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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.
THE "LITTLE ICE AGE": LOCAL AND GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES P. D. JONES and K. R. BRIFFA Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, Norwich, NR4 7TJ, UK. This volume of Climatic Change is devoted to the study of the climate of the last 1000 years, with a major emphasis on the last few centuries. The timespan encompasses what has been referred to as the "Little Ice Age" (Bradley, 1992). This term was originally coined by glaciologists, with reference to the most recent major glacial advance of the Holocene (Bradley and Jones, 1993). Although other such advances in different parts of the world may not have been synchronous, the term "Little Ice Age" has come to be associated with the period of a widespread foreward movement of European glaciers between about 14 50 to 1850, as well as with relatively cooler temperatures. The issue of whether or not this concept is appropriate, is a major theme of many of the papers included in this volume.
The image of a giant sword melting stands at the structural and thematic heart of the Old English heroic poem Beowulf. This meticulously researched book investigates the nature and significance of this golden-hilted weapon and its likely relatives within Beowulf and beyond, drawing on the fields of Old English and Old Norse language and literature, liturgy, archaeology, astronomy, folklore and comparative mythology. In Part I, Pettit explores the complex of connotations surrounding this image (from icicles to candles and crosses) by examining a range of medieval sources, and argues that the giant sword may function as a visual motif in which pre-Christian Germanic concepts and prominent Chri...
This accessible study of Northern European shamanistic practice, or seidr, explores the way in which the ancient Norse belief systems evoked in the Icelandic Sagas and Eddas have been rediscovered and reinvented by groups in Europe and North America. The book examines the phenomenon of altered consciousness and the interactions of seid-workers or shamanic practitioners with their spirit worlds. Written by a follower of seidr, it investigates new communities involved in a postmodern quest for spiritual meaning.
This volume contains a reprint of the English translation (1843) by Sir George Webbe Dasent of Rask s "Anvising till Islandskan eller Nordiska Fornspraket" (1818). This re-edition, with an added bio-bibliography of Rask, should enable the linguist of today to obtain a fairly rounded picture of this important 19th-century scholar who, together with Bopp and Grimm, has justly been ranked among the founding fathers of the comparative-historical study of Indo-European languages.Rasmus Kristian Rask (1787 1832) did not occupy himself with historical linguistics alone as a comparativist, but also with language as a system based on a notion of structure comprised of three key ideas: the idea of wholeness, the idea of transformation (derivation and composition), and the idea of self-regulation. He formulated theoretical and practical premises for the composition of grammars, and in this he was far ahead of his time and in closer proximity to the linguistic concerns and problems of our era. From both theoretical and pedagogical points of view, Rask s grammar of Icelandic remains a most remarkable work.