Download or read book The End of the World in Scandinavian Mythology written by Anders Hultgård and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-09-19 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The End of the World in Scandinavian Mythology is a detailed study of the Scandinavian myth on the end of the world, the Ragnarök, and its comparative background. The Old Norse texts on Ragnarök, in the first place the 'Prophecy of the Seeress' and the Prose Edda of the Icelander Snorri Sturluson, are well known and much discussed. However, Anders Hultgård suggests that it is worthwhile to reconsider the Ragnarök myth and shed new light on it using new comparative evidence, and presenting texts in translation that otherwise are available only to specialists. The intricate question of Christian influence on Ragnarök is addressed in detail, with the author arriving at the conclusion of an independent pre-Christian myth with the closest analogies in ancient Iran. People in modern society are concerned with the future of our world, and we can see these same fears and hopes expressed in many ancient religions, transformed into myths of the future including both cosmic destruction and cosmic renewal. The Ragnarök myth can be said to be the classical instance of such myths, making it more relevant today than ever before.

Download or read book Rulership in 1st to 14th century Scandinavia written by Dagfinn Skre and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-12-16 with total page 562 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book seeks to revitalise the somewhat stagnant scholarly debate on Germanic rulership in the first millennium AD. A series of comprehensive chapters combines literary evidence on Scandinavia’s polities, kings, and other rulers with archaeological, documentary, toponymical, and linguistic evidence. The picture that emerges is one of surprisingly stable rulership institutions, sites, and myths, while control of them was contested between individuals, dynasties, and polities. While in the early centuries, Scandinavia was integrated in Germanic Europe, profound societal and cultural changes in 6th-century Scandinavia and the Christianisation of Continental and English kingdoms set northern kingship on a different path. The pagan heroic warrior ethos, essential to kingship, was developed and refined; only to recur overseas embodied in 9th–10th-century Vikings. Three chapters on a hitherto unknown masonry royal manor at Avaldsnes in western Norway, excavated 2017, concludes this volume with discussions of the late-medieval peak of Norwegian kingship and it’s eventual downfall in the late 14th century. This book’s discussions and results are relevant to all scholars and students of 1st-millenium Germanic kingship, polities, and societies.

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 445 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 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 Decolonising Medieval Fennoscandia written by Solveig Marie Wang and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-03-20 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The interdisciplinary study investigates the relationship between Norse and Saami peoples in the medieval period and focuses on the multifaceted portrayal of Saami peoples in medieval texts. The investigative analysis is anchored in postcolonial methodologies and argues for the inherent need to decolonise the medieval source-material as well as recent historiography. This is achieved by presenting the historiographic and political background of research into Norse-Saami relations, before introducing an overview of textual sources discussing Saami peoples from the classical period to the late 1400s, an analysis of the textual motifs associated with the Saami in medieval literature (their relevance and prevalence), geo-political affairs, trading relations, personal relations and Saami presence in the south. By using decolonising tools to read Norse-Saami relations in medieval texts, influenced by archaeological material and postcolonial frameworks, the study challenges lingering colonial assumptions about the role of the Saami in Norse society. The current research episteme is re-adjusted to offer alternative readings of Saami characters and emphasis is put on agency, fluidity and the dynamic realities of the Saami medieval pasts.

Download or read book Conquest and Transformation written by Laura Ashe and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 491 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford English Literary History is the new century's definitive account of a rich and diverse literary heritage that stretches back for a millennium and more. This volume explores the vast cultural, literary, social, and political transformations which characterized the period 1000-1350.

Download or read book The Oxford English Literary History written by Laura Ashe and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-15 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford English Literary History is the new century's definitive account of a rich and diverse literary heritage that stretches back for a millennium and more. Each of these thirteen groundbreaking volumes offers a leading scholar's considered assessment of the authors, works, cultural traditions, events, and ideas that shaped the literary voices of their age. The series will enlighten and inspire not only everyone studying, teaching, and researching in English Literature, but all serious readers. This book describes and seeks to explain the vast cultural, literary, social, and political transformations which characterized the period 1000-1350. Change can be perceived everywhere at this time. Theology saw the focus shift from God the Father to the suffering Christ, while religious experience became ever more highly charged with emotional affectivity and physical devotion. A new philosophy of interiority turned attention inward, to the exploration of self, and the practice of confession expressed that interior reality with unprecedented importance. The old understanding of penitence as a whole and unrepeatable event, a second baptism, was replaced by a new allowance for repeated repentance and penance, and the possibility of continued purgation of sins after death. The concept of love moved centre stage: in Christ's love as a new explanation for the Passion; in the love of God as the only means of governing the self; and in the appearance of narrative fiction, where heterosexual love was suddenly represented as the goal of secular life. In this mode of writing further emerged the figure of the individual, a unique protagonist bound in social and ethical relation with others; from this came a profound recalibration of moral agency, with reference not only to God but to society. More generally, the social and ethical status of secular lives was drastically elevated by the creation and celebration of courtly and chivalric ideals. In England the ideal of kingship was forged and reforged over these centuries, in intimate relation with native ideals of counsel and consent, bound by the law. In the aftermath of Magna Carta, and as parliament grew in reach and importance, a politics of the public sphere emerged, with a literature to match. These vast transformations have long been observed and documented in their separate fields. The Oxford English Literary History: Volume 1: 1000-1350: Conquest and Transformation offers an account of these changes by which they are all connected, and explicable in terms of one another.

Download or read book Tracing the Jerusalem Code written by Kristin B. Aavitsland and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-04-19 with total page 805 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the aim to write the history of Christianity in Scandinavia with Jerusalem as a lens, this book investigates the image – or rather the imagination – of Jerusalem in the religious, political, and artistic cultures of Scandinavia through most of the second millennium. Jerusalem is conceived as a code to Christian cultures in Scandinavia. The first volume is dealing with the different notions of Jerusalem in the Middle Ages. Tracing the Jerusalem Code in three volumes Volume 1: The Holy City Christian Cultures in Medieval Scandinavia (ca. 1100–1536) Volume 2: The Chosen People Christian Cultures in Early Modern Scandinavia (1536–ca. 1750) Volume 3: The Promised Land Christian Cultures in Modern Scandinavia (ca. 1750–ca. 1920)

Download or read book Ancestor Worship and the Elite in Late Iron Age Scandinavia written by Triin Laidoner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-01-14 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ancestor worship is often assumed by contemporary European audiences to be an outdated and primitive tradition with little relevance to our societies, past and present. This book questions that assumption and seeks to determine whether ancestor ideology was an integral part of religion in Viking Age and early medieval Scandinavia. The concept is examined from a broad socio-anthropological perspective, which is used to structure a set of case studies which analyse the cults of specific individuals in Old Norse literature. The situation of gods in Old Norse religion has been almost exclusively addressed in isolation from these socio-anthropological perspectives. The public gravemound cults of deceased rulers are discussed conventionally as cases of sacral kingship, and, more recently, religious ruler ideology; both are seen as having divine associations in Old Norse scholarship. Building on the anthropological framework, this study introduces the concept of ‘superior ancestors’, employed in social anthropology to denote a form of political ancestor worship used to regulate social structure deliberately. It suggests that Old Norse ruler ideology was based on conventional and widely recognised religious practices revolving around kinship and ancestors and that the gods were perceived as human ancestors belonging to elite families.

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 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Volumes 1 and 2 in the SKALD series present the large and important body of skaldic poetry preserved in sagas about the kings of Norway and other Scandinavian rulers. Vol. 1 is dedicated mainly to court poetry in praise of rulers from the legendary Yngling kings to Olafr Haraldsson (St. Olav) and Knutr Sveinsson (Cnut the Great). Alongside formal commemoration of raids and battles there are dialogues with valkyries, lively travelogue, accounts of miracles, and freestanding stanzas capturing frustrated love and moments of humour. This volume also contains the General Introduction to the series.

Download or read book Women in Old Norse Literature written by J. Friðriksdóttir and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-03-12 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Old Norse texts offer different ideas about what it is to be female, presenting women in diverse social and economic positions. This book analyzes female characters in medieval Icelandic saga literature, and demonstrates how they engaged with some of the most contested values of the period, revealing the anxieties of both the authors and audiences.

Download or read book Crimsoning the Eagle s Claw written by Ro̜gnvaldr Kali Kolsson (Earl of Orkney) and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A genuinely unique European treasure, this volume bristles with all 33 of Rognvaldr's verses from the Orkneyinga Saga. While full of highly stylised, often grotesque images, the poems convey the skill, vigour and daring of the original.

Download or read book King Harald s Saga written by Snorri Sturluson and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2005-04-28 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This compelling Icelandic history describes the life of King Harald Hardradi, from his battles across Europe and Russia to his final assault on England in 1066, less than three weeks before the invasion of William the Conqueror. It was a battle that led to his death and marked the end of an era in which Europe had been dominated by the threat of Scandinavian forces. Despite England's triumph, it also played a crucial part in fatally weakening the English army immediately prior to the Norman Conquest, changing the course of history. Taken from the Heimskringla - Snorri Sturluson's complete account of Norway from prehistoric times to 1177 - this is a brilliantly human depiction of the turbulent life and savage death of the last great Norse warrior-king.

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 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 Viking Language 1 written by Jesse L. Byock and published by Createspace Independent Pub. This book was released on 2013 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An introduction to Old Norse, runes, Icelandic sagas, and the culture of the Vikings. The 15 graded lessons include vocabulary and grammar exercises, 35 readings, pronunciation, 15 maps, 45 illustrations, and 180 exercises. Journey through Viking Age Denmark, Iceland, Greenland, Norway, Sweden, Britain, Russia, and Byzantium with original Old Norse readings of Vikings, Norse mythology, heroes, sacred kingship, blood feuds, and daily life.

Download or read book Approaches to the Medieval Self written by Stefka G. Eriksen and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-09-21 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The main aim of this book is to discuss various modes of studying and defining the medieval self, based on a wide span of sources from medieval Western Scandinavia, c. 800-1500, such as archeological evidence, architecture and art, documents, literature, and runic inscriptions. The book engages with major theoretical discussions within the humanities and social sciences, such as cultural theory, practice theory, and cognitive theory. The authors investigate how the various approaches to the self influence our own scholarly mindsets and horizons, and how they condition what aspects of the medieval self are 'visible' to us. Utilizing this insight, we aim to propose a more syncretic approach towards the medieval self, not in order to substitute excellent models already in existence, but in order to foreground the flexibility and the complementarity of the current theories, when these are seen in relationship to each other. The self and how it relates to its surrounding world and history is a main concern of humanities and social sciences. Focusing on the theoretical and methodological flexibility when approaching the medieval self has the potential to raise our awareness of our own position and agency in various social spaces today.