Download or read book Medieval Iceland written by Jesse L. Byock and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1990-02-07 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gift of Joan Wall. Includes index. Includes bibliographical references (p. 227-248) and index. * glr 20090610.
Download or read book Culture and History in Medieval Iceland written by Kirsten Hastrup and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1985 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 930, Iceland first established a common law for the island and became an autonomous republic, which lasted until it came under the sovereignty of the Norwegian king nearly three and a half centuries later. This volume is a two-part analysis of that society, known as the Icelandic "commonwealth" or "Freestate." The first section examines how medieval Icelanders classified and perceived such domains as time, space, kinship, political organization, and cosmology, linking together these various realms to present an integrated picture of the society's world-view. The second section focuses on the changes that took place during the period in the fields of ecology, demography, religion, property relations, and the law, and explains how and why these changes, interacting with more fundamental social structures and beliefs, undermined--and ultimately destroyed--the society.
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.
Download or read book Saga written by Jeff Janoda and published by Chicago Review Press. This book was released on 2016-04-01 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This retelling of the ancient Saga of the People of Eyri is a modern classic. Absolutely gripping and compulsively readable, Booklist said this book, "does what good historical fiction is supposed to do: put a face on history that is recognizable to all." And medieval expert Tom Shippey, writing for the Times Literary Supplement said, "Sagas look like novels superficially, in their size and layout and plain language, but making their narratives into novels is a trick which has proved beyond most who have tried it. Janoda's Saga provides a model of how to do it: pick out the hidden currents, imagine how they would seem to peripheral characters, and as with all historical novels, load the narrative with period detail drawn from the scholars. No better saga adaptation has been yet written."
Download or read book Landscape Tradition and Power in Medieval Iceland written by Chris Callow and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-08-03 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this volume Chris Callow provides a critical reading of the evidence for changes in Iceland’s socio-political structures from its colonisation to the 1260s when leading Icelanders swore oaths of loyalty to the Norwegian king.
Download or read book Illuminated Manuscript Production in Medieval Iceland written by Stefan Drechsler and published by . This book was released on 2021-06-28 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines a cultural revolution that took place in the Scandinavian artistic landscape during the medieval period. Within just one generation (c. 1340?1400), the Augustinian monastery of Helgafell became the most important centre of illuminated manuscript production in western Iceland. By conducting interdisciplinary research that combines methodologies and sources from the fields of Art History, Old Norse-Icelandic manuscript studies, codicology, and Scandinavian history, this book explores both the illuminated manuscripts produced at Helgafell and the cultural and historical setting of the manuscript production.00Equally, the book explores the broader European contexts of manuscript production at Helgafell, comparing the similar domestic artistic monuments and relevant historical evidence of Norwich and surrounding East Anglia in England, northern France, and the region between Bergen and Trondheim in western Norway. The book proposes that most of these workshops are related to ecclesiastical networks, as well as secular trade in the North Sea, which became an important economic factor to western Icelandic society in the fourteenth century. The book thereby contributes to a new and multidisciplinary area of research that studies not only one but several European cultures in relation to similar domestic artistic monuments and relevant historical evidence. It offers a detailed account of this cultural site in relation to its scribal and artistic connections with other ecclesiastical and secular scriptoria in the broader North Atlantic region.
Download or read book The Development of Education in Medieval Iceland written by Ryder Patzuk-Russell and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-02-08 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Medieval Iceland is known for the fascinating body of literary works it produced, from ornate court poetry to mythological treatises to sagas of warrior-poets and feud culture. This book investigates the institutions and practices of education which lay behind not only this literary corpus, but the whole of medieval Icelandic culture, religion, and society. By bringing together a broad spectrum of sources, including sagas, law codes, and grammatical treatises, it addresses the history of education in medieval Iceland from multiple perspectives. It shows how the slowly developing institutions of the church shaped educational practices within an entirely rural society with its own distinct vernacular culture. It emphasizes the importance of Latin, despite the lack of surviving manuscripts, and teaching and learning in a highly decentralized environment. Within this context, it explores how medieval grammatical education was adapted for bilingual clerical education, which in turn helped create a separate and fully vernacularized grammatical discourse.
Download or read book The Routledge Research Companion to the Medieval Icelandic Sagas written by Ármann Jakobsson and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-02-17 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The last fifty years have seen a significant change in the focus of saga studies, from a preoccupation with origins and development to a renewed interest in other topics, such as the nature of the sagas and their value as sources to medieval ideologies and mentalities. The Routledge Research Companion to the Medieval Icelandic Sagas presents a detailed interdisciplinary examination of saga scholarship over the last fifty years, sometimes juxtaposing it with earlier views and examining the sagas both as works of art and as source materials. This volume will be of interest to Old Norse and medieval Scandinavian scholars and accessible to medievalists in general.
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 The Medieval Saga written by Carol J. Clover and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-15 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written in the thirteenth century, the Icelandic prose sagas, chronicling the lives of kings and commoners, give a dramatic account of the first century after the settlement of Iceland—the period from about 930 to 1050. To some extent these elaborate tales are written versions of traditional sagas passed down by word of mouth. How did they become the long and polished literary works that are still read today? The evolution of the written sagas is commonly regarded as an anomalous phenomenon, distinct from contemporary developments in European literature. In this groundbreaking study, Carol J. Clover challenges this view and relates the rise of imaginative prose in Iceland directly to the rise of imaginative prose on the Continent. Analyzing the narrative structure and composition of the sagas and comparing them with other medieval works, Clover shows that the Icelandic authors, using Continental models, owe the prose form of their writings, as well as some basic narrative strategies, to Latin historiography and to French romance.
Download or read book Magic and Kingship in Medieval Iceland written by Nicolas Meylan and published by Brepols Publishers. This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines the performative and ideological functions of texts dealing with magic in contexts of social and political conflict. While the rites, representations, and agents of medieval Scandinavian magic have been the object of numerous studies, little attention has been given to magic as a discourse. As a consequence, Old Norse sources mobilizing magic have been analysed mainly as evidence for a stable extra-textual phenomenon. This volume breaks with this perspective.The book focuses on the use of discourses of magic in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Icelandic texts concerned with kingship. It is argued that Icelanders constructed magic as a discursive answer to the increasingly pressing question of how to deal with the reality of their subordination to kings. This they did by telling stories of flattering Icelandic successes over kings brought about by magic in a bid to challenge dominant definitions and the social and political status quo. The book thus follows the conditions of emergence that made these subversive discourses of magic meaningful; it describes the various forms they were given, the various constraints weighing upon their use, and the particular political goals they served.
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 The Growth of the Medieval Icelandic Sagas 1180 1280 written by Theodore Murdock Andersson and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Andersson introduces readers to the development of the Icelandic sagas between 1180 and 1280, a crucial period that witnessed a gradual shift of emphasis from tales of adventure and personal distinction to the analysis of politics and history.
Download or read book Anglo Saxon England in Icelandic Medieval Texts written by Magnús Fjalldal and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Medieval Icelandic authors wrote a great deal on the subject of England and the English. This new work by Magnús Fjalldal is the first to provide an overview of what Icelandic medieval texts have to say about Anglo-Saxon England in respect to its language, culture, history, and geography. Some of the texts Fjalldal examines include family sagas, the shorter þættir, the histories of Norwegian and Danish kings, and the Icelandic lives of Anglo-Saxon saints. Fjalldal finds that in response to a hostile Norwegian court and kings, Icelandic authors - from the early thirteenth century onwards (although they were rather poorly informed about England before 1066) - created a largely imaginary country where friendly, generous, although rather ineffective kings living under constant threat welcomed the assistance of saga heroes to solve their problems. The England of Icelandic medieval texts is more of a stage than a country, and chiefly functions to provide saga heroes with fame abroad. Since many of these texts are rarely examined outside of Iceland or in the English language, Fjalldal's book is important for scholars of both medieval Norse culture and Anglo-Saxon England.
Download or read book Medieval Iceland written by Jesse L. Byock and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1990-02-07 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gift of Joan Wall. Includes index. Includes bibliographical references (p. 227-248) and index. * glr 20090610.
Download or read book Wasteland with Words written by Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Iceland is an enigmatic island country marked by contradiction: it’s a part of Europe, yet separated from it by the Atlantic Ocean; it’s seemingly inhospitable, yet home to more than 300,000. Wasteland with Words explores these paradoxes to uncover the mystery of Iceland. In Wasteland with Words Sigurdur Gylfi Magnússon presents a wide-ranging and detailed analysis of the island’s history that examines the evolution and transformation of Icelandic culture while investigating the literary and historical factors that created the rich cultural heritage enjoyed by Icelanders today. Magnússon explains how a nineteenth-century economy based on the industries of fishing and agriculture—one of the poorest in Europe—grew to become a disproportionately large economic power in the late twentieth century, while retaining its strong sense of cultural identity. Bringing the story up to the present, he assesses the recent economic and political collapse of the country and how Iceland has coped. Throughout Magnússon seeks to chart the vast changes in this country’s history through the impact and effect on the Icelandic people themselves. Up-to-date and fascinating, Wasteland with Words is a comprehensive study of the island’s cultural and historical development, from tiny fishing settlements to a global economic power.
Download or read book The Mappae Mundi of Medieval Iceland written by Dale Kedwards and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2020 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Front cover -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgements -- Abbreviations -- Introduction -- Chapter 1 The Icelandic Hemispherical World Maps -- Chapter 2 The Icelandic Zonal Map -- Chapter 3 The Two Maps from Viðey -- Chapter 4 Iceland in Europe -- Chapter 5 Forty Icelandic Priests and a Map of the World -- Conclusion -- Map Texts and Translations -- The Icelandic Hemispherical World Maps -- The Icelandic Zonal Map -- The Larger Viðey Map -- The Smaller Viðey Map -- Bibliography -- Index -- Studies in Old Norse Literature.
