Download or read book The Medieval Icelandic Saga and Oral Tradition written by Gísli Sigurðsson and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work explores the role of orality in shaping and evaluating medieval Icelandic literature. Applying field studies of oral cultures in modern times to this distinguished medieval literature, G sli Sigur sson asks how it would alter our reading of medieval Icelandic sagas if it were assumed they had grown out of a tradition of oral storytelling, similar to that observed in living cultures. Sigur sson examines how orally trained lawspeakers regarded the emergent written culture, especially in light of the fact that the writing down of the law in the early twelfth century undermined their social status. Part II considers characters, genealogies, and events common to several sagas from the east of Iceland between which a written link cannot be established. Part III explores the immanent or mental map provided to the listening audience of the location of Vinland by the sagas about the Vinland voyages. Finally, this volume focuses on how accepted foundations for research on medieval texts are affected if an underlying oral tradition (of the kind we know from the modern field work) is assumed as part of their cultural background. This point is emphasized through the examination of parallel passages from two sagas and from mythological overlays in an otherwise secular text.
Download or read book The Medieval Icelandic Saga and Oral Tradition written by Gísli Sigurðsson and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work explores the role of orality in shaping and evaluating medieval Icelandic literature. Applying field studies of oral cultures in modern times to this distinguished medieval literature, G sli Sigur sson asks how it would alter our reading of medieval Icelandic sagas if it were assumed they had grown out of a tradition of oral storytelling, similar to that observed in living cultures. Sigur sson examines how orally trained lawspeakers regarded the emergent written culture, especially in light of the fact that the writing down of the law in the early twelfth century undermined their social status. Part II considers characters, genealogies, and events common to several sagas from the east of Iceland between which a written link cannot be established. Part III explores the immanent or mental map provided to the listening audience of the location of Vinland by the sagas about the Vinland voyages. Finally, this volume focuses on how accepted foundations for research on medieval texts are affected if an underlying oral tradition (of the kind we know from the modern field work) is assumed as part of their cultural background. This point is emphasized through the examination of parallel passages from two sagas and from mythological overlays in an otherwise secular text.
Download or read book Old Icelandic Literature and Society written by Margaret Clunies Ross and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000-09-21 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first comprehensive account of Old Icelandic literature set within its social and cultural context.
Download or read book The Growth of the Medieval Icelandic Sagas 1180 1280 written by Theodore Murdock Andersson and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Andersson introduces readers to the development of the Icelandic sagas between 1180 and 1280, a crucial period that witnessed a gradual shift of emphasis from tales of adventure and personal distinction to the analysis of politics and history.
Download or read book An Introduction to the Sagas of Icelanders written by CARL. PHELPSTEAD and published by . This book was released on 2024-05-14 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combining an accessible approach with innovative scholarship, Carl Phelpstead draws on historical context, contemporary theory, and close reading to deepen our understanding of Icelandic saga narratives about the island's early history.
Download or read book Comic Sagas and Tales from Iceland written by and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2013-03-07 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comic Sagas and Tales brings together the very finest Icelandic stories from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, a time of civil unrest and social upheaval. With feuding families and moments of grotesque violence, the sagas see such classic mythological figures as murdered fathers, disguised beggars, corrupt chieftains and avenging sons do battle with axes, words and cunning. The tales, meanwhile, follow heroes and comical fools through dreams, voyages and religious conversions in medieval Iceland and beyond. Shaped by Iceland's oral culture and their conversion to Christianity, these stories are works of ironic humour and stylistic innovation.
Download or read book Laxdaela Saga written by Magnus Magnusson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1969 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written around 1245 by an unknown author, the Laxdaela Saga is an extraordinary tale of conflicting kinships and passionate love, and one of the most compelling works of Icelandic literature. Covering 150 years in the lives of the inhabitants of the community of Laxriverdale, the saga focuses primarily upon the story of Gudrun Osvif's-daughter: a proud, beautiful, vain and desirable figure, who is forced into an unhappy marriage and destroys the only man she has truly loved – her husband's best friend. A moving tale of murder and sacrifice, romance and regret, the Laxdaela Saga is also a fascinating insight into an era of radical change – a time when the Age of Chivalry was at its fullest flower in continental Europe, and the Christian faith was making its impact felt upon the Viking world.
Download or read book Viking Myths and Sagas written by Rosalind Kerven and published by Chartwell Books. This book was released on 2017-09-15 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written in consultation with leading academics.
Download or read book A Companion to Old Norse Icelandic Literature and Culture written by Rory McTurk and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-03-11 with total page 584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This major survey of Old Norse-Icelandic literature and culturedemonstrates the remarkable continuity of Icelandic language andculture from medieval to modern times. Comprises 29 chapters written by leading scholars in thefield Reflects current debates among Old Norse-Icelandicscholars Pays attention to previously neglected areas of study, such asthe sagas of Icelandic bishops and the fantasy sagas Looks at the ways Old Norse-Icelandic literature is used bymodern writers, artists and film directors, both within and outsideScandinavia Sets Old Norse-Icelandic language and literature in its widercultural context
Download or read book Icelanders in the Viking Age written by William R. Short and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2010-03-15 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Sagas of Icelanders are enduring stories from Viking-age Iceland filled with love and romance, battles and feuds, tragedy and comedy. Yet these tales are little read today, even by lovers of literature. The culture and history of the people depicted in the Sagas are often unfamiliar to the modern reader, though the audience for whom the tales were intended would have had an intimate understanding of the material. This text introduces the modern reader to the daily lives and material culture of the Vikings. Topics covered include religion, housing, social customs, the settlement of disputes, and the early history of Iceland. Issues of dispute among scholars, such as the nature of settlement and the division of land, are addressed in the text.
Download or read book The Cambridge Introduction to the Old Norse Icelandic Saga written by Margaret Clunies Ross and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-10-28 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The medieval Norse-Icelandic saga is one of the most important European vernacular literary genres of the Middle Ages. This Introduction to the saga genre outlines its origins and development, its literary character, its material existence in manuscripts and printed editions, and its changing reception from the Middle Ages to the present time. Its multiple sub-genres - including family sagas, mythical-heroic sagas and sagas of knights - are described and discussed in detail, and the world of medieval Icelanders is powerfully evoked. The first general study of the Old Norse-Icelandic saga to be written in English for some decades, the Introduction is based on up-to-date scholarship and engages with current debates in the field. With suggestions for further reading, detailed information about the Icelandic literary canon, and a map of medieval Iceland, this book is aimed at students of medieval literature and assumes no prior knowledge of Scandinavian languages.
Download or read book The Saga of Olaf Tryggvason written by Oddr Snorrason and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-31 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Oddr Snorrason, a Benedictine monk in northern Iceland in the late twelfth century, composed a landmark Latin biography of the legendary Norwegian king Olaf Tryggvason (died 1000 C.E.). This biography was soon translated into Icelandic, and the translation (though not the Latin original) is preserved in two somewhat differing versions and a small fragment of a third. The Saga of Olaf Tryggvason is the first English translation of this text, augmented by an introduction and notes to guide the reader. There is a strong possibility that Oddr's biography was the first full-length saga of the Icelandic Middle Ages. It ushered in a century of saga writing that assured Iceland a unique place in medieval literature and in the history of prose writing. Aside from being a harbinger of the saga tradition, and indeed of the modern novel, The Saga of Olaf Tryggvason has its own literary merits, including an epic description of the great Battle of Svoldr, in which King Olaf succumbed. In significant ways the narrative of this battle anticipates the mature style of the classical sagas in the thirteenth century.
Download or read book Writing the Oral Tradition written by Mark Amodio and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is a splendid, rewarding book destined to reshape critical thinking about medieval poetry in English. Amodio combines groundbreaking theory with a deep, wide-ranging command of relevant scholarship to offer a uniquely inclusive perspective on an enormous and disparate collection of Old and Middle English poetry." --John Miles Foley, University of Missouri, Columbia "This is a well-conceived, well-structured, and well-written book that fills a significant gap in current scholarly discourse. Amodio is extremely well-informed about current oral theory, and presents a beautifully integrated thesis. This clear-sighted and provocative book both promises and delivers much." --Andy Orchard, University of Toronto Mark Amodio's book focuses on the influence of the oral tradition on written vernacular verse produced in England from the fifth to the fifteenth century. His primary aim is to explore how a living tradition articulated only through the public, performance voices of pre-literate singers came to find expression through the pens of private, literate authors. Amodio argues that the expressive economy of oral poetics survives in written texts because, throughout the Middle Ages, literacy and orality were interdependent, not competing, cultural forces. After delving into the background of the medieval oral-literate matrix, Writing the Oral Tradition develops a model of non-performative oral poetics that is a central, perhaps defining, component of Old English vernacular verse. Following the Norman Conquest, oral poetics lost its central position and became one of many ways to articulate poetry. Contrary to many scholars, Amodio argues that oral poetics did not disappear but survived well into the post-Conquest period. It influenced the composition of Middle English verse texts produced from the twelfth to the fourteenth century because it offered poets an affectively powerful and economical way to articulate traditional meanings. Indeed, fragments of oral poetics are discoverable in contemporary prose, poetics, and film as they continue to faithfully emit their traditional meanings.
Download or read book Gisli Sursson s Saga and the Saga of the People of Eyri written by and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2003-09-25 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These sagas recount fierce feuds in which honour is fought for, sacrifice is demanded, and blood is shed. The fate of the characters at the centre of each saga, however, is very different. Gisli is a traditional Viking-age hero who is determined to exact revenge at any cost and whose death is tragic when it comes. In contrast his nephew, Snorri, represents a new generation and acts to strengthen the new social order. Taken together these sagas reveal the richness and variety of the saga tradition.
Download or read book The Book of Settlements written by and published by Univ. of Manitoba Press. This book was released on 2007-01-15 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Iceland was the last country in Europe to become inhabited, and we know more about the beginnings and early history of Icelandic society than we do of any other in the Old World. This world was vividly recounted in The Book of Settlements, first compiled by the first Icelandic historians in the thirteenth century. It describes in detail individuals and daily life during the Icelandic Age of Settlement.
Download or read book Dating the Sagas written by Else Mundal and published by Museum Tusculanum Press. This book was released on 2013-05-15 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Icelandic genre known as the Family Sagas, Sagas of Icelanders, or Sagas about early Icelanders consists of anonymous works, and the genre, as well as the individual sagas, are therefore difficult to date. This literature is also difficult to date since sagas are stories that were transformed both during oral and scribal transmission. The authors of the present book address methodological problems and discuss the dating of individual sagas and the genre itself. Focusing their attention on an important period in the history of Icelandic literature, the authors are particularly concerned with the several new written genres which developed in Iceland in the thirteenth century, of which the Sagas about early Icelanders is regarded as the most important. The articles gathered in this volume show that the dating of the beginning of this written genre and of individual sagas belonging to it is crucial to the understanding of the development of literary history in thirteenth-century Iceland.
Else Mundal is professor of Old Norse Philology at the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Bergen. She has published widely on Old Norse saga literature, Eddic and skaldic poetry, on Old Norse mythology, women in Old Norse society, as well as on the relationship between the oral and the written literature and the impact of Christianization on the Old Norse culture.
Download or read book The Bookish Riddaras gur written by Geraldine Barnes and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book deals with a fascinating, but largely neglected, area of late medieval Icelandic literature: the indigenous prose romances, generally known as riddarasogur (i.e. sagas of knights), a group of some 30 sagas composed in Iceland from the late 13th or early 14th century onwards. These sagas take place in an exotic (non-Scandinavian), vaguely chivalric, milieu and are characterized by the extensive use of foreign motifs and a strong supernatural or fabulous element. Although the riddarasogur are clearly modeled on continental chivalric romances and are influenced by the 'translated' riddarasogur (in terms of subject matter, style, and ethos), that debt tends to be limited largely to the surface attributes of romance - typically, princes on quests in exotic foreign lands which ultimately bring material rewards, noble brides, and the acquisition of new kingdoms. Contrary to European chivalric romance, however, the Icelandic riddarasogur manifest a substantial debt to medieval encyclopedic and historiographical traditions. One effect of this is to bring an element of 'biculturalism' to the textual landscapes of the riddarasogur, which suggests that their authors, and, by implication, their audiences, were familiar with both learned tradition and traditional lore, and accustomed to moving back and forth between them in creative literary composition. The author, Geraldine Barnes, has written extensively on the riddarasogur throughout her long career. The book represents the culmination of Barnes's work in this area and presents an interesting 'take' on the riddarasogur, focusing on their learned or 'bookish' elements. (Series: The Viking Collection: Studies in Northern Civilization - Vol. 21)
