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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.
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.
Adam of Bremen’s Gesta Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae Pontificum
Adam of Bremen’s Gesta Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae Pontificum is one of the most important accounts documenting the history, geography and ethnology of Northern and Central-Eastern Europe in the period between the ninth and eleventh centuries. Its author, a canon of the archdiocese of Hamburg-Bremen, remains an almost anonymous figure but his text is an essential source for the study of the early medieval Baltic. However, despite its undisputed status, past scholarship has tended to treat Adam of Bremen’s account as, on the one hand, an historically accurate document, or, alternatively, a literary artefact containing few, if any, reliable historical facts. The studies collected in this volume investigate the origins and context of the Gesta and will enable researchers to better understand and evaluate the historical veracity of the text.
Openness in Medieval Europe
This volume challenges the persistent association of the Middle Ages with closure and fixity. Bringing together a range of disciplines and perspectives, it identifies and uncovers forms of openness which are often obscured by modern assumptions, and demonstrates how they coexist with, or even depend upon, enclosure and containment in paradoxical and unexpected ways. Explored through notions such as porosity, vulnerability, exposure, unfinishedness, and inclusivity, openness turns out to permeate medieval culture, unsettling boundaries, binaries, and clear-cut distinctions.
Landscape, Religion, and the Supernatural
This book is the first study to tackle the relationship between landscape and religion in-depth. Author Matthias Egeler overviews previous theories of the relationship between landscape and religion and then pushes this theorizing further with a rich case study: the supernatural landscape of the Icelandic Westfjords. There, religion and the supernatural--from churches to elf hills--are ubiquitous in the landscape and, as Egeler shows, this example sheds entirely new light on core aspects of the relationship between landscape, religion, and the supernatural.
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.
Great Immortality
In Great Immortality, twenty scholars from considerably different cultural backgrounds explore the ways in which certain poets, writers, and artists in Europe have become major figures of cultural memory.
Res, Artes Et Religio
Res, artes et religio is a collection of thirty-nine essays in honour of Rudolf Simek, professor at the Department of German, Comparative Literature and Culture at the University of Bonn. The terms res, artes and religio describe the wide-ranging interests of Rudolf Simek, which centre around but are by no means limited to the area of Viking Age and medieval Scandinavia. The chapters gathered here, written by his friends, colleagues and students, match these interests and show the influence of his work in the fields of mythology, religious studies, runology, saga studies, archaeology and more.
Die dänischen Eufemiaviser und die Rezeption höfischer Kultur im spätmittelalterlichen Dänemark – The Eufemiaviser and the Reception of Courtly Culture in Late Medieval Denmark
Das Buch präsentiert Texte, die ein einzigartiges Zeugnis kontinentaler höfischer Erzählkunst in der dänischen Literatur zwischen Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit darstellen: die Eufemiaviser (Eufemia-Gedichte), die in der Zeit um 1470–1480 über französische und altschwedische Vorlagen ins Dänische übersetzt wurden. In der skandinavistischen Forschung wurden sie bisher kaum untersucht. This book presents texts which are a unique testimony in Danish literature between the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern period: the so-called Eufemiaviser (Eufemia poems), courtly verse romances, translated into Danish via Old French and Old Swedish sources in the later part of the 15th century. These texts have hardly been studied in Scandinavian research so far.
Die skandinavischen Rätselbücher auf der Grundlage der deutschen Rätselbuch-Traditionen (1540-1805)
Im Jahr 1509 erscheint in Deutschland das sogenannte Straßburger Rätselbuch. Es entwickelt sich binnen weniger Jahre zu einem Verkaufsschlager. So wird es auch zur Keimzelle für die Entstehung der Rätselbücher in Skandinavien. Bis zur Etablierung als eigenständige Buchgattung, die erst um 1800 abgeschlossen ist, greifen dänische und schwedische Verleger immer wieder auf deutsche Vorlagen zurück. Der Pietismus in Dänemark und der Gotizismus in Schweden führen dazu, dass die Entwicklung der Rätselbücher in den skandinavischen Ländern unterschiedlich verläuft. Gegen Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts sind die Rätselbücher allen Bevölkerungsschichten zugänglich, so dass die Herausbildung eines skandinavischen Volksrätsels in dieser Zeit durch das «Absinken» der Rätselbücher erklärbar ist.
