Download or read book The Seven Wives of Harald Fairhair written by Marcia Lee Liaklev and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2013-07-24 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: King Gudrod was called the Hunter and he lived up to his name. Not only did he need to prove his power by hunting down animals, but he took the same actions when dealing with people. Gudrod was accustomed to getting his own way and he did what he needed to make that happen. When his first wife died, he decided he would have Aasa from the neighboring kingdom of Agder for his next wife. Aasa was a young woman of exceeding great beauty. She was tall of stature with long, flaming red hair and piercing green eyes. Her beauty was only exceeded by her strong will and sharp intellect and Gudrod had desired her for a long while. He sent his men west to Agder to ask Aasa's father, King Harald Redbeard, to give his daughter to him. "There will be no match between Gudrod the Hunter and my daughter," exclaimed Harald Redbeard, "Take your request and go elsewhere! Aasa would never consider a man like Gudrod to wed!" The ambassadors returned and told the result of their errand. "Harald Redbeard refused my offer?" shouted Gudrod. "We shall see how he likes my next offer! Gather the men and ready the ships. We sail for Agder tonight!" A great force of ships and men landed before dawn near the estate of King Harald and crept, with stealth, up the hill to the longhouse. After the building was completely surrounded, King Gudrod shouted at the door, "Harald Redbeard, you shall pay dearly for refusing to give your daughter Aasa to me. Tonight, she shall be in my bed and you shall be dead!" Thus began the saga foretelling the events that would shape the life and times of King Harald Fairhair.
Download or read book The Seven Wives of Harald Fairhair written by Marcia Liaklev and published by . This book was released on 2015-10-14 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE VIKING AGE was an exciting era of conquest and adventure, full of bigger than life men who dared the raging seas in open dragon ships, their round battle shields arrayed in a menacing row signaling the brute strength of the warriors who manned the mighty ships. One of the greatest of these was the WARRIOR KING HARALD FAIRHAIR, FIRST KING OF ALL NORWAY and a superhero of the VIKING AGE. His was definitely a life of conquest and adventure. Not only did he conquer the thirty one petty kingdoms of Norway and the petty kings who had ruled them, but he also conquered the seven women who were each unique and beautiful in their own way. They would give him twenty sons and two daughters. Harald was not inherently romantic, but he did envy the look of love he saw in the eyes of his powerful father, Halvdan the Black, whenever his lovely mother Ragnhild was near. Their influence was key to the remarkable man he would become.Enter ODIN, the ALLFATHER who ruled the mortals under his charge. Would the god actually ask Harald to marry at the age of eleven, despite the stunning red-haired beauty chosen for his mate? But she was only the bait, the bait that would set the young prince on his quest to fulfill the destiny required of him by Odin in the pre-mortal world. Little did this Viking lad know that Asa would be just the first of the wives Odin would choose for him to wed. After countless successful battles and many years as the powerful ruler, Harald began to feel proud of his great accomplishments and neglected to pay homage to the god who had protected and guided the events of his life. Then came the witch. The confident king was helpless under her power and she used him as she pleased. Only after he had sired four sons while hidden in a dark, filthy cave did Odin allow him to be rescued. Some lessons are hard to learn, but those are the kind one never forgets. Fortunately for Harald, he had yet more women to love and more sons to be brought into the world. The noble blood that ran through the veins of these sons would insure the longevity of Harald's royal line. THE SEVEN WIVES OF HARALD FAIRHAIR, FIRST KING OF ALL NORWAY, tells the story of this superhero in a historical novel that realistically depicts the life and time of the VIKING AGE. It was an age when women were strong, but men were stronger. IT IS A STORY OF LOVE AND WAR, BUT MOSTLY LOVE. This is a work of fiction, based on facts as found in the HEIMSKRINGLA, A HISTORY OF THE KINGS OF NORWAY, an ancient text written in the Old Norse language. It was compiled by SNORRE STURLUSON from documents, now lost, that were recorded during the 9th to the 12th century.To shorten the lengthy novel, the historic maps and illustrations were removed for this edition, making it 354 versus 416 pages. The strong font, Copperplate Gothic, has also been replaced by the weak Times New Roman font to please those readers who had difficulty reading the font in the first edition.
Download or read book Ancestral Roots of Certain American Colonists who Came to America Before 1700 written by Frederick Lewis Weis and published by Genealogical Publishing Com. This book was released on 1992 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Between History and Myth written by Bruce Lincoln and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2014-09-01 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All groups tell stories about their beginnings. Such tales are oft-repeated, finely wrought, and usually much beloved. Among those institutions most in need of an impressive creation account is the state: it’s one of the primary ways states attempt to legitimate themselves. But such founding narratives invite revisionist retellings that modify details of the story in ways that undercut, ironize, and even ridicule the state’s ideal self-representation. Medieval accounts of how Norway was unified by its first king provide a lively, revealing, and wonderfully entertaining example of this process. Taking the story of how Harald Fairhair unified Norway in the ninth century as its central example, Bruce Lincoln illuminates the way a state’s foundation story blurs the distinction between history and myth and how variant tellings of origin stories provide opportunities for dissidence and subversion as subtle—or not so subtle—modifications are introduced through details of character, incident, and plot structure. Lincoln reveals a pattern whereby texts written in Iceland were more critical and infinitely more subtle than those produced in Norway, reflecting the fact that the former had a dual audience: not just the Norwegian court, but also Icelanders of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, whose ancestors had fled from Harald and founded the only non-monarchic, indeed anti-monarchic, state in medieval Europe. Between History and Myth will appeal not only to specialists in Scandinavian literature and history but also to anyone interested in memory and narrative.
Download or read book All the King s Women Polygyny and Politics in Europe 900 1250 written by Jan Rüdiger and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-09-25 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In All the King’s Women Jan Rüdiger investigates medieval elite polygyny and its ‘uses’ in Northern Europe with a comparative perspective on England and France as well as Iberia.
Download or read book Heimskringla written by Snorri Sturluson and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-07-05 with total page 881 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of sagas concerning the various rulers of Norway, from about 850 to 1177. Beginning with the dim prehistory of the mythical gods and their descendants, Heimskringla recounts the history of the kings of Norway through the reign of Olaf Haraldsson, who became Norway’s patron saint. Once found in most homes and schools and still regarded as a national treasure, Heimskringla influenced the thinking and literary style of Scandinavia over several centuries. “[Snorri Sturluson] speaks—as almost no other historian ever has spoken—with the authority of a man whose masterful skills would have made him one of the formidable, foremost in any of the events he records. So he saturates even remotely past happenings with a gripping first-hand quality...Hollander’s translation is very good, fresh on every page . . . Wherever you open the book, the life grips you and you read on.” —Ted Hughes, New York Review of Books “Among the many contributions to world literature that ancient Iceland has given us, Heimskringla stands out as one of the truly monumental works. Among medieval European histories in the vernacular it has no equal.” —Modern Philology
Download or read book True Myth written by Nashid Al-Amin and published by Trafford Publishing. This book was released on 2013-02-21 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why is it that encyclopedias assert the Vikings, or Norsemen, landed in parts of North America, yet the Vikings have never been credited with its discovery? Historians bestow this honor on Christopher Columbus, who ventured here five hundred years after the Vikings, having never set foot on the continent! True Myth: Black Vikings of the Middle Ages takes the reader where he or she has never been before. We have always been told that Vikings, or Norsemen, were tall, blond, white and blue-eyedan image that has been presented to us in books and films. Now comes a book that challenges this centuries-old assertion, presenting evidence that these vaunted warriors were not the people popular historians have told us they were. The author presents evidence that white-skinned peoples in England, Ireland, and Wales referred to Vikings as black pagans and black devils. The extent of their dominance in Europe is examinedin fact, the author presents a reassessment of Europe that some readers will find difficult to believe, beginning with mans migrations into the continent and examining a number of black-skinned peoples who called Europe home from very ancient times almost to the present. The reader has never read a book like thisfilled with quotations from noted historians as well as from several Icelandic sagasthat will take the reader on a journey he or she has never imagined! A more accurate picture of Europe has never been presented before. The writer revisits the last ice age, presents evidence of the heavy presence of blacks in ancient Europe, and revisits ancient Greece, Rome, and areas of Asia, discussing the presence of black-skinned peoples in them before arriving in Viking-age Scandinavia when Norsemen embarked on a three-century-long assault on the continent and began migrating to Iceland and other areas of North America. Once the reader has completed True Myth: Black Vikings of the Middle Ages, he or she will have to question what he or she has been taught, historians once thought to be trustworthy, and the notion that the races were strictly divided and had never intermingled. There has never been a truer picture of Europe written, and the reader now has the opportunity to embark on the most thrilling journey he or she will ever take.
Download or read book The Early Kings of Norway written by Thomas Carlyle and published by London Chapman and Hall [1878?]. This book was released on 1875 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Past Present written by Thomas Carlyle and published by . This book was released on 1904 with total page 756 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Laughing Shall I Die written by Tom Shippey and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 571 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Laughing Shall I Die explores the Viking fascination with scenes of heroic death. The literature of the Vikings is dominated by famous last stands, famous last words, death songs, and defiant gestures, all presented with grim humor. Much of this mindset is markedly alien to modern sentiment, and academics have accordingly shunned it. And yet, it is this same worldview that has always powered the popular public image of the Vikings—with their berserkers, valkyries, and cults of Valhalla and Ragnarok—and has also been surprisingly corroborated by archaeological discoveries such as the Ridgeway massacre site in Dorset. Was it this mindset that powered the sudden eruption of the Vikings onto the European scene? Was it a belief in heroic death that made them so lastingly successful against so many bellicose opponents? Weighing the evidence of sagas and poems against the accounts of the Vikings’ victims, Tom Shippey considers these questions as he plumbs the complexities of Viking psychology. Along the way, he recounts many of the great bravura scenes of Old Norse literature, including the Fall of the House of the Skjoldungs, the clash between the two great longships Ironbeard and Long Serpent, and the death of Thormod the skald. One of the most exciting books on Vikings for a generation, Laughing Shall I Die presents Vikings for what they were: not peaceful explorers and traders, but warriors, marauders, and storytellers.
Download or read book History of Norway written by Karen Larsen and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-08 with total page 603 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A distinguished one-volume history of Norway, from the Vikings through the Resistance of World War II. "Full, objective, and thoroughly readable history, rich in content.... The result is a well-rounded treatment of Norwegian life—political, religious, economic, and intellectual—during the long centuries.... Easily the most important history of Norway in the English language since Gjerset."—N. Y. Times Originally published in 1948. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Download or read book Past and present Latter Day pamphlets etc written by Thomas Carlyle and published by . This book was released on 1906 with total page 756 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The people s edition of Thomas Carlyle s works 37 vols Wanting vol 33 35 written by Thomas Carlyle and published by . This book was released on 1889 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The New Cambridge Medieval History written by Rosamond McKitterick and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 1156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sample Text
Download or read book Corpus Poeticum Boreale written by Guðbrandur Vigfússon and published by . This book was released on 1883 with total page 730 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Corpus Poeticvm Boreale written by Guðbrandur Vigfússon and published by . This book was released on 1883 with total page 728 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Corpus poeticum boreale written by Gudbrand Vigfusson and published by . This book was released on 1883 with total page 764 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
