Download or read book Paranormal Encounters in Iceland 1150 1400 written by Ármann Jakobsson and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-03-23 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology of international scholarship offers new critical approaches to the study of the many manifestations of the paranormal in the Middle Ages. The guiding principle of the collection is to depart from symbolic or reductionist readings of the subject matter in favor of focusing on the paranormal as human experience and, essentially, on how these experiences are defined by the sources. The authors work with a variety of medieval Icelandic textual sources, including family sagas, legendary sagas, romances, poetry, hagiography and miracles, exploring the diversity of paranormal activity in the medieval North. This volume questions all previous definitions of the subject matter, most decisively the idea of saga realism, and opens up new avenues in saga research.

Download or read book Paranormal Encounters in Iceland 1150 1400 written by Ármann Jakobsson and published by . This book was released on 2020-03-30 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology brings together articles by several scholars all engaged in the study of the many manifestations of the paranormal in the Middle Ages. The guiding principles of the collection are a clear focus on the parnormal experiences themselves, and, essentially, how they are defined by the sources. The authors work with a variety of medieval Icelandic sources, including family sagas, legendary sagas, romances, poetry, hagiography and miracles, exploring the variedness of paranormal activity in the medieval North. This volume questions all previous definitions of the subject matter, most decisively the idera of saga realism and will open up new avenues in saga research.

Download or read book The Troll Inside You written by Ármann Jakobsson and published by punctum books. This book was released on 2017 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do medieval Icelanders mean when they say "troll"? What did they see when they saw a troll? What did the troll signify to them? And why did they see them? The principal subject of this book is the Norse idea of the troll, which the author uses to engage with the larger topic of paranormal experiences in the medieval North. The texts under study are from 13th-, 14th-, and 15th-century Iceland. The focus of the book is on the ways in which paranormal experiences are related and defined in these texts and how those definitions have framed and continue to frame scholarly interpretations of the paranormal. The book is partitioned into numerous brief chapters, each with its own theme. In each case the author is not least concerned with how the paranormal functions within medieval society and in the minds of the individuals who encounter and experience it and go on to narrate these experiences through intermediaries. The author connects the paranormal encounter closely with fears and these fears are intertwined with various aspects of the human experience including gender, family ties, and death. The Troll Inside You hovers over the boundaries of scholarship and literature. Its aim is to prick and provoke but above all to challenge its audience to reconsider some of their preconceived ideas about the medieval past.

Download or read book Cultural Legacies of Old Norse Literature written by Dustin Geeraert and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2022-08-23 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The cultural and literary legacy of medieval Iceland, with its roots in Norse heathen religion, heroic literature, and Viking Age history, is the focus of this volume. Its chapters examine the history and reception of a particular text or topic within this remarkable tradition. They treat a number of topics, including the legendary dragon-slayer Sigurd, the many personas of the mysterious god Odin, aspects of the ancient mythology of gods and giants, the early settlement of Iceland, the defiant Viking warriors known as the "Sworn Brothers", the entrepreneurial role of cloth production in medieval Scandinavia, the codicology and book history of key literary works, the many references to medieval Nordic lore in modern fiction and poetry, and the cultural position of islands such as Iceland in relation to the ebb and flow of religions, institutions and empires. Reconsidering these areas of Old Norse-Icelandic literary culture reveals the striking resilience and adaptability of its traditions, through a startling variety of transformations.

Download or read book Story World and Character in the Late slendingas gur written by Rebecca Merkelbach and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2024-06-11 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues for new models of reading the complexity and subversiveness of fourteen "post-classical" sagas. The late Sagas of Icelanders, thought to be written in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, have hitherto received little scholarly attention. Previous generations of critics have unfavourably compared them to "classical" Íslendingasögur and fornaldarsögur, leading modern audiences to project their expectations onto narratives that do not adhere to simple taxonomies and preconceived notions of genre. As "rogues" within the canon, they challenge the established notions of what makes an Íslendingasaga. Based on a critical appraisal of conceptualisations of canon and genre in saga literature, this book offers a new reading of the relationship between the individual, paranormal, and social dimensions that form the foundation of these sagas. It draws on a multidisciplinary approach, informed by perspectives as diverse as "possible worlds" theory, gender studies, and social history. The "post-classical" sagas are not only read anew and integrated into both their generic and socio-historical context; they are met on their own terms, allowing their fascinating narratives to speak for themselves.

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 with total page 373 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 Understanding Disability Throughout History written by Hanna Björg Sigurjónsdóttir and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-10-27 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Understanding Disability Throughout History explores seldom-heard voices from the past by studying the hidden lives of disabled people before the concept of disability existed culturally, socially and administratively. The book focuses on Iceland from the Age of Settlement, traditionally considered to have taken place from 874 to 930, until the 1936 Law on Social Security (Lög um almannatryggingar), which is the first time that disabled people were referenced in Iceland as a legal or administrative category. Data sources analysed in the project represent a broad range of materials that are not often featured in the study of disability, such as bone collections, medieval literature and census data from the early modern era, archaeological remains, historical archives, folktales and legends, personal narratives and museum displays. The ten chapters include contributions from multidisciplinary team of experts working in the fields of Disability Studies, History, Archaeology, Medieval Icelandic Literature, Folklore and Ethnology, Anthropology, Museum Studies, and Archival Sciences, along with a collection of post-doctoral and graduate students. The volume will be of interest to all scholars and students of disability studies, history, medieval studies, ethnology, folklore, and archaeology.

Download or read book Urbanization in Viking Age and Medieval Denmark written by Maria Corsi and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study traces the history of urbanization in Denmark from c. 500 to 1350 and explores how interconnected political, religious, and economic factors were instrumental in bringing about the growth of towns. Prior to urban development, certain specialized sites such as elite residences and coastal landing places performed many of the functions that would later be taken over by medieval towns. Fundamental changes in political power, the coming of Christianity, and economic development over the course of the Viking and Middle Ages led to the abandonment of these sites in favour of new urban settlements that would come to form the political, religious, and economic centres of the medieval kingdom. Bringing together both archaeological and historical sources, this study illustrates not only how certain cultural and economic shifts were crucial to the development of towns, but also the important role urbanization had in the transition from Viking to medieval Denmark.

Download or read book The Paganesque and the Tale of V lsi written by PROFESSOR MERRILL. KAPLAN and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2024-10-22 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenges the concept that the notorious horse penis is key to understanding the Tale of Vǫlsi, via the concept of the "paganesque". A family of Norwegian pagans, stubbornly resisting the new Christian religion, worship a diabolically animated preserved horse penis, intoning verses as they pass it from hand to hand until King Olaf the Saint intervenes. This is the matter of the medieval Tale of Vǫlsi. Traditionally, it has been read as evidence of a pre-Christian fertility cult - or simply dismissed as an obscene trifle. This book takes a new approach by developing the concept of the "paganesque" - the air of a religious culture older than and inimical to Christianity. It shows how the Tale of Vǫlsi deploys a range of vernacular genres, from verbal dueling and mythological poetry to folk belief about milk-stealing witches and the reanimated dead, to create the flavor of paganism for a fourteenth-century Icelandic audience: an imagined paganism that has theological stakes as well as satirical bite. Throughout, the study challenges the notion that the horse penis is the key to understanding the narrative. Once the object is removed from the center of interpretation, the artistry and wit of the tale's "Paganesque" come fully into view.

Download or read book Reimagining Christendom written by Joel D. Anderson and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2023-03-14 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With its expanding legal system and its burgeoning throngs of lawyers, legates, and documents, the papacy of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries has often been credited with spearheading a governmental revolution that molded the high medieval church into an increasingly disciplined, uniform, and machine-like institution. Reimagining Christendom offers a fresh appraisal of these developments from a surprising and distinctive vantage point. Tracing the web of textual ties that connected the northern fringes of Europe to the Roman see, Joel D. Anderson explores the ways in which Norse writers recruited, refashioned, and repurposed the legal principles and official documents of the Roman church for their own ends. Drawing on little-known vernacular sagas, Reimagining Christendom is populated with tales of married bishops, fictitious and forged papal bulls, and imagined canon law proceedings. These narratives, Anderson argues, demonstrate how Norse writers adapted and reconfigured the institutional power of the church in order to legitimize some of the thoroughly abnormal practices of their native bishops. In the process, Icelandic clerics constructed their own visions of ecclesiastical order--visions that underscore the thoroughly malleable character of the Roman church's text-based government and that articulate diverse ways of belonging to the far-flung imagined community of high medieval Christendom.

Download or read book Gender and Protest written by Frank Jacob and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-09-04 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For centuries women and other "gendered minorities" had to protest to gain equality. Their demands were often matched by counter-protest from conservative forces within historical societies that intended to return to "old orders" or "good old times." The present volume will take a closer look at the interrelationship between gender and protest and analyze in detail how gender-related perspectives stimulated protests and initiated historical changes. Through historical case studies that range from antiquity until modern times, specialists from different countries and disciplines discuss reasons for protest, gender as a factor that stimulated social conflicts, and the power of gendered protests of the past with regards to their impact and long-term impact until today.

Download or read book Unusual Death and Memorialization written by Titta Kallio-Seppä and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2022-08-12 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most cultures and societies have their own customs and traditions of treating their dead. In the past, some deceased received a burial that deviated from tradition. The reasons for unusual burial could result from reasons such as outbreaks of epidemics or wars, or from premature births, distinctive social status, or disability. Authors present a selection of cases addressing the issue of unusual deaths, burials, or ways to remember the deceased. Chapters explore theoretical views related to social memory of death and memorializing the deceased and their resting places during modern period. The case studies introduce varied views on ‘otherness’ that are visible in burial customs and memorialization.

Download or read book Vigor Mortis written by Scott G. Bruce and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-12-16 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the enduring presence and participation of the dead in the lives of premodern people from the Carolingian period to the end of the Middle Ages. Unlike modern states, which erect barriers to separate the dying and the deceased from their families, friends, and associates, premodern societies in western Europe fostered an on-going relationship between the living and the dead that was mutually beneficial to both parties. As these studies show, the dead had many means at their disposal to communicate their needs and disaffection, including ghostly visitations and unquiet corpses. For their part, medieval authors told stories about the fate of the dead and the geography of the afterlife to dissuade sinful behaviour and foster virtue in preparation for the Last Judgment. Premodern hauntings also serve as a useful metaphor for the uncertainty of archival research in recovering past voices and for the racial presumptions that inform our reconstruction of the western Middle Ages. This book will appeal to scholars and students of history and literature, especially those interested in the concept of death in the medieval period. The chapters in this book were originally published in the Journal of Medieval History.

Download or read book The Cursed Carolers in Context written by Lynneth Miller Renberg and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-03-23 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cursed Carolers in Context explores the interplay between the forms and contexts in which the tale of the cursed carolers circulated and the meanings it had for medieval and early modern authors and audiences. The story of the cursed carolers has circulated in Europe since the eleventh century. In this story, a group of people in a village in Saxony skip Christmas mass to perform a circle dance in the cemetery, only to be cursed and forced to keep dancing for a whole year. By approaching the story in specific historical contexts, this book shows how the story of the cursed carolers became a space in which medieval readers, writers, and listeners could debate the meaning and significance of a surprising variety of questions, including ecclesiastical authority, gender roles, pastoral responsibility, and even the conduct of crusades. This consideration of the interplay between text and context sheds new light on how and why the story of the dancers achieved such popularity in the Middle Ages, and how its meanings developed and changed throughout the period. This book will appeal to scholars and students of medieval European history, literature, and dance, as well as those interested in cultural history.

Download or read book The Norse Sorceress written by Leszek Garde?a and published by Oxbow Books. This book was released on 2023-08-24 with total page 1062 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Old Norse literature abounds with descriptions of magic acts that allow ritual specialists of various kinds to manipulate the world around them, see into the future or the distant past, change weather conditions, influence the outcomes of battles, and more. While magic practitioners are known under myriad terms, the most iconic of them is the völva. As the central figure of the famous mythological poem Völuspá (The Prophecy of the Völva), the völva commands both respect and fear. In non-mythological texts similar women are portrayed as crucial albeit somewhat peculiar members of society. Always veiled in mystery, the völur and their kind have captured the academic and popular imagination for centuries. Bringing together scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds, this volume aims to provide new insights into the reality of magic and its agents in the Viking world, beyond the pages of medieval texts. It explores new trajectories for the study of past mentalities, beliefs, and rituals as well as the tools employed in these practices and the individuals who wielded them. In doing so, the volume engages with several topical issues of Viking Age research, including the complex entanglements of mind and materiality, the cultural attitudes to animals and the natural world, and the cultural constructions of gender and sexuality. By addressing these complex themes, it offers a nuanced image of the völva and related magic workers in their cultural context. The volume is intended for a broad, diverse, and international audience, including experts in the field of Viking and Old Norse studies but also various non-professional history enthusiasts. The Norse Sorceress: Mind and Materiality in the Viking World is a key output of the project Tanken bag Tingene (Thoughts behind Things) conducted at the National Museum of Denmark from 2020 to 2023 and funded by the Krogager Foundation.

Download or read book The Prosimetrum of the slendingas gur written by Brynja þOrgeirsdóttir and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2024-12-16 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Verse quotation is intrinsic to the literary style of the medieval Icelandic corpus of Íslendingasögur (sagas of Icelanders), one of the most important vernacular literary genres of the European Middle Ages. The essays collected in this volume demonstrate that the combination of prose and verse constitutes a distinctive literary aesthetic, and that in the medieval Icelandic literary tradition, it was not a question of choosing between prose and verse as the vehicle for stories about the foundational generations of settlers on the island, but of combining both modes to forge the unique literary form of the saga. Verse quotation has always been recognised as an important aspect of the Íslendingasögur, but to date, the significance of verse to the aesthetic of the narrative has mainly been explored with reference to the sub-genre of the skáldasögur (sagas of poets), in which the proportion of verse to prose is at its highest. The contributions to the volume analyse the Íslendingasögur as prosimetrum - that is, they treat the combination of verse and prose as a salient generic and aesthetic feature of this body of sagas. The contributors are leading scholars in the field of Old Norse studies, and their work represents current research trends in the UK, USA, Iceland, Denmark, and Germany. Their innovative approaches will enable a better understanding on the literary mode of the corpus as a whole, as well as producing fresh insights into the compositional habits of the (anonymous) authors of individual sagas.

Download or read book Nemo non metuit written by Fabrizio Conti and published by Trivent Publishing. This book was released on 2022-10-30 with total page 557 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Nemo Non Metuit": Magic in the Roman World has the ambitious goal of discussing some of the fundamental themes in the development of the idea of magic, in all its facets, in the long chronological span of the Roman world, between the 8th century BCE and the 5th century CE. At the same time, this volume is the result of a team effort that has brought together both accomplished scholars and young researchers at the beginning of their scholarly careers. Altogether, this ample work is the result of a synergy that brought together different approaches to the study of Roman magic. The broad content of this volume includes studies on magical gems of Etruscan, Greek and Phoenician background; curse tablets; amulets targeting malaria; erotic spells; the use of veneficia or poisons for magical purposes; judicial prayers in Roman Britain; witches in the literary tradition; the role of women in the matter of magic and divination; the figure of the "Orphic witch" in the age of Augustus; sorcerers and rivals of Jesus Christ; early-Christian sermons against magic and superstition; the fight of late-antique Church against magical powers. By addressing such a diverse spectrum of topics, this volume aims to challenge traditional views and open new paths of interpretation in the reconstruction of a long-term cultural-historical object such as magic in connection to the Roman civilization.