Download or read book Minni and Muninn written by Pernille Hermann 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 consists of articles about terms for, concepts of and functions of memory. The articles deal with medieval Norse texts, such as sagas, myths, skaldic poems, laws and historiographical writings, and they refer to theoretical insights from international memory studies that have developed recently. In recent years, various branches of memory studies have provided useful tools of analysis that offer new ways of understanding medieval cultures. The articles in this collection draw on these new theoretical tools for studying - and conceptualizing - memory, in order to reassess the function of memory in medieval Nordic culture. Despite its interdisciplinary and comparative basis, the volume remains very much an empirical study of memory and memory-dependent issues as these took form in the Nordic world.
Download or read book Gemini and the Sacred written by Kimberley C. Patton and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-10-06 with total page 569 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do twins remain uncanny to those born alone-in other words, most of us? Even with the rise of IVF and an increase in multiple births, why do we still do “a double take” when we encounter twins? Why has this been a near-universal response throughout human history, and how has it played out in religion and myth? Through the work of leading scholars in religion, folklore and mythology, history, anthropology, and archaeology, Gemini and the Sacred explores how twinship has long been imagined, especially in the complex relationship of sacred twin traditions to “twins on the ground” in biology and lived experience. The book considers the multiple ways in which the “doubling” of a human being may be interpreted as auspicious and powerful-or suppressed as unstable and dangerous. Why has this been so and how does it affect living twins today? Treating both famous and lesser-known twins-including supernatural animal twins-in the ancient Near Eastern and classical Mediterranean worlds; early Christianity and Gnosticism; Vedic, Hindu, West African, Black Atlantic, and native American traditions; ancient Mesoamerica, Celtic Roman Britain, and Scandinavia; and in the special, fraught bond shared by all twins, the book offers a variety of perspectives on this topic of great cultural significance.
Download or read book Handbook of Pre Modern Nordic Memory Studies written by Jürg Glauser and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2018-11-19 with total page 1190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, the field of Memory Studies has emerged as a key approach in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and has increasingly shown its ability to open new windows on Nordic Studies as well. The entries in this book document the work-to-date of this approach on the pre-modern Nordic world (mainly the Viking Age and the Middle Ages, but including as well both earlier and later periods). Given that Memory Studies is an ever expanding critical strategy, the approximately eighty contributors in this volume also discuss the potential for future research in this area. Topics covered range from texts to performance to visual and other aspects of material culture, all approached from within an interdisciplinary framework. International specialists, coming from such relevant fields as archaeology, mythology, history of religion, folklore, history, law, art, literature, philology, language, and mediality, offer assessments on the relevance of Memory Studies to their disciplines and show it at work in case studies. Finally, this handbook demonstrates the various levels of culture where memory had a critical impact in the pre-modern North and how deeply embedded the role of memory is in the material itself.
Download or read book The Poetics of Commemoration written by Erin Michelle Goeres and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Poetics of Commemoration is a study of commemorative skaldic verse from the Viking Age. It investigates how skaldic poets responded to the deaths of kings and the ways in which poetic commemoration functioned within the social and political communities of the early medieval court. Beginning with the early genealogical poem Ynglingatal, the book explores how the commemoration of a king's ancestors could be used to consolidate his political position and to provide a shared history for the community. It then examines the presentation of dead kings in the poems Eiriksmal and Hakonarmal, showing how poets could re-cast their kings as characters of myth and legend in the afterlife. This is followed by an analysis of verse in which poets use their commemoration of one king to reinforce their relationship with his successor; it is shown that poetry could both help and hinder the integration of the poet into the retinue of a new king. Focusing then on the memorial poems composed for Kings Olafr Tryggvason and Olafr Haraldsson, as well as for the Jarls of the Orkney Islands, the book considers the tension between public and private expressions of grief. It explores the strategies used by poets to negotiate the tumultuous period that followed the death of a king, and to work through their own emotional responses to that loss. The book demonstrates that skaldic poets engaged with the deaths of rulers in a wide variety of ways, and that poetic commemoration was a particularly effective means not only of constructing a collective memory of the dead man, but also of consolidating the new social identity of the community he left behind.
Download or read book Mnemonic Echoing in Old Norse Sagas and Eddas written by Pernille Hermann and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-08-22 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings together Old Norse-Icelandic literature and critical strategies of memory, and argues that some of the particularities of this vernacular textual tradition are explained by the fact that this literature derives from, represents, and incorporates into its designs mnemonic devices of different kinds. Even if Old Norse-Icelandic manuscript culture is relatively silent about the mnemonic context of the literature, the texts themselves exhibit multiple reminiscences of memory. By showing that this literature reveals glimpses of mnemonic technologies at the same time as it testifies to a cultural memory, this study demonstrates how ‘the past’, and narrative traditions about the past, were constructed in a dynamic relationship with ideas that existed at the time the texts were written. Moreover, the book deals with the function of memory in early book-culture, with metaphors of memory, and with mnemonic cues such as spatiality and visuality. With its new readings of canonical texts like the Íslendingasǫgur, the Prose Edda and selected eddic poems, as well as of less widely studied branches of Old Norse-Icelandic literature, such as the sagas of bishops and religious texts, this book will be of interest to Old Norse scholars and to scholars interested in medieval Scandinavia and memory studies.
Download or read book Old Norse Folklore written by Stephen A. Mitchell and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2023-12-15 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The medieval northern world consisted of a vast and culturally diverse region both geographically, from roughly Greenland to Novgorod and culturally, as one of the last areas of Europe to be converted to Christianity. Old Norse Folklore explores the complexities of thisfascinating world in case studies and theoretical essays that connect orality and performance theory to memory studies, and myths relating to pre-Christian Nordic religion to innovations within late medieval pilgrimage song culture. Old Norse Folklore provides critical new perspectives on the Old Norse world, some of which appear in this volume for the first time in English. Stephen A. Mitchell presents emerging methodologies by analyzing Old Norse materials to offer a better understandings ofunderstanding of Old Norse materials. He examines, interprets, and re-interprets the medieval data bequeathed to us by posterity—myths, legends, riddles, charms, court culture, conversion narratives, landscapes, and mindscapes—targeting largely overlooked, yet important sources of cultural insights.
Download or read book Memory and Remembering in Early Irish Literature written by Sarah Künzler and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-12-04 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ireland possesses an early and exceptionally rich medieval vernacular tradition in which memory plays a key role. What attitudes to remembering and forgetting are expressed in secular early Irish texts? How do the texts conceptualise the past and what does this conceptualisation tell us about the present and future? Who mediates and validates different versions of the past and how is future remembrance guaranteed? This study approaches such questions through close readings of individual texts. It centres on three major aspects of medieval Irish memory culture: places and landscapes, the provision of information about the past by miraculously old eye-witnesses, and the personal, social and cultural impact of forgetting. The discussions shed light on the relationship between memory and forgetting and explore the connections between the past, present and future. This shows the fascinating spatio-temporal identity constructions in medieval Ireland and links the Irish texts to the broader European world. The monograph makes this rich literary sources available to an interdisciplinary audience and is of interest to both a general medievalist audience and those working in Cultural Memory Studies.
Download or read book How Thor Lost His Thunder written by Declan Taggart and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-11-15 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How Thor Lost his Thunder is the first major English-language study of early medieval evidence for the Old Norse god, Thor. In this book, the most common modern representations of Thor are examined, such as images of him wreathed in lightning, and battling against monsters and giants. The origins of these images within Iron Age and early medieval evidence are then uncovered and investigated. In doing so, the common cultural history of Thor’s cult and mythology is explored and some of his lesser known traits are revealed, including a possible connection to earthquakes and volcanic eruptions in Iceland. This geographically and chronologically far-reaching study considers the earliest sources in which Thor appears, including in evidence from the Viking colonies of the British Isles and in Scandinavian folklore. Through tracing the changes and variety that has occurred in Old Norse mythology over time, this book provokes a questioning of the fundamental popular and scholarly beliefs about Thor for the first time since the Victorian era, including whether he really was a thunder god and whether worshippers truly believed they would encounter him in the afterlife. Considering evidence from across northern Europe, How Thor Lost his Thunder challenges modern scholarship’s understanding of the god and of the northern pantheon as a whole and is ideal for scholars and students of mythology, and the history and religion of medieval Scandinavia.
Download or read book Distributed Cognition in Medieval and Renaissance Culture written by Miranda Anderson and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-15 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection brings together 14 essays by international specialists in Medieval and Renaissance culture to bring recent insights from cognitive science and philosophy of mind to bear on how cognition was seen as distributed across brain, body and world between the 9th and 17th centuries.
Download or read book Viking Mediologies written by Kate Heslop and published by Fordham University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-15 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Viking Mediologies is a study of pre-modern multimedia rooted in the embodied poetic practice of Viking Age skalds. Prior study of the skaldic tradition has focused on authorship—distinctions of poetic style, historical contexts, and attention to the oeuvres of the skalds whose names are preserved in the written tradition. Kate Heslop reconsiders these not as texts but as pieces in a pre-modern media landscape, focusing on poetry’s medial capacity to embody memory, visuality, and sound. Mobile, hybrid, diasporic social formations—bands of raiders and traders, petty kingdoms, colonial expeditions—achieved new prominence in the Viking Age. Skalds offered the leaders of these groups something uniquely valuable. With their complicated poetry, they claimed to be able to capture shared contingent meanings and re-mediate them in named, memorable, reproducible works. The commemorative poetry in kviðuháttr remembers histories of ruin and loss. Skaldic ekphrasis discloses and reproduces the presence of the gods. Dróttkvætt encomium evokes for the leader’s retinue the soundscape of battle. As writing arrived in Scandinavia in the wake of Christianization, the media landscape shifted. In the poetry of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, skalds adjusted to the demands of a literate audience, while the historical and poetological texts of the Icelandic High Middle Ages opened a dialogue between Latin Christian ideas of mediation and local traditions. In the Second Grammatical Treatise, for example, the literate technology of the grid is used to analyze the complex resonances of dróttkvætt as the output of a syllable-spewing hurdy-gurdy—a poetry machine. Offering both new readings of both canonical works such as Ynglingatal, Ragnarsdrápa, and Háttatal, and examinations of lesser-known texts like Glymdrápa, Líknarbraut, and Sturla Þórðarson’s Hákonarkviða, Viking Mediologies explores the powers and limits of poetic mediation.
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 Place and Space in the Medieval World written by Meg Boulton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-12-06 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses the critical terminologies of place and space (and their role within medieval studies) in a considered and critical manner, presenting a scholarly introduction written by the editors alongside thematic case studies that address a wide range of visual and textual material. The chapters consider the extant visual and textual sources from the medieval period alongside contemporary scholarly discussions to examine place and space in their wider critical context, and are written by specialists in a range of disciplines including art history, archaeology, history, and literature.
Download or read book Iceland Ireland written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-02-07 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers the first comparative account from contemporary and historical perspectives of Irish and Icelandic memory cultures and addresses the broader dynamics of trans-cultural memory that are surfaced in such comparative approaches of geographically peripheral islands.
Download or read book Classical Rhetoric in the Middle Ages written by John O. Ward and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-12-24 with total page 724 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Classical Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: The Medieval Rhetors and Their Art 400-1300, with Manuscript Survey to 1500 CE is a completely updated version of John Ward’s much-used doctoral thesis of 1972, and is the definitive treatment of this fundamental aspect of medieval and rhetorical culture. It is commonly believed that medieval writers were interested only in Christian truth, not in Graeco-Roman methods of ‘persuasion’ to whatever viewpoint the speaker / writer wanted. Dr Ward, however, investigates the content of well over one thousand medieval manuscripts and shows that medieval writers were fully conscious of and much dependent upon Graeco-Roman rhetorical methods of persuasion. The volume then demonstrates why and to what purpose this use of classical rhetoric took place.
Download or read book Donations Inheritance and Property in the Nordic and Western World from Late Antiquity until Today written by Ole-Albert Rønning and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-07-14 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Donations, Inheritance and Property in the Nordic and Western World from Late Antiquity until Today presents an examination of Nordic donation and gift-giving practices in the Nordic and Western world, beginning in late Antiquity and extending through to the present day. Through chapters contributed by leading international researchers, this book explores the changing legal, social and religious frameworks that shape how donations and gifts are given. In addition to donations to ecclesiastical, charitable and cultural institutions, this books also highlights the sociolegal challenges and the tensions that can occur as a result of transferring property, including answering key questions such as who has a right to what. It also presents, for the first time, an insight into the dynamics of donations and the interplay between individual motivations, strategic behaviour and the legal setting of inheritance law. Offering a broad chronological and European perspective and including a wide range of illuminating case studies Donations, Inheritance and Property in the Nordic and Western World from Late Antiquity until Today is ideal for students of Nordic and European legal and social history.
Download or read book Law Book Culture in the Middle Ages written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-02-01 with total page 477 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Law | Book | Culture in the Middle Ages takes a detailed view on the role of manuscripts and the written word in legal cultures, spanning the medieval period across western and central Europe.
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 377 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.
