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.
Bad Boys and Wicked Women
This volume assembles 13 essays as the result of a workshop for international doctoral and post-doctoral researchers in Old Norse studies, which was held at the Institute for Nordic Philology at LMU in Munich in December 2015. The contributions’ focus lies on different aspects of ›bad‹ or ›evil‹ characters in saga literature, and they give testimony to the broad literary variety such figures display in Old Norse texts. The “Antagonists and Troublemakers in Old Norse Literature” are here explored in their diversity, ranging from their literary psychology to their characteristics which often challenge gender norms. The contributions discuss the narrative strategies of presenting these characters to the audience, both positively and negatively. Furthermore, they analyse how the central paradox of evil and its dependence on context is realised in various ways in Old Norse literature.
Unwanted
The 9 essays collected in this volume are the result of a workshop for international doctoral and postdoctoral researchers in Old Norse-Icelandic Saga Studies held at the Institute for Nordic Philology (LMU) in Munich in December 2018. The contributors focus on ›unwanted‹, illicit, neglected, and marginalised elements in saga literature and research on it. The chapters cover a wide range of intra-textual phenomena, narrative strategies, and understudied aspects of individual texts and subgenres. The analyses demonstrate the importance of deviance and transgression as literary characteristics of saga narration, as well as the discursive parameters that have been dominant in Saga Studies. The aim of this collection is to highlight the productiveness of developing modified methodological approaches to the sagas and their study, with a starting point in narratological considerations.
Cultural Contacts and Cultural Identity
This collection of essays by researchers from a wide area of fields, among them classical and modern literature, archeology, philosophy, linguistics, and social sciences, focusses on the theme of a continued interaction between culture and identity as well as the contact between people of different cultural backgrounds. This multilingual volume compiles essays in English and German.
Iceland and the Immrama: An Enquiry into Irish Influence on Old Norse-Icelandic Voyage Literature
The question of the extent of Gaelic influence on medieval Icelandic literature and culture has fascinated scholars for many years, especially the possible relationship between Irish voyage literature and Icelandic narratives concerning journeys to the Otherworld. This book provides a fresh examination and reappraisal of the topic. It compares the Irish [i]immrama[/i] ‘voyages’, including the greatly influential Hiberno-Latin text [i]Navigatio Sancti Brendani[/i] ‘The Voyage of Saint Brendan’, and [i]echtrai[/i] ‘otherworld adventures’ with the Icelandic [i]fornaldarsögur[/i] and related material, such as the voyages of Torkillus in Saxo’s [i]Gesta Danorum[/i]. It also assesses stories about Hvítramannaland, touches on similarities in folk narratives and examines the influence of Classical and Christian literature on the tales. In conclusion, the book makes proposals to account for the parallels and differences between the two traditions and is accompanied by an extensive bibliography and several indices.
Wizards and Words
This work presents an outline of the Old Norse vocabulary associated with magic and its practicioners. The research is focused on the individual words’ evaluative aspect and on their function within the texts, as well as on the narrative roles of magic as a literary motif and as a cultural concept. The literary motif of magic plays a significant role as a narrative device that enables the construction of multiple layers of meaning in the texts. The cultural concept of magic contributes to the conceptualization of various social and psychological aspects, such as the transformations of political power, gender roles, the transgression of norms, irrational impulses, and diverse forms of otherness.
Fast Goes the Fleeting Time: The Miscellaneous Concepts of Time in Different Old Norse Genres and their Causes
This work is concerned with time reckoning and perception in Old Norse culture. Based on an analysis of various prose and poetic works, the author reconstructs the native images of time, as well as their changes in relation to social development, namely the arrival of Christianity and feudalism to the North. The primary sources are divided into three groups. The first group comprises works that contain traces of the original domestic understanding of time, the „Poetic Edda“, „Snorri’s Edda“, legendary and family sagas. The second group includes different types of texts, all of which adopt foreign concepts of time that spread to Iceland especially through various learned treatises and the influence of the Church. Lastly, it is examined how foreign time reckoning and perception affected the temporal structure of kings’ and bishops’ sagas included in the third group of sources.
Masculinities in Old Norse Literature
Compared to other areas of medieval literature, the question of masculinity in Old Norse-Icelandic literature has been understudied. This is a neglect which this volume aims to rectify. The essays collected here introduce and analyse a spectrum of masculinities, from the sagas of Icelanders, contemporary sagas, kings' sagas, legendary sagas, chivalric sagas, bishops' sagas, and eddic and skaldic verse, producing a broad and multifaceted understanding of what it means to be masculine in Old Norse-Icelandic texts. A critical introduction places the essays in their scholarly context, providing the reader with a concise orientation in gender studies and the study of masculinities in Old Norse-Ic...
Dreaming of a Glacier
Snæfellsjökull is one of Iceland’s most famous volcanoes. It is there that Jules Verne located the entrance to the centre of the earth; it is the abode of a medieval saga hero and the location of one of Halldór Laxness’s novels. Travellers, painters, poets, and film-makers have been drawn to it in equal measure – while at the same time and against all expectations, others seem unfazed: as famous as the mountain is on a national and international stage, local folklore and medieval historiography have amazingly little interest in it. Clearly, Snæfellsjökull is not the same to everyone. This volume presents a survey of the place of Snæfellsjökull in the Icelandic and European imagination. It adapts the paradigm of geocriticism, which shifts the focus of the scholarly investigation from the work of individual authors to the multitude of views that different authors, artists, and practitioners have on a single place. The results of the perambulation of Snæfellsjökull presented here show that both its cultural and literary history, as well as the paradigm of geocriticism, open up broad vistas that amply repay the effort necessary to tackle this mountain.
Verheißung und Verderben
Der prophetische Traum ist ein Motiv, das in der gesamten mittelalterlichen Literatur weit verbreitet ist, in der altnordischen Sagaliteratur allerdings in besonders hoher Frequenz und einzigartiger Ausprägung begegnet. Der vorliegende Band nähert sich dem Phänomen des Traums aus verschiedenen Blickwinkeln an, indem die einzelnen Trauminhalte, Symbole und Figuren ebenso untersucht werden wie die narrativen Strukturen, in die diese Traumerzählungen eingebunden sind. Gleichzeitig sind die Träume nicht nur textintern von Bedeutung, sondern dienen auch als religions- und mentalitätsgeschichtlicher Spiegel des skandinavischen Hochmittelalters, möglicherweise können sie sogar als Reflexe der wikingerzeitlichen Vorstellungswelt betrachtet werden.
Literatur als Spektakel
Isländische Ritter- und Abenteuersagas zeichnen das Bild einer imaginären Vorzeit, die geprägt ist von gewaltigen Schlachten, in denen riesenhafte Helden gegen Widersacher streiten, die grotesk überzeichnet scheinen. Was dem heutigen Leser als freiwillig oder unfreiwillig komische Übertreibung anmutet, nimmt sich vor dem Hintergrund mittelalterlicher Welt- und Vergangenheitskonstruktionen, einer Epoche, in der die Relikte von Sauriern als „Riesenknochen“ zu interpretieren waren, ungleich glaubwürdiger aus. Dem Rezipienten im spätmittelalterlichen Island bot dies in räumliche wie zeitliche Ferne projizierte Spektakel der Körper, obgleich es in erster Linie dem Vergnügen dient, zugleich mehr als das: Glaubhafte – oder zumindest „geglaubte“ – Schilderungen von den Wundern der Vorzeit, im Dienste der Unterhaltung.
