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Book Toward the Gleam

    Book Details:
  • Author : T. M. Doran
  • Publisher : Ignatius Press
  • Release : 2011-01-01
  • ISBN : 1586176331
  • Pages : 468 pages

Download or read book Toward the Gleam written by T. M. Doran and published by Ignatius Press. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between the two world wars, on a hike in the English countryside, Professor John Hill takes refuge from a violent storm in a cave. There he nearly loses his life, but he also makes an astonishing discovery -- an ancient manuscript housed in a cunningly crafted metal box. Though a philologist by profession, Hill cannot identify the language used in the manuscript and the time period in which it is was made, but he knows enough to make an educated guess -- that the book and its case are the fruits of a long-lost, but advanced civilization. The translation of the manuscript and the search for its origins become a life-long quest for Hill. As he uncovers an epic that both enchants and inspires him, he tracks down scholars from Oxford to Paris who can give him clues. Along the way, he meets several intriguing characters, including a man keenly interested in obtaining artifacts from a long-lost civilization that he believes was the creation of a superior race, and will help him fulfill his ambition to rule other men. Concluding that Hill must have found something that may help him in this quest, but knowing not what it is and where it is hidden, he has Hill, his friends at Oxford, and his family shadowed and threatened until finally he and Hill face off in a final, climatic confrontation. A story that features a giant pirate and slaver, a human chameleon on a perilous metaphysical journey, a mysterious hermit, and creatures both deadly and beautiful, this is a novel that explores the consequences of the predominant ideas of the 20th Century.

Book Gods  Heroes    Kings

    Book Details:
  • Author : Christopher R. Fee
  • Publisher : Oxford University Press
  • Release : 2004-03-18
  • ISBN : 9780198038788
  • Pages : 260 pages

Download or read book Gods Heroes Kings written by Christopher R. Fee and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2004-03-18 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The islands of Britain have been a crossroads of gods, heroes, and kings-those of flesh as well as those of myth-for thousands of years. Successive waves of invasion brought distinctive legends, rites, and beliefs. The ancient Celts displaced earlier indigenous peoples, only to find themselves displaced in turn by the Romans, who then abandoned the islands to Germanic tribes, a people themselves nearly overcome in time by an influx of Scandinavians. With each wave of invaders came a battle for the mythic mind of the Isles as the newcomer's belief system met with the existing systems of gods, legends, and myths. In Gods, Heroes, and Kings, medievalist Christopher Fee and veteran myth scholar David Leeming unearth the layers of the British Isles' unique folkloric tradition to discover how this body of seemingly disparate tales developed. The authors find a virtual battlefield of myths in which pagan and Judeo-Christian beliefs fought for dominance, and classical, Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, and Celtic narrative threads became tangled together. The resulting body of legends became a strange but coherent hybrid, so that by the time Chaucer wrote "The Wife of Bath's Tale" in the fourteenth century, a Christian theme of redemption fought for prominence with a tripartite Celtic goddess and the Arthurian legends of Sir Gawain-itself a hybrid mythology. Without a guide, the corpus of British mythology can seem impenetrable. Taking advantage of the latest research, Fee and Leeming employ a unique comparative approach to map the origins and development of one of the richest folkloric traditions. Copiously illustrated with excerpts in translation from the original sources,Gods, Heroes, and Kings provides a fascinating and accessible new perspective on the history of British mythology.

Book Beowulf

    Book Details:
  • Author :
  • Publisher : Courier Corporation
  • Release : 2012-03-01
  • ISBN : 0486111105
  • Pages : 70 pages

Download or read book Beowulf written by and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2012-03-01 with total page 70 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finest heroic poem in Old English celebrates the exploits of Beowulf, a young nobleman of southern Sweden. Combines myth, Christian and pagan elements, and history into a powerful narrative. Genealogies.

Book The Wisdom of Exeter

Download or read book The Wisdom of Exeter written by E.J. Christie and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-09-21 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This interdisciplinary volume collects original essays in literary criticism and literary theory, philology, codicology, metrics, and art history. Composed by prominent scholars in Anglo-Saxon studies, these essays honor the depth and breadth of Patrick W. Conner’s influence in our discipline. As a scholar, teacher, editor, administrator and innovator, Pat has contributed to Anglo-Saxon studies for four decades. It is hard to say which of his legacies is most profound.

Book Anglo Saxon Kingdoms

Download or read book Anglo Saxon Kingdoms written by Claire Breay and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Anglo-Saxon period stretches from the arrival of Germanic groups on British shores in the early 5th century to the Norman Conquest of 1066. During these centuries, the English language was used and written down for the first time, pagan populations were converted to Christianity, and the foundations of the kingdom of England were laid. This richly illustrated new book - which accompanies a landmark British Library exhibition - presents Anglo-Saxon England as the home of a highly sophisticated artistic and political culture, deeply connected with its continental neighbours. Leading specialists in early medieval history, literature and culture engage with the unique, original evidence from which we can piece together the story of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, examining outstanding and beautiful objects such as highlights from the Staffordshire hoard and the Sutton Hoo burial. At the heart of the book is the British Library's outstanding collection of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, the richest source of evidence about Old English language and literature, including Beowulf and other poetry; the Lindisfarne Gospels, one of Britain's greatest artistic and religious treasures; the St Cuthbert Gospel, the earliest intact European book; and historical manuscripts such as Bede's Ecclesiastical History and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. These national treasures are discussed alongside other, internationally important literary and historical manuscripts held in major collections in Britain and Europe. This book, and the exhibition it accompanies, chart a fascinating and dynamic period in early medieval history, and will bring to life our understanding of these formative centuries.

Book Romanesque and the Past

Download or read book Romanesque and the Past written by John McNeill and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-11-01 with total page 631 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The nineteen papers collected in this volume explore a notable phenomenon, that of retrospection in the art and architecture of Romanesque Europe. They arise from a conference organized by the British Archaeological Association in 2010, and reflect its interest in how and why the past manifested itself in the visual culture of the 11th and 12th centuries. This took many forms, from the casual re-use of ancient material to a specific desire to re-present or emulate earlier objects and buildings. Central to it is a concern for the revival of Roman and early medieval forms, spolia, selective quotation, archaism and the construction of histories. The individual essays presented here cover a wide range of topics and media: the significance of consecration ceremonies in the creation of architectural memory, the rise of pictorial concepts in 12th-century chronicles, the creation of history in the Paris of Hugh of St-Victor, and the appeal of the works of Bernward of Hildesheim and of Hrabanus Maurus in the centuries after their deaths. There are studies of buildings and the ideological purpose behind them at Tarragona, Ripoll, Cluny, Pannonhalma (Hungary), La Roccelletta (Calabria), and Old St Peter's, comparative studies of Trier, Villenauxe and Glastonbury, and of Bury St Edmunds, Rievaulx and Canterbury, and wide-ranging papers on the tantalizing evidence for an engagement with an overseas past in Ireland, an Anglo-Saxon past in England, and a Milanese past among the aisleless cruciform churches of Augustinian Europe. The volume concludes with an assessment of the very concept of Romanesque.

Book The Continuity of the Conquest

Download or read book The Continuity of the Conquest written by Wendy Marie Hoofnagle and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2016-09-16 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Norman conquerors of Anglo-Saxon England have traditionally been seen both as rapacious colonizers and as the harbingers of a more civilized culture, replacing a tribal Germanic society and its customs with more refined Continental practices. Many of the scholarly arguments about the Normans and their influence overlook the impact of the past on the Normans themselves. The Continuity of the Conquest corrects these oversights. Wendy Marie Hoofnagle explores the Carolingian aspects of Norman influence in England after the Norman Conquest, arguing that the Normans’ literature of kingship envisioned government as a form of imperial rule modeled in many ways on the glories of Charlemagne and his reign. She argues that the aggregate of historical and literary ideals that developed about Charlemagne after his death influenced certain aspects of the Normans’ approach to ruling, including a program of conversion through “allurement,” political domination through symbolic architecture and propaganda, and the creation of a sense of the royal forest as an extension of the royal court. An engaging new approach to understanding the nature of Norman identity and the culture of writing and problems of succession in Anglo-Norman England, this volume will enlighten and enrich scholarship on medieval, early modern, and English history.

Book The Pictorial Arts of the West  800 1200

Download or read book The Pictorial Arts of the West 800 1200 written by Charles Reginald Dodwell and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1993-01-01 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between the ninth and thirteenth centuries the Western world witnessed a glorious flowering of the pictorial arts. In this lavishly illustrated book, C.R. Dodwell provides a comprehensive guide to all forms of this art--from wall and panel paintings to stained glass windows, mosaics, and embroidery--and sets them against the historical and theological influences of the age. Dodwell describes the rise and development of some of the great styles of the Middle Ages: Carolingian art, which ranged from the splendid illuminations appropriate to an emperor's court to drawings of great delicacy; Anglo-Saxon art, which had a rare vitality and finesse; Ottonian art with its political and spiritual messages; the colorful Mozarabic art of Spain, which had added vigor through its interaction with the barbaric Visigoths; and the art of Italy, influenced by the styles of Byzantium and the West. Dodwell concludes with an examination of the universal Romanesque style of the twelfth century that extended from the Scandinavian countries in the north to Jerusalem in the south. His book--which includes the first exhaustive discussion of the painters and craftsmen of the time, incorporates the latest research, and is filled with new ideas about the relations among the arts, history, and theology of the period--will be an invaluable resource for both art historians and students of the Middle Ages.

Book The Tiberius psalter

Download or read book The Tiberius psalter written by A. P. Campbell and published by . This book was released on 1974 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book Anglo Saxon Chronicle

    Book Details:
  • Author : Alfred the Great
  • Publisher :
  • Release : 2020-08-20
  • ISBN : 9781774260104
  • Pages : 200 pages

Download or read book Anglo Saxon Chronicle written by Alfred the Great and published by . This book was released on 2020-08-20 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles is a collection of Old English annals chronicling the history of the Anglo-Saxon race. They were originally compiled in Wessex during the reign of Alfred the Great (871-899 AD). It was continuously updated by following generations and in one case was still being updated in 1154 AD. Regardless of certain biases, the Chronicle is the most important historical source of history of the British Isles for the period between the departure of the Roman Empire, and years following the Norman conquest. There are seven original copies of the text that reside in the British Library and two other public libraries in the United Kingdom.Alfred the Great was the king of the West Saxons at the time of heightened invasions from the Scandinavian Vikings. His kingdom of Wessex was the last surviving Saxon kingdom left in resistance to the invaders. At one-point Alfred's kingdom was reduced to his household in exile in the marshlands in Somerset, England. Through military reorganization, diplomatic maneuvers, and Christian missionary work, Alfred was able to push back against the Scandinavians and establish Wessex as the most powerful kingdom on the British Isles. By the end of his reign Wessex was the dominant power on the British Isles, the Vikings had been humbled and partially assimilated into Christian culture. His dream of an united Britain under the control of Wessex was almost complete. Alfred is the only English King to be given the title of 'the Great'.

Book Anglo Saxon Art

Download or read book Anglo Saxon Art written by David Mackenzie Wilson and published by Overlook Books. This book was released on 1984 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book Empires of Faith in Late Antiquity

Download or read book Empires of Faith in Late Antiquity written by Jaś Elsner and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-19 with total page 533 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the problems for studying art and religion in Eurasia arising from ancestral, colonial and post-colonial biases in historiography.

Book Northern memories and the English Middle Ages

Download or read book Northern memories and the English Middle Ages written by Tim William Machan and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-18 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provocatively argues that much of what English writers of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries remembered about medieval English geography, history, religion and literature, they remembered by means of medieval and modern Scandinavia. These memories, in turn, figured in something even broader. Protestant and fundamentally monarchical, the Nordic countries constituted a politically kindred spirit in contrast with France, Italy and Spain. Along with the so-called Celtic fringe and overseas colonies, Scandinavia became one of the external reference points for the forging of the United Kingdom. Subject to the continual refashioning of memory, the region became at once an image of Britain’s noble past and an affirmation of its current global status, rendering trips there rides on a time machine.

Book Dragon Lords

    Book Details:
  • Author : Eleanor Parker
  • Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
  • Release : 2018-05-01
  • ISBN : 1838608400
  • Pages : 306 pages

Download or read book Dragon Lords written by Eleanor Parker and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-05-01 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why did the Vikings sail to England? Were they indiscriminate raiders, motivated solely by bloodlust and plunder? One narrative, the stereotypical one, might have it so. But locked away in the buried history of the British Isles are other, far richer and more nuanced, stories; and these hidden tales paint a picture very different from the ferocious pillagers of popular repute. Eleanor Parker here unlocks secrets that point to more complex motivations within the marauding army that in the late ninth century voyaged to the shores of eastern England in its sleek, dragon-prowed longships. Exploring legends from forgotten medieval texts, and across the varied Anglo-Saxon regions, she depicts Vikings who came not just to raid but also to settle personal feuds, intervene in English politics and find a place to call home. Native tales reveal the links to famous Vikings like Ragnar Lothbrok and his sons; Cnut; and Havelok the Dane. Each myth shows how the legacy of the newcomers can still be traced in landscape, place-names and local history. This book uncovers the remarkable degree to which England is Viking to its core.

Book The Waning Sword  Conversion Imagery and Celestial Myth in  Beowulf

Download or read book The Waning Sword Conversion Imagery and Celestial Myth in Beowulf written by Edward Pettit and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2020-01-14 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The image of a giant sword melting stands at the structural and thematic heart of the Old English heroic poem Beowulf. This meticulously researched book investigates the nature and significance of this golden-hilted weapon and its likely relatives within Beowulf and beyond, drawing on the fields of Old English and Old Norse language and literature, liturgy, archaeology, astronomy, folklore and comparative mythology. In Part I, Pettit explores the complex of connotations surrounding this image (from icicles to candles and crosses) by examining a range of medieval sources, and argues that the giant sword may function as a visual motif in which pre-Christian Germanic concepts and prominent Christian symbols coalesce. In Part II, Pettit investigates the broader Germanic background to this image, especially in relation to the god Ing/Yngvi-Freyr, and explores the capacity of myths to recur and endure across time. Drawing on an eclectic range of narrative and linguistic evidence from Northern European texts, and on archaeological discoveries, Pettit suggests that the image of the giant sword, and the characters and events associated with it, may reflect an elemental struggle between the sun and the moon, articulated through an underlying myth about the theft and repossession of sunlight. The Waning Sword: Conversion Imagery and Celestial Myth in 'Beowulf' is a welcome contribution to the overlapping fields of Beowulf-scholarship, Old Norse-Icelandic literature and Germanic philology. Not only does it present a wealth of new readings that shed light on the craft of the Beowulf-poet and inform our understanding of the poem’s major episodes and themes; it further highlights the merits of adopting an interdisciplinary approach alongside a comparative vantage point. As such, The Waning Sword will be compelling reading for Beowulf-scholars and for a wider audience of medievalists.

Book The Once   Future King

    Book Details:
  • Author : T. H. White
  • Publisher : McClelland & Stewart
  • Release : 2015-10-13
  • ISBN : 1551999145
  • Pages : 705 pages

Download or read book The Once Future King written by T. H. White and published by McClelland & Stewart. This book was released on 2015-10-13 with total page 705 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive modern take on the timeless tale of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round table. The legends of King Arthur date back to medieval Europe, and have become some of the dominant myths of Western culture. In The Once & Future King, T. H. White reinvents the story for a modern audience. The novel starts by introducing the reader to a young Arthur – just a child, and far from the King he will become – as he is raised by the wizard Merlyn, and moves on to chronicle his rise to Kingship, the affair between Guinevere and Lancelot, and the eventual destruction of the round table. The first section, released independently as The Sword in the Stone, was adapted into an animated film by Walt Disney Pictures. Penguin Random House Canada is proud to bring you classic works of literature in e-book form, with the highest quality production values. Find more today and rediscover books you never knew you loved.