Download or read book A Handbook to Eddic Poetry written by Carolyne Larrington and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-19 with total page 675 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first comprehensive and accessible survey in English of Old Norse eddic poetry: a remarkable body of literature rooted in the Viking Age, which is a critical source for the study of early Scandinavian myths, poetics, culture and society. Dramatically recreating the voices of the legendary past, eddic poems distil moments of high emotion as human heroes and supernatural beings alike grapple with betrayal, loyalty, mortality and love. These poems relate the most famous deeds of gods such as Óðinn and Þórr with their adversaries the giants; they bring to life the often fraught interactions between kings, queens and heroes as well as their encounters with valkyries, elves, dragons and dwarfs. Written by leading international scholars, the chapters in this volume showcase the poetic riches of the eddic corpus, and reveal its relevance to the history of poetics, gender studies, pre-Christian religions, art history and archaeology.
Download or read book The Meters of Old Norse Eddic Poetry written by Seiichi Suzuki and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2013-12-12 with total page 1142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a formal and functional study of the three distinct meters of Old Norse eddic poetry, fornyrðislag, málaháttr, and ljóðaháttr. It provides a systematic account of these archaic meters, both synchronic and diachronic, and from a comparative Germanic perspective; particularly concerned with Norse innovations in metrical practice, Suzuki explores how and why the three meters were shaped in West Scandinavia through divergent reorganization of the Common Germanic metrical system. The book constitutes the first comprehensive work on the meters of Old Norse eddic poetry in a single coherent framework; with thorough data presentation, detailed philological analysis, and sophisticated linguistic explanation, the book will be of enormous interest to Old Germanic philologists/linguists, medievalists, as well as metrists of all persuasions. A strong methodological advantage of this work is the extensive use of inferential statistical techniques for giving empirical support to specific analyses and claims being adduced. Another strength is a cognitive dimension, a (re)construction of a prototype-based model of the metrical system and its overall characterization as an integral part of the poetic knowledge that governed eddic poets' verse-making technique in general.
Download or read book Essays on Eddic Poetry written by John McKinnel and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2014-01-01 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays on Eddic Poetry presents a selection of important articles on Old Norse literature by noted medievalist John McKinnell. While McKinnell's work addresses many of the perennial issues in the study of Old Norse, this collection has a special focus on the interplay between heathen and Christian world-views in the poems. Among the texts examined are Hávamál, which includes an elegantly cynical poem about Óðinn's sexual intrigues and a more mystical one about his self-sacrifice on the world-tree in order to gain magical wisdom; V?lundarkviða, which recounts an elvish smith's revenge for his captivity and maiming; and Hervararkviða, where the heroine bravely but foolishly raises her dead father to demand the deadly sword Tyrfingr from him. Originally published between 1988 and 2008, these twelve essays cover a wide range of mythological and heroic poems and have been revised and updated to reflect the latest scholarship.
Download or read book The Poetic Edda written by and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-03-01 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Poetic Edda comprises a treasure trove of mythic and spiritual verse holding an important place in Nordic culture, literature, and heritage. Its tales of strife and death form a repository, in poetic form, of Norse mythology and heroic lore, embodying both the ethical views and the cultural life of the North during the late heathen and early Christian times. Collected by an unidentified Icelander, probably during the twelfth or thirteenth century, The Poetic Edda was rediscovered in Iceland in the seventeenth century by Danish scholars. Even then its value as poetry, as a source of historical information, and as a collection of entertaining stories was recognized. This meticulous translation succeeds in reproducing the verse patterns, the rhythm, the mood, and the dignity of the original in a revision that Scandinavian Studies says "may well grace anyone's bookshelf."
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 Influences of Pre Christian Mythology and Christianity on Old Norse Poetry written by Andrew McGillivray and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2018-10-08 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Eddic poem Vafþrúðnismál serves as a representation of early pagan beliefs or myths and as a myth itself; the poem performs both of these functions, acting as a poetic framework and functioning as sacred myth. In this study, the author looks closely at the journey of the Norse god Óðinn to the hall of the ancient and wise giant Vafþrúðnir, where Óðinn craftily engages his adversary in a life-or-death contest in knowledge.
Download or read book A History of Icelandic Literature written by Stefán Einarsson and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2019-12-01 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1957. Stefán Einarsson covers almost a thousand years of Icelandic literature in tracing the influence of the sagas and eddic poems. The book begins with background on Icelandic literature, outlining its literary roots in Scandinavia. Following this, Einarsson provides a thorough survey of Icelandic literature through the 1950s.
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 296 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 The Poetic Edda written by Carolyne Larrington and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2014-09-11 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: She sees, coming up a second time, earth from the ocean, eternally green; the waterfalls plunge, an eagle soars above them, over the mountain hunting fish. After the terrible conflagration of Ragnarok, the earth rises serenely again from the ocean, and life is renewed. The Poetic Edda begins with The Seeress's Prophecy which recounts the creation of the world, and looks forward to its destruction and rebirth. In this great collection of Norse-Icelandic mythological and heroic poetry, the exploits of gods and humans are related. The one-eyed Odin, red-bearded Thor, Loki the trickster, the lovely goddesses, and the giants who are their enemies walk beside the heroic Helgi, Sigurd the Dragon-Slayer, Brynhild the shield-maiden, and the implacable Gudrun. This translation also features the quest-poem The Lay of Svipdag and The Waking of Angantyr, in which a girl faces down her dead father to retrieve his sword. Comic, tragic, instructive, grandiose, witty, and profound, the poems of the Edda have influenced artists from Wagner to Tolkien and speak to us as freely as when they were first written down seven hundred and fifty years ago.
Download or read book A History of Old Norse Poetry and Poetics written by Margaret Clunies Ross and published by DS Brewer. This book was released on 2005 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book in English to deal with the twin subjects of Old Norse poetry and the various vernacular treatises on native poetry that were a conspicuous feature of medieval intellectual life in Iceland and the Orkneys from the mid-twelfth to the fourteenth centuries. Its aim is to give a clear description of the rich poetic tradition of early Scandinavia, particularly in Iceland, where it reached its zenith, and to demonstrate the social contexts that favoured poetic composition, from the oral societies of the early Viking Age in Norway and its colonies to the devout compositions of literate Christian clerics in fourteenth-century Iceland. The author analyses the two dominant poetic modes, eddic and skaldic, giving fresh examples of their various styles and subjects; looks at the prose contexts in which most Old Norse poetry has been preserved; and discusses problems of interpretation that arise because of the poetry's mode of transmission. She is concerned throughout to link indigenous theory with practice, beginning with the pre-Christian ideology of poets as favoured by the god ódinn and concluding with the Christian notion that a plain style best conveys the poet's message. Margaret Clunies Ross is McCaughey Professor of English Language and Early English Literature and Director of the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Sydney.
Download or read book The Poetic Edda written by Paul Acker and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unique collection of essays applies significant critical approaches to the mythological poetry of the Poetic Edda, a principal source for Old Norse cosmography and the legends of Odin, Loki, and Thor. The volume also provides very useful introductions that sketch the critical history of the Eddas. By applying new theoretical approaches (feminist, structuralist, post-structuralist) to each of the major poems, this book yields a variety of powerful and convincing readings. Contributors to the collection are both young scholars and senior figures in the discipline, and are of varying nationalities (American, British, Australian, Scandinavian, and Icelandic), thus ensuring a range of interpretations from different corners of the scholarly community. The new translations included here make available for the first time to English-speaking students the intriguing methodologies that are currently developing in Scandinavia. An essential collection of scholarship for any Old Norse course, The Poetic Edda will also be of interest to scholars of Indo-European myth, as well as those who study the theory of myth.
Download or read book Icelandic Poetry Or The Edda of Saemund written by and published by . This book was released on 1797 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Corpus poeticum boreale Eddic poetry written by Guðbrandur Vigfússon and published by . This book was released on 1883 with total page 716 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Poetic Edda written by Edward Pettit and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2023-03-03 with total page 730 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an edition and translation of one of the most important and celebrated sources of Old Norse-Icelandic mythology and heroic legend, namely the medieval poems now known collectively as the Poetic Edda or Elder Edda. Included are thirty-six texts, which are mostly preserved in medieval manuscripts, especially the thirteenth-century Icelandic codex traditionally known as the Codex Regius of the Poetic Edda. The poems cover diverse subjects, including the creation, destruction and rebirth of the world, the dealings of gods such as Óðinn, Þórr and Loki with giants and each other, and the more intimate, personal tragedies of the hero Sigurðr, his wife Guðrún and the valkyrie Brynhildr. Each poem is provided with an introduction, synopsis and suggestions for further reading. The Old Norse texts are furnished with a textual apparatus recording the manuscript readings behind this edition’s emendations, as well as select variant readings. The accompanying translations, informed by the latest scholarship, are concisely annotated to make them as accessible as possible. As the first open-access, single-volume parallel Old Norse edition and English translation of the Poetic Edda, this book will prove a valuable resource for students and scholars of Old Norse literature. It will also interest those researching other fields of medieval literature (especially Old English and Middle High German), and appeal to a wider general audience drawn to the myths and legends of the Viking Age and subsequent centuries.
Download or read book Revisiting the Poetic Edda written by Paul Acker and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-06-26 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing alive the dramatic poems of Old Norse heroic legend, this new collection offers accessible, ground-breaking and inspiring essays which introduce and analyse the exciting legends of the two doomed Helgis and their valkyrie lovers; the dragon-slayer Sigurðr; Brynhildr the implacable shield-maiden; tragic Guðrún and her children; Attila the Hun (from a Norse perspective!); and greedy King Fróði, whose name lives on in Tolkien’s Frodo. The book provides a comprehensive introduction to the poems for students, taking a number of fresh, theoretically-sophisticated and productive approaches to the poetry and its characters. Contributors bring to bear insights generated by comparative study, speech act and feminist theory, queer theory and psychoanalytic theory (among others) to raise new, probing questions about the heroic poetry and its reception. Each essay is accompanied by up-to-date lists of further reading and a contextualisation of the poems or texts discussed in critical history. Drawing on the latest international studies of the poems in their manuscript context, and written by experts in their individual fields, engaging with the texts in their original language and context, but presented with full translations, this companion volume to The Poetic Edda: Essays on Old Norse Mythology (Routledge, 2002) is accessible to students and illuminating for experts. Essays also examine the afterlife of the heroic poems in Norse legendary saga, late medieval Icelandic poetry, the nineteenth-century operas of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, and the recently published (posthumous) poem by Tolkien, The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún.
Download or read book OLD NORSE POEMS written by Various and published by Abela Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2010-03 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE GROUP of poems offered in this volume comprises practically all the more considerable (non-Skaldic) verse material not in the Edda. Indeed, it has been subtitled "the most important non-skaldic verse not included in the poetic edda." It is a supplement to the Edda and it shows, even better than that remarkable collection, the wealth of independent poetic inventions and forms that flourished in the Scandinavian North before and immediately after the introduction of Christianity, especially when we bear in mind that much has been irretrievably lost. As to the contents of these poems, with respect to the first group of nine, range from the genuinely "heroic," realistic, dialogic-dramatic, earlier lays (such as the Biarkamol) to the more "romantic," legendary, monologic-elegiac, retrospective, later lays (like Hialmar's Death Song); though the lines of demarcation are by no means sharp and, in fact, nearly every poem represents an individual combination of these traits. A very different type of lay is seen in the three contemporary encomiastic poems which celebrate the life and deeds of the (historic) rulers of Norway-the only non-Skaldic efforts of this genre so exceedingly numerous in Old Norse literature. There is no common denominator for the four poems at the end of the volume, except possibly their arch-heathen character. As a finale the Song of the Sun marks the transition from heathen to Christian spheres of thought. Common to all of this material is its unliterary, that is, unbookish, character which is in marked contrast to virtually all of Anglo-Saxon epic literature, influenced as it is, to a greater or lesser degree, by Christian or classical models. That is to say, we deal here with the genuinely native expression of the North. 33% of the net profit will be donated to charities for educational purposes. Yesterday's Books for Tomorrow's Educations"
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.
