Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
A Companion to Saxo Grammaticus
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.
The Legendary Saga as a Medium of Cultural Memory
This book examines the representation and historical significance of the legendary Scandinavian past as it is depicted in two late medieval Icelandic saga manuscripts: AM 589a–f 4to and AM 586 4to. It situates the manuscripts within their literary, media, and historical contexts to read the legendary sagas (or fornaldarsögur) within them as works of historical writing. The qualities about them that are often used to deny them the label of ‘history ́ — their proximity to romance and ‘folklore’, and their playfully self-conscious narration — are reinterpreted as conscious attempts to reconfigure cultural memory to suit the needs of the manuscripts’ fifteenth-century patrons. Th...
The Abyss as a Concept for Cultural Theory
This edited volume provides a comparative exploration of corresponding concepts of the abyss in various languages and cultures. Fourteen chapters investigate ancient cultures such as Hebrew, Ancient Greek, Sanskrit and Old Norse, but also more contemporary American, African and Asian languages, such as Hawaiian, Umbundu, Chinese and Khasi, as well as European languages, such as German, Estonian, English, French, Polish and Russian. The book combines ethnolinguistics with history of ideas, literature, folklore, religion and translation, based on the conviction that language and our linguistic concepts give evidence of and shape our ideas about the world and about ourselves.
The Legendary Sagas
The present collection of articles about the Icelandic fornaldarsögur, fornaldarsögur Norðurlanda, comprises the third and final of those anthologies concerning these texts edited by Ármann Jakobsson, Annette Lassen and Agneta Ney. The first volume, Fornaldarsagornas struktur och ideologi: Handlingar från ett symposium i Uppsala 31.8–2.9 2001, was published in Uppsala in 2003. The second volume, Fornaldarsagaerne, myter og virkelighed: studier i de oldislandske fornaldarsögur Norðurlanda, appeared in Copenhagen in 2009. The first volume includes an extensive bibliography of the fornaldarsögur, the second a somewhat substantial addendum to that bibliography while this was not deemed necessary for this third volume.While the earlier volumes have focused upon structure and ideology, myth and reality, the present volume focuses on the origin and development of the fornaldarsögur Norðurlanda.
The Routledge Research Companion to the Medieval Icelandic Sagas
The last fifty years have seen a significant change in the focus of saga studies, from a preoccupation with origins and development to a renewed interest in other topics, such as the nature of the sagas and their value as sources to medieval ideologies and mentalities. The Routledge Research Companion to the Medieval Icelandic Sagas presents a detailed interdisciplinary examination of saga scholarship over the last fifty years, sometimes juxtaposing it with earlier views and examining the sagas both as works of art and as source materials. This volume will be of interest to Old Norse and medieval Scandinavian scholars and accessible to medievalists in general.
The Prosimetrum of the Íslendingasögur
Verse quotation is intrinsic to the literary style of the medieval Icelandic corpus of Íslendingasögur (sagas of Icelanders), one of the most important vernacular literary genres of the European Middle Ages. The essays collected in this volume demonstrate that the combination of prose and verse constitutes a distinctive literary aesthetic, and that in the medieval Icelandic literary tradition, it was not a question of choosing between prose and verse as the vehicle for stories about the foundational generations of settlers on the island, but of combining both modes to forge the unique literary form of the saga. Verse quotation has always been recognised as an important aspect of the Íslen...
Odin’s Ways
This book is about the Old Norse god Odin. It includes references to all occurrences of Odin in the Old Norse/Icelandic texts, including Saxo’s Gesta Danorum, the eddic poems, Snorri’s Edda, and Ynglinga saga and analyses the high medieval reception and literary representations of Odin rather than the religious character of the god. This is the only existing study of Odin in all the Old Norse/Icelandic texts and applies a contextual method: the different guises of Odin are studied on the basis of the various textual contexts and on their background in the literary and Christian intellectual milieu of the time. Contrary to existing studies, this method is non-reductive in that it does not aim at providing a synthesis about Odin’s original nature on the basis of the differing textual uses of Odin in the Middle Ages. The book argues that the perceived complexity of Odin, often highlighted in research, is first and foremost a function of the complex textual material spanning a wide variety of genres each with its particular literary conventions and of the reception of Odin in early modern and modern mythological studies.
Revisiting the Poetic Edda
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...
Geographies of Knowledge and Imagination in 19th Century Philological Research on Northern Europe
Comparative philology was one of the most prolific fields of knowledge in the humanities during the 19th century. Based on the discovery of the Indo-European language family, it seemed to admit the reconstruction of a common history of European languages, and even mythologies, literatures, and people. However, it also represented a way to establish geographies of belonging and difference in the context of 19th century nation-building and identity politics. In spite of a widely acknowledged consensus about the principles and methods of comparative philology, the results depended on local conditions and practices. If Scandinavians were considered to be Germanic or not, for example, was up to i...
Kinship in Old Norse Myth and Legend
This wide-ranging study offers a new understanding of Old Norse kinship in which the individual self was expanded to encompass its kin. Family interactions in Old Norse myth and legend were often fraught, competitive, even violent as well as loving, protective and supportive. Focusing particularly on intergenerational relationships in the legendary sagas, the Poetic Edda and Snorra Edda, this book reveals not only why ambivalence was so characteristic of mythic-heroic kinship relations but how they were able to endure, even thrive, in spite of such pressures. Close attention is paid to the way gender inflects the dynamic between parents and their children and to the patronymic naming system ...
