Download or read book Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages written by Diana Whaley and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Norse-Icelandic Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages project aims to produce a new edition of the known corpus of skaldic verse, including runic inscriptions in metrical form. In practice this means editing all poetry supposed to be from earliest times until c. 1400, which does not belong to the collection in the Codex Regius of the Elder Edda and related collections. This is the first edition of the skaldic corpus from first principles since Finnur Jónsson's Den Norsk-Islandske Skjaldedigtning (1912-15). It will be published in both book and electronic form as a critical edition with an English translation, editorial apparatus and notes. It will, however, in all cases re-examine the manuscript evidence for the poetic texts and their contexts. The edition will be produced in eight volumes, each one based on distinct source categories arranged in assumed chronological order, so that the manuscript contexts in which the poetry has been preserved will be kept in view. This basis of selection, plus the inclusion of an English translation and notes, should prove useful to readers outside skaldic studies, such as historians, archaeologists and scholars of other medieval literatures, who have previously found skaldic verse rather inaccessible. The volume of runic poetry will also contain images of the objects on which the inscriptions were carved. There will be a ninth volume comprising various indices and a complete bibliography of works relevant to skaldic poetry.
Download or read book Poetry from the Kings Sagas 1 written by Diana Whaley and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 1206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Eddic Skaldic and Beyond written by Martin Chase and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2014-06-02 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eddic, Skaldic, and Beyond shines light on traditional divisions of Old Norse–Icelandic poetry and awakens the reader to work that blurs these boundaries. Many of the texts and topics taken up in these enlightening essays have been difficult to categorize and have consequently been overlooked or undervalued. The boundaries between genres (Eddic and Skaldic), periods (Viking Age, medieval, early modern), or cultures (Icelandic, Scandinavian, English, Continental) may not have been as sharp in the eyes and ears of contemporary authors and audiences as they are in our own. When questions of classification are allowed to fade into the background, at least temporarily, the poetry can be appreciated on its own terms. Some of the essays in this collection present new material, while others challenge long-held assumptions. They reflect the idea that poetry with “medieval” characteristics continued to be produced in Iceland well past the fifteenth century, and even beyond the Protestant Reformation in Iceland (1550). This superb volume, rich in up-to-date scholarship, makes little-known material accessible to a wide audience.
Download or read book Poetry from the Kings Sagas 2 Poetry by named Skalds c 1035 1105 written by Kari Ellen Gade and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The poetry in this volume commemorates the lives of Scandinavian rulers from c.1035 to 1280 and events that took place during their reigns. It mainly focuses on the kings of Norway and on noblemen and chieftains associated with these kings, although some of the kings of Denmark, as well as three of the jarls of Orkney receive attention.
Download or read book Old Norse Women s Poetry written by Sandra Ballif Straubhaar and published by DS Brewer. This book was released on 2011 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Text, with English translation in two formats, of all the Old Norse poetry attributed to women - skáldkonur. The rich and compelling corpus of Old Norse poetry is one of the most important and influential areas of medieval European literature. What is less well known, however, is the quantity of the material which can be attributed to women skalds. This book, intended for a broad audience, presents a bilingual edition (Old Norse and English) of this material, from the ninth to the thirteenth century and beyond, with commentary and notes. The poems here reflect the dramatic and often violent nature of the sagas: their subject matter features Viking Age shipboard adventures and shipwrecks; prophecies; curses; declarations of love and of revenge; duels, feuds and battles; encounters with ghosts; marital and family discord; and religious insults, among many other topics. Their authors fall into four main categories: pre-Christian Norwegian and Icelandic skáldkonur of the Viking Age; Icelandic skáldkonur of the Sturlung Age (thirteenth century); additional early skáldkonur from the Islendingasögur and related material, not as historically verifiable as the first group; and mythical figures cited as reciting verse in the legendary sagas (fornaldarsögur). Sandra Ballif Straubhaar is Senior Lecturer in Germanic Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.
Download or read book Speaker and Authority in Old Norse Wisdom Poetry written by Brittany Erin Schorn and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2017-07-10 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While there is a long tradition of research into eddic poetry, including the poems classed as wisdom literature, much of this has approached the subject either as a primarily philological commentary or has addressed literary and thematic topics of individual or small groups of poems. This book offers a wide-ranging enquiry into the defining features of Old Norse wisdom, including the representation of wisdom in texts which cross traditional generic boundaries. It builds on recent advances in understanding of pre-Christian religion in Scandinavia, and calls on comparative and supporting work from several different disciplinary backgrounds (including literary theory, other medieval literatures and anthropology). Speaker and Authority interrogates important questions about the concept of knowledge, as well as its role in medieval Scandinavian society and its broader European cultural context.
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 Old Norse Poetry in Performance written by Brian McMahon and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-05-02 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a range of approaches to the study of Old Norse poetry in performance. The contributors examine both eddic and skaldic poems and consider the surviving evidence for how they were originally recited or otherwise performed in medieval Scandinavia, Iceland and at royal courts across Europe. This study also engages with the challenge of reconstructing medieval performance styles and examines ways of applying the modern discipline of Performance Studies to the fragmentary corpus of Old Norse verse. The performance of verse by characters who appear in the Old Icelandic saga tradition is also considered, as is the cultural value associated not only with the poems themselves but with their various means of transmission and reception. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in the fields of Old Norse studies, Performance and Theatre History.
Download or read book Emotional Alterity in the Medieval North Sea World written by Erin Sebo and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-09-25 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses a little-considered aspect of the study of the history of emotions in medieval literature: the depiction of perplexing emotional reactions. Medieval literature often confronts audiences with displays of emotion that are improbable, physiologically impossible, or simply unfathomable in modern social contexts. The intent of such episodes is not always clear; medieval texts rarely explain emotional responses or their motivations. The implication is that the meanings communicated by such emotional display were so obvious to their intended audience that no explanation was required. This raises the question of whether such meanings can be recovered. This is the task to which the contributors to this book have put themselves. In approaching this question, this book does not set out to be a collection of literary studies that treat portrayals of emotion as simple tropes or motifs, isolated within their corpora. Rather, it seeks to uncover how such manifestations of feeling may reflect cultural and social dynamics underlying vernacular literatures from across the medieval North Sea world.
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 A Companion to Saxo Grammaticus written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2024-06-13 with total page 725 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ever since the publication of Saxo Grammaticus’ Gesta Danorum at the beginning of the thirteenth century, scholars and laymen have grappled with the complex and marvellous chronicle. As much specialized scholarship has been published in Danish, this companion breaks new ground by giving a comprehensive and up-to-date tour of the work for a global audience. Attention is given to the unity of Saxo’s massive chronicle, whether he is dealing with a legendary pagan past or events from his own time. Saxo’s world and views are explored in ways that shed new light on all of northern Europe. Contributors are Bjørn Bandlien, Karsten Friis-Jensen, Michael H. Gelting, Thomas K. Heebøll-Holm, Lars Hermanson, Lars Kjær, Torben Kjersgaard Nielsen, Annette Lassen, Anders Leegaard Knudsen, Lars Boje Mortensen, Mia Münster-Swendsen, Erik Niblaeus, Roland Scheel, Karen Skovgaard-Petersen, Kurt Villads Jensen, and Helle Vogt.
Download or read book Cultures of Compunction in the Medieval World written by and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-10-15 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Compunction was one of the most important emotions for medieval Christianity; in fact, through its confessional function, compunction became the primary means for an affective sinner to gain redemption. Cultures of Compunction in the Medieval World explores how such emotion could be expressed, experienced and performed in medieval European society. Using a range of disciplinary approaches – including history, philosophy, art history, literary studies, performance studies and linguistics – this book examines how and why emotions which now form the bedrock of modern western culture were idealized in the Middle Ages. By bringing together expertise across disciplines and medieval languages, this important book demonstrates the ubiquity and impact of compunction for medieval life and makes wider connections between devotional, secular and quotidian areas of experience.
Download or read book Nordic Elites in Transformation c 1050 1250 Volume III written by Wojtek Jezierski and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the practical and symbolic resources of legitimacy which the elites of medieval Scandinavia employed to establish, justify, and reproduce their social and political standing between the end of the Viking Age and the rise of kingdoms in the thirteenth century. Geographically the chapters cover the Scandinavian realms and Free State Iceland. Thematically the authors cover a wide palette of cultural practices and historical sources: hagiography, historiography, spaces and palaces, literature, and international connections, which rulers, magnates or ecclesiastics used to compete for status and to reserve haloing glory for themselves. The volume is divided in three sections. The first looks at the sacral, legal, and acclamatory means through which privilege was conferred onto kings and ruling families. Section Two explores the spaces such as aristocratic halls, palaces, churches in which the social elevation of elites took place. Section Three explores the traditional and novel means of domestic distinction and international cultural capital which different orders of elites – knights, powerful clerics, ruling families etc. – wrought to assure their dominance and set themselves apart vis-à-vis their peers and subjects. A concluding chapter discusses how the use of symbolic capital in the North compared to wider European contexts.
Download or read book Scandinavia in the Age of Vikings written by Jon Vidar Sigurdsson and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-15 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Scandinavia in the Age of Vikings, Jón Viðar Sigurðsson returns to the Viking homeland, Scandinavia, highlighting such key aspects of Viking life as power and politics, social and kinship networks, gifts and feasting, religious beliefs, women's roles, social classes, and the Viking economy, which included farming, iron mining and metalworking, and trade. Drawing of the latest archeological research and on literary sources, namely the sagas, Sigurðsson depicts a complex and surprisingly peaceful society that belies the popular image of Norsemen as bloodthirsty barbarians. Instead, Vikings often acted out power struggles symbolically, with local chieftains competing with each other through displays of wealth in the form of great feasts and gifts, rather than arms. At home, conspicuous consumption was a Viking leader's most important virtue; the brutality associated with them was largely wreaked abroad. Sigurðsson's engaging history of the Vikings at home begins by highlighting political developments in the region, detailing how Danish kings assumed ascendency over the region and the ways in which Viking friendship reinforced regional peace. Scandinavia in the Age of Vikings then discusses the importance of religion, first pagan and (beginning around 1000 A.D.) Christianity; the central role that women played in politics and war; and how the enormous wealth brought back to Scandinavia affected the social fabric—shedding new light on Viking society.
Download or read book The Saga of the J msvikings written by Alison Finlay and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-08-05 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unique among the Icelandic sagas, part-history, part-fiction, the Saga of the Jómsvikings tells of a legendary band of vikings, originally Danish, who established an island fortress of the Baltic coast and launched and ultimately lost their heroic attack on the pagan ruler of Norway in the late tenth century. The saga's account of their stringent warrior code, fatalistic adherence to their own reckless vows and declarations of extreme courage as they face execution articulates a remarkable account of what it meant to be a viking. This translation presents the longest and earliest text of the saga, never before published in English, with a full literary and historical introduction to this remarkable work.
Download or read book Authorship Worldview and Identity in Medieval Europe written by Christian Raffensperger and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-03-03 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What did medieval authors know about their world? Were they parochial and focused on just their monastery, town, or kingdom? Or were they aware of the broader medieval Europe that modern historians write about? This collection brings the focus back to medieval authors to see how they described their world. While we see that each author certainly had their own biases, the vast majority of them did not view the world as constrained to their small piece of it. Instead, they talked about the wider world, and often they had informants or textual sources that informed them about the world, even if they did not visit it themselves. This volume shows that they also used similar ideas to create space and identity – whether talking about the desert, the holy land, or food practices in their texts. By examining medieval authors and their own perceptions of their world, this collection offers a framework for discussions of medieval Europe in the twenty-first century.
Download or read book Old English Philology written by Leonard Neidorf and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2016 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays bringing out the crucial importance of philology for understanding Old English texts.
