Download or read book Law and Literature in Medieval Iceland written by Theodore Murdock Andersson and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The two sagas here presented in translation with commentary belong to a class of medieval Icelandic texts commonly called family sagas. There are some three dozen of these sagas, composed for the most part in the thirteenth century, which tell stories about leading Icelandic figures and families from the time of the island's colonization around 900 to the middle of the eleventh century. This book contains the only complete translation of Ljosvetninga saga in English and the only English commentary on either saga. The authors aim to present the basic material needed for an informed reading of the Icelandic sagas. Both represent a school that urges that the sagas be refocused as historical documents, and they represent the two approaches to rehistorian (Andersson), the other a social and legal historian (Miller). One attempts to tie the sagas more closely to medieval literature and oral literature in general. The other attempts to define the relationship between the sagas and the social systems in which they evolved, and is much influenced by American legal realism and law-and-society scholarship."
Download or read book The Conflict of Law and Justice in the Icelandic Sagas written by William Pencak and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-02-22 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world's longest lasting republic between ancient Rome and modern Switzerland, medieval Iceland (c. 870-1262) centered its national literature, the great family sagas, around the problem of can a republic survive and do justice to its inhabitants. The Conflict of Law and Justice in the Icelandic Sagas takes a semiotic approach to six of the major sagas which depict a nation of free men, abetted by formidable women, testing conflicting legal codes and principles - pagan v. Christian, vengeance v. compromise, monarchy v. republicanism, courts v. arbitration. The sagas emerge as a body of great literature embodying profound reflections on political and legal philosophy because they do not offer simple solutions, but demonstrate the tragic choices facing legal thinkers (Njal), warriors (Gunnar), outlaws (Grettir), women (Gudrun of Laxdaela Saga), priests (Snorri of Eyrbyggja Saga), and the Icelandic community in its quest for stability and a good society. Guest forewords by Robert Ginsberg and Roberta Kevelson, set the book in the contexts of philosophy, semiotics, and Icelandic studies to which it contributes.
Download or read book Women Between the Texts written by Jana Kate Schulman and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 774 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Medieval Icelandic Saga and Oral Tradition written by Gísli Sigurðsson and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work explores the role of orality in shaping and evaluating medieval Icelandic literature. Applying field studies of oral cultures in modern times to this distinguished medieval literature, G sli Sigur sson asks how it would alter our reading of medieval Icelandic sagas if it were assumed they had grown out of a tradition of oral storytelling, similar to that observed in living cultures. Sigur sson examines how orally trained lawspeakers regarded the emergent written culture, especially in light of the fact that the writing down of the law in the early twelfth century undermined their social status. Part II considers characters, genealogies, and events common to several sagas from the east of Iceland between which a written link cannot be established. Part III explores the immanent or mental map provided to the listening audience of the location of Vinland by the sagas about the Vinland voyages. Finally, this volume focuses on how accepted foundations for research on medieval texts are affected if an underlying oral tradition (of the kind we know from the modern field work) is assumed as part of their cultural background. This point is emphasized through the examination of parallel passages from two sagas and from mythological overlays in an otherwise secular text.
Download or read book Bloodtaking and Peacemaking written by William Ian Miller and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-05-15 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dubbed by the New York Times as "one of the most sought-after legal academics in the county," William Ian Miller presents the arcane worlds of the Old Norse studies in a way sure to attract the interest of a wide range of readers. Bloodtaking and Peacemaking delves beneath the chaos and brutality of the Norse world to discover a complex interplay of ordering and disordering impulses. Miller's unique and engaging readings of ancient Iceland's sagas and extensive legal code reconstruct and illuminate the society that produced them. People in the saga world negotiated a maze of violent possibility, with strategies that frequently put life and limb in the balance. But there was a paradox in striking the balance—one could not get even without going one better. Miller shows how blood vengeance, law, and peacemaking were inextricably bound together in the feuding process. This book offers fascinating insights into the politics of a stateless society, its methods of social control, and the role that a uniquely sophisticated and self-conscious law played in the construction of Icelandic society. "Illuminating."—Rory McTurk, Times Literary Supplement "An impressive achievement in ethnohistory; it is an amalgam of historical research with legal and anthropological interpretation. What is more, and rarer, is that it is a pleasure to read due to the inclusion of narrative case material from the sagas themselves."—Dan Bauer, Journal of Interdisciplinary History
Download or read book Iceland s Relationship with Norway c 870 c 1100 written by Ann-Marie Long and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-07-03 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Iceland’s Relationship with Norway c.870 – c.1100: Memory, History and Identity, Ann-Marie Long reassesses the development of Icelandic society from the earliest settlements to the twelfth century. Through a series of thematic studies, the book discusses the place of Norway in Icelandic cultural memory and how Icelandic authors envisioned and reconstructed their past. It examines in particular how these authors instrumentalized Norway to explain the changing parameters of Icelandic autonomy. Over time this strategy evolved to meet the needs of thirteenth-century Icelandic politics as well as the demands posed by the transition from autonomous island to Norwegian dependency.
Download or read book Laws of Early Iceland written by and published by Univ. of Manitoba Press. This book was released on 2014-09-27 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The laws of Medieval Iceland provide detailed and fascinating insight into the society that produced the Icelandic sagas. Known collectively as Gragas (Greygoose), this great legal code offers a wealth of information about early European legal systems and the society of the Middles Ages. This first translation of Gragas is in two volumes.
Download or read book Laws of Early Iceland written by and published by Univ. of Manitoba Press. This book was released on 2000-11-03 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The laws of Mediaeval Iceland provide detailed and fascinating insight into the society that produced the Icelandic sagas. Known collectively as Gragas (Greygoose), this great legal code offers a wealth of information about early European legal systems and the society of the Middles Ages. This first translation of Gragas is in two volumes.
Download or read book Emotion Violence Vengeance and Law in the Middle Ages written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-05-01 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributions to this Festschrift for the renowned American legal and literary scholar William Ian Miller reflect the extraordinary intellectual range of the honorand, who is equally at home discussing legal history, Icelandic sagas, English literature, anger and violence, and contemporary popular culture. Professor Miller's colleagues and former students, including distinguished academic lawyers, historians, and literary scholars from the United States, Canada, and Europe, break important new ground by bringing little-known sources to a wider audience and by shedding new light on familiar sources through innovative modes of analysis. Contributors are Stuart Airlie, Theodore M. Andersson, Nora Bartlett, Robert Bartlett, Jordan Corrente Beck, Carol J. Clover, Lauren DesRosiers, William Eves, John Hudson, Elizabeth Papp Kamali, Kimberley-Joy Knight, Simon MacLean, M.W. McHaffie, Eva Miller, Hans Jacob Orning, Jamie Page, Susanne Pohl-Zucker, Amanda Strick, Helle Vogt, Mark D. West, and Stephen D. White.
Download or read book The Medieval Icelandic Saga and Oral Tradition written by Gísli Sigurðsson and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work explores the role of orality in shaping and evaluating medieval Icelandic literature. Applying field studies of oral cultures in modern times to this distinguished medieval literature, G sli Sigur sson asks how it would alter our reading of medieval Icelandic sagas if it were assumed they had grown out of a tradition of oral storytelling, similar to that observed in living cultures. Sigur sson examines how orally trained lawspeakers regarded the emergent written culture, especially in light of the fact that the writing down of the law in the early twelfth century undermined their social status. Part II considers characters, genealogies, and events common to several sagas from the east of Iceland between which a written link cannot be established. Part III explores the immanent or mental map provided to the listening audience of the location of Vinland by the sagas about the Vinland voyages. Finally, this volume focuses on how accepted foundations for research on medieval texts are affected if an underlying oral tradition (of the kind we know from the modern field work) is assumed as part of their cultural background. This point is emphasized through the examination of parallel passages from two sagas and from mythological overlays in an otherwise secular text.
Download or read book Excommunication and Outlawry in the Legal World of Medieval Iceland written by Elizabeth Walgenbach and published by Northern World. This book was released on 2021 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In this book Elizabeth Walgenbach argues that outlawry in medieval Iceland was a punishment shaped by the conventions of excommunication as it developed in the medieval Church. Excommunication and outlawry resemble one another, often closely, in a range of Icelandic texts, including lawcodes and narrative sources such as the contemporary sagas. This is not a chance resemblance but a by-product of the way the law was formed and written. Canon law helped to shape the outlines of secular justice. The book is organized into chapters on excommunication, outlawry, outlawry as secular excommunication, and two case studies-one focused on the conflicts surrounding Bishop Guðmundr Arason and another focused on the outlaw Aron Hjǫrleifsson"--
Download or read book Narrating Law and Laws of Narration in Medieval Scandinavia written by Roland Scheel and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-01-20 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Disputes lie at the heart of the sagas. Consequently, literary texts have been treated as sources of legal practice – narrations of law – while the sagas themselves and the handling of legal matters by the figures adhere to ‘laws of narration’. The volume addresses this intricate relationship between literature and social practice from the perspective of historians as well as philologists. The contributions focus not only on disputes and their solution in saga literature, but also on the representation of law and its history in sagas and Latin historiography from Scandinavia as well as the representation of laws and norms in mythological texts. They demonstrate that narrations of law provide an indispensable insight into legal culture and its connection to a wider framework of social norms, adjusting the impression given by the laws. The philological approaches underline that the narrative texts also have an agenda of their own when it comes to their representation of law, providing a mirror of conduct, criticising inequity, reinforcing the political and juridical position of kings or negotiating norms in mythological texts. Altogether, the volume underlines the unifying force exerted by a common fiction of law beyond its letter.
Download or read book Medieval Iceland written by Sverrir Jakobsson and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-09-20 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the ninth century, at the beginning of this account, Iceland was uninhabited save for fowl and smaller Arctic animals. In the middle of the sixteenth century, by the end of this history, it had embarked on a course that led to the creation of a small country on the periphery of Europe. The history of medieval Iceland is to some degree a microcosm of European history, but in other respects it has a trajectory of its own. As in medieval Europe, the evolution of the Church, episodic warfare, and the strengthening of the bonds of government played an important role. Unlike the rest of Europe, however, Iceland was not settled by humans until the Middle Ages and it was without towns and any type of executive government until the late medieval period. Medieval Iceland is a review of Icelandic history from the settlement until the advent of the Reformation, with an emphasis on social and political change, but also on cultural developments, such as the creation of a particular kind of literature, known throughout the world as the sagas. A view of medieval Icelandic history as it has never been told before from one of its leading historians, this book will appeal to students and scholars alike interested in Icelandic and medieval history.
Download or read book The Dynamics of Medieval Iceland written by E. Paul Durrenberger and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As witness to four hundred years of social, economic, and political change, the sagas of medieval Iceland provide access not only to a single energetic past but to processes of continual change. In this innovative book, which connects the political economy of medieval Iceland and its rich cultural artifacts, E. Paul Durrenberger brings anthropological perspectives to bear on the study of medieval Iceland and brings medieval Iceland into the purview of anthropology. The social order of stratified, stateless medieval Iceland contained a dynamism that inexorably led to the discord of the Sturlung age. Icelanders interpreted their experiences within existing cultural categories and from these interpretations produced the family sagas and the Sturlung sagas. Durrenberger convincingly argues that the sagas are not simply thirteenth-century accounts of earlier times but also the cultural artifacts of the age that created them; moreover, the free translations of the sagas are really nineteenth- and twentieth-century artifacts that impose market and modern state perspectives on the radically different society of medieval Iceland. The rendering of the sagas as a political act revaluing honor, reciprocity, and law can be understood only in the cultural context of their time. For anthropologists unfamiliar with the Icelandic tradition, Durrenberger meticulously illustrates his arguments with contextual analyses of saga plots and episodes. He presents his anthropological theses in a way that will enlighten historians, social scientists, and saga and other literary scholars. By addressing methodological issues of translation and contextualization and using sophisticated models of medieval domesticeconomy and cross-cultural comparisons, The Dynamics of Medieval Iceland serves as an exemplary case study in the expansion of social contexts for literary analysis as well as in the anthropological use of literary and historical data.
Download or read book Excommunication and Outlawry in the Legal World of Medieval Iceland written by Elizabeth Walgenbach and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-05-25 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on excommunication, outlawry, and the connections between them in medieval Icelandic legal and literary sources. It argues that outlawry was a punishment shaped by the conventions and structures of excommunication as it developed in canon law.
Download or read book Dominican Resonances in Medieval Iceland written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-08-16 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the life and times of Jón Halldórsson, bishop of Skálholt (1322–39), a Dominican who had studied the liberal arts and canon law in Paris and Bologna, and provides a snapshot with wider implications for understanding of medieval literacy.
Download or read book Violence and Risk in Medieval Iceland written by Oren Falk and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-25 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historians spend a lot of time thinking about violence: bloodshed and feats of heroism punctuate practically every narration of the past. Yet historians have been slow to subject 'violence' itself to conceptual analysis. What aspects of the past do we designate violent? To what methodological assumptions do we commit ourselves when we employ this term? How may we approach the category 'violence' in a specifically historical way, and what is it that we explain when we write its history? Astonishingly, such questions are seldom even voiced, much less debated, in the historical literature. Violence and Risk in Medieval Iceland: This Spattered Isle lays out a cultural history model for understanding violence. Using interdisciplinary tools, it argues that violence is a positively constructed asset, deployed along three principal axes - power, signification, and risk. Analysing violence in instrumental terms, as an attempt to coerce others, focuses on power. Analysing it in symbolic terms, as an attempt to communicate meanings, focuses on signification. Finally, analysing it in cognitive terms, as an attempt to exercise agency despite imperfect control over circumstances, focuses on risk. Violence and Risk in Medieval Iceland explores a place and time notorious for its rampant violence. Iceland's famous sagas hold treasure troves of circumstantial data, ideally suited for past-tense ethnography, yet demand that the reader come up with subtle and innovative methodologies for recovering histories from their stories. The sagas throw into sharp relief the kinds of analytic insights we obtain through cultural interpretation, offering lessons that apply to other epochs too.
