Download or read book Old Norse Mythology comparative Perspectives written by Pernille Hermann and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The existing manuscripts of Old Norse mythology were written mainly by Christians, obscuring the pre-Christian oral histories. This book assembles comparisons from a range of analytical perspectives--examining the similarities and differences of the Old Norse mythologies with the myths of other cultures and within the Old Norse corpus itself.
Download or read book Old Norse Religion in Long term Perspectives written by Anders Andrén and published by Nordic Academic Press. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of Old Norse Religion is a truly multidisciplinary and international field of research. The rituals, myths and narratives of pre-Christian Scandinavia are investigated and interpreted by archaeologists, historians, art historians, historians of religion as well as scholars of literature, onomastics and Scandinavian studies. For obvious reasons, these studies belong to the main curricula in Scandinavia but are also carried out at many other universities in Europe, the United States and Australia a fact that is evident to any reader of this book. In order to bring this broad and varied field of research together, an international conference on Old Norse religion was held in Lund in June 2004. About two hundred delegates from more than fifteen countries took part. The intention was to gather researchers to encourage and improve scholarly exchange and dialogue, and Old Norse religion in long-term perspectives presents a selection of the proceedings from that conference. The 75 contributions elucidate topics such as worldview and cosmology, ritual and religious practice, myth and memory as well as the reception and present-day use of Old Norse religion. The main editors of this volume have directed the multidisciplinary research project Roads to Midgard since 2000. The project is based at Lund University and funded by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation.
Download or read book Tracing Old Norse Cosmology written by Anders Andrén and published by Nordic Academic Press. This book was released on 2014-01-01 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Old Norse religion is considered as one of the best-known pre-Christian religions in Europe, due to the rich and varied Icelandic literature from the 12th to the 14th century. Since the Icelandic texts are Christian there has been an ongoing debate regarding their value as sources for deeper knowledge about pre-Christian religion in Scandinavia. However, with the help of archaeology it is possible to show that some elements in the texts actually have a pagan origin. Archaeology can also be used to outline a history of Old Norse religion through time. The collection of essays is a thorough study of some fundamental cosmological elements in Old Norse religion, such as the sun, the world-tree and the concept of Midgard (i.e. Middle Earth). Andrén argues that representations of all these elements can be traces through images and material culture during different parts of Scandinavian prehistory. By studying the history of these representations it is possible to outline a long-term perspective on Old Norse religion, including periods of fundamental changes.
Download or read book Theorizing Old Norse Myth written by Stefan Brink and published by Brepols Publishers. This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection explores the theoretical and methodological foundations through which we understand Old Norse myths and the mythological world, and the medieval sources in which we find expressions of these. Some contributions take a broad, comparative perspective; some address specific details of Old Norse myths and mythology; and some devote their attention to questions concerning either individual gods and deities, or more topographical and spatial matters (such as conceptions of pagan cult sites). The elements discussed provide an introductory and general overview of scholarly enquiry into myth and ritual, as well as an attempt to define myth and theory for Old Norse scholarship. The articles also offer a rehabilitation of the comparative method alongside a discussion of the concept of 'cultural memory' and of the cognitive functions that myths may have performed in early Scandinavian society. Particular subjects of interest include analyses of the enigmatic god Heimdallr, the more well-known Oðinn, the deities, the female asynjur, and the 'elves' or alfar. Text-based discussions are set alongside recent archaeological discoveries of cult buildings and cult sites in Scandinavia, together with a discussion of the most enigmatic site of all: Uppsala in Sweden. The key themes discussed throughout this volume are brought together in the concluding chapter, in a comprehensive summary that sheds new light on current scholarly perspectives.
Download or read book Old Norse Mythology written by John Lindow and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book treats from the perspective of the series "World mythologies in theory and in everyday life" the body of texts from medieval Scandinavia, mostly Iceland, usually known as "Norse mythology" or "Scandinavian mythology." Specifically, it constitutes a case study of a "literary or textual mythology," that is, a mythology from the past that we know only through written texts that have been left to us, augmented in a few cases by artifacts and images. This case is particularly interesting because the texts (with a tiny handful of enigmatic exceptions) were recorded centuries after the Nordic peoples had abandoned the religion associated with the mythology and converted to Christianity. The mythology lived on without direct connection to ritual activity or religious conviction. Drawing both on sources from before the conversion and on comparative analysis, it is certainly possible to reach informed inferences about the mythology before the conversion to Christianity-that is, when it existed as part of the pre-Christian religion of the Nordic peoples and their successors. From the perspective of the mythologies of the world, what is perhaps most important about these inferences is that this pre-Christian mythology was not a canonical mythology, since it almost certainly lacked a canon of sacred texts such as one finds in the great world religions of today. The focus of the book is not the mythology in and of itself, as would be true of a handbook, but rather how particular historical and intellectual circumstances formed conceptions about it."--
Download or read book More Than Mythology written by Catharina Raudvere and published by Nordic Academic Press. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The religion of the Viking Age is conventionally identified through its mythology: the ambiguous character Odin, the forceful Thor, and the end of the world approaching in Ragnarök. But pre-Christian religion consisted of so much more than mythic imagery and legends, and lingered for long in folk tradition. Studying religion of the North with an interdisciplinary approach is exceptionally fruitful, in both empirical and theoretical terms, and in this book a group of distinguished scholars widen the interpretative scope on religious life among the pre-Christian Scandinavian people. The authors shed new light on topics such as rituals, gender relations, social hierarchies, and inter-regional contacts between the Nordic tradition and the Sami and Finnish regions. The contributions add to a more complex view of the pre-Christian religion of Scandinavia, with relevant new questions about the material and a broad analysis of religion as a cultural expression.
Download or read book Old Norse Religion in Long Term Perspectives written by Anders Andrén and published by Nordic Academic Press. This book was released on 2006-01-12 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Consisting of more than 70 papers written by scholars concerned with pre-Christian Norse religion, the articles discuss subjects such as archaeology, art history, historical archaeology, history, history of ideas, theological history, literature, onomastics, Scandinavian languages, and Scandinavian studies. The interdisciplinary aim of the book brings together text-based and material-based researchers to improve scholarly exchange and dialogue and provide a variety of contributions that elucidate topics such as worldview and cosmology, ritual and religious practice, myth and memory, as well as reception and present-day use of old Norse religion.
Download or read book The Norns in Old Norse Mythology written by Karen Bek-Pedersen and published by Dunedin Academic Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The nornir - or norns - were a group of female supernatural beings closely related to ideas about fate in the Old Norse tradition. In this book, author Karen Bek-Pedersen provides a thorough understanding of the role played by norns and other similar beings. Surprisingly little has been written specifically about the norns, and this book - now available in paperback - is the first detailed discussion of the norns among the literature dealing with Old Norse beliefs. Although often mentioned in scholarship treating Old Norse culture, the norns are all too often dealt with in overly superficial ways. The book's research goes much deeper in order to properly understand the nature and role of the norns in the Old Norse world view. The conclusions that are reached overturn a number of stereotypical conceptions that have long dominated the understanding of these beings. The book is especially relevant to those interested in or studying Old Norse culture and tradition. However, comparative material from Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, and Classical traditions is also employed, therefore the book will also be of interest to those with a broader interest in European mythologies.
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 276 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 362 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 Dating the Old Norse Poetic Edda written by Christopher D. Sapp and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2022-06-15 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers new dating of the poems of the Old Norse Poetic Edda , perhaps our best sources about the mythology and legends of the Viking Age. This study compares the anonymous Eddic poems to dated skaldic poems with respect to five phenomena that develop diachronically in early Old Norse: the expletive particle of, types of negation, word order, types of relative clause, and metrical criteria. After examining these dating features individually, the three most reliable criteria—the particle of, negation, and relative clause type—are combined into a multifactorial analysis using a Naïve Bayes Classifier. The classifier assigns a date to each Eddic poem, and these proposed dates have interesting implications for our understanding of these texts as sources for the medieval history, mythology, linguistics, and literature of the Germanic peoples. This book will have broad interdisciplinary interest, not just to historical linguists and philologists but also to scholars of Norse history, literature, and mythology.
Download or read book Parallel Myths written by J.F. Bierlein and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2010-06-16 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Unusually accessible and useful . . . An eye-opener to readers into the universality and importance of myth in human history and culture.”—William E. Paden, Chair, Department of Religion, University of Vermont For as long as human beings have had language, they have had myths. Mythology is our earliest form of literary expression and the foundation of all history and morality. Now, in Parallel Myths, classical scholar J. F. Bierlein gathers the key myths from all of the world's major traditions and reveals their common themes, images, and meanings. Parallel Myths introduces us to the star players in the world's great myths—not only the twelve Olympians of Greek mythology, but the stern Norse Pantheon, the mysterious gods of India, the Egyptian Ennead, and the powerful deities of Native Americans, the Chinese, and the various cultures of Africa and Oceania. Juxtaposing the most potent stories and symbols from each tradition, Bierlein explores the parallels in such key topics as creation myths, flood myths, tales of love, morality myths, underworld myths, and visions of the Apocalypse. Drawing on the work of Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade, Carl Jung, Karl Jaspers, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and others, Bierlein also contemplates what myths mean, how to identify and interpret the parallels in myths, and how mythology has influenced twentieth-century psychology, philosophy, anthropology, and literary studies. “A first-class introduction to mythology . . . Written with great clarity and sensitivity.”—John G. Selby, Associate Professor, Roanoke College
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 Wilderness in Mythology and Religion written by Laura Feldt and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2012-10-01 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wilderness is one of the most abiding creations in the history of religions. It has a long and seminal history and is of contemporary relevance in wildlife preservation and climate discourses. Yet it has not previously been subject to scrutiny or theorising from a cross-cultural study of religions perspective. What are the specific relations between the world’s religions and imagined and real wilderness areas? The wilderness is often understood as a domain void of humans, opposed to civilization, but the analyses in this book complicate and question the dualism of previous theoretical grids and offer new perspectives on the interesting multiplicity of the wilderness and religion nexus. This book thus addresses the need for cross-cultural anthropological and history of religions analyses by offering in-depth case studies of the use and functions of wilderness spaces in a diverse range of contexts including, but not limited to, ancient Greece, early Christian asceticism, Old Norse religion, the shamanism-Buddhism encounter in Mongolia, contemporary paganism, and wilderness spirituality in the US. It advances research on religious spatialities, cosmologies, and ideas of wild nature and brings new understanding of the role of religion in human interaction with ‘the world’.
Download or read book Modern Paganism in World Cultures written by Michael Strmiska and published by ABC-CLIO. This book was released on 2005-12-12 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of Neopagan religious movements in North America, the United Kingdom, and Europe where people increasingly turn to ancestral religions, not as amusement or matters of passing interest, but in an effort to practice those religions as they were before the advent of Christianity.
Download or read book Nordic Religions in the Viking Age written by Thomas Andrew DuBois and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 1999-08-03 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas DuBois unravels for the first time the history of the Nordic religions in the Viking Age. "A seminal study of Nordic religions that future scholars will not be able to avoid."—Church History
Download or read book Theology of Wagner s Ring Cycle II written by Richard H. Bell and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: (Vol 1.) Wagner's Ring is one of the greatest of all artworks of Western civilization, but what is it all about? The power and mystery of Wagner's creation was such that he himself felt he stood before his work "as though before some puzzle." A clue to the Ring's greatness lies in its multiple avenues of self-disclosure and the corresponding plethora of interpretations that over the years has granted ample scope for directors and will no doubt do so well into the distant future. One possible interpretation, which Richard Bell argues should be taken seriously, is the Ring as Christian theology. In this first of two volumes, Bell considers, among other things, how the composer's Christian interests may be detected in the "forging" of his Ring, looking at how he appropriated his sources (whether they be myths and sagas, writers, poets, or philosophers) and considering works composed around the same time, especially his Jesus of Nazareth. -- back cover.
