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"For centuries, the literary heritage preserved in Icelandic medieval manuscripts has played a vital role in the self-image of the Icelandic nation. From the late eighteenth century, Icelandic scholars managed to study and publish this material on their own terms. Throughout the long nineteenth century, they also started to engage in philological work. This coincided with an increasing awareness among Icelanders of a separate nationality and their growing demand for autonomy. What was the connection between these two developments? The twelve chapters in this book explore the interplay between various national discourses that characterised the scholarly reception of Icelandic heritage during the period. Contributors are: Alderik H. Blom, Clarence E. Glad, Matthew James Driscoll, Gylfi Gunnlaugsson, Simon Halink, Hjalti Snær Ægisson, Jon Gunnar Jørgensen, Annette Lassen, and Ragnheiður Mósesdóttir."--
This book presents a comprehensive, contrastive account of the phonological structures and characteristics of Icelandic and Faroese. It is written for Nordic linguists and theoretical phonologists interested in what the languages reveal about phonological structure and phonological change and the relation between morphology, phonology, and phonetics. The book is divided into five parts. In the first Professor Árnason provides the theoretical and historical context of his investigation. Icelandic and Faroese originate from the West-Scandinavian or Norse spoken in Norway, Iceland and part of the Scottish Isles at the end of the Viking Age. The modern spoken languages are barely intelligible t...
While Iceland is the second largest inhabited island in Europe, with only 313,000 inhabitants in 2007, the Icelanders form one of the smallest independent nations in the world. Around two-thirds of the population lives in the capital, Reykjavík, and its suburbs, while the rest is spread around the inhabitable area of the country. Until fairly recently the Icelandic nation was unusually homogeneous, both in cultural and religious terms; in 1981, around 98 percent of the nation was born in Iceland and 96 percent belonged to the Lutheran state church or other Lutheran religious sects. In 2007, these numbers were down to 89 and 86 percent respectively, reflecting the rapidly growing multicultural nature of Icelandic society. The A to Z of Iceland traces Iceland's history and provides a compass for the direction the country is heading. This is done through its chronology, introductory essays, appendixes, map, bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on important persons, places, events, and institutions and significant political, economic, social, and cultural aspects.
This is the second of a three-volume comprehensive reference work on “Gender across Languages”, which provides systematic descriptions of various categories of gender (grammatical, lexical, referential, social) in 30 languages of diverse genetic, typological and socio-cultural backgrounds. Among the issues discussed for each language are the following: What are the structural properties of the language that have an impact on the relations between language and gender? What are the consequences for areas such as agreement, pronominalisation and word-formation? How is specification of and abstraction from (referential) gender achieved in a language? Is empirical evidence available for the a...
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.