Author: Marianne E. Kalinke Publisher: Cornell University Library ISBN: 9780935995251 Category : Languages : de Pages : 384
Book Description
An Icelandic Literary Florilegium, a special issue of New Norse Studies, is a smorgasbord of noteworthy studies and brings together twelve original articles. The various authors examine topics within the field of Old Norse-Icelandic and deal with a variety of literary genres, including the Sagas of Icelanders, kings' sagas, saints' lives, contemporary sagas, skaldic poetry, and post-Reformation compositions in verse and prose. There is no unifying theme, but all articles are written with Professor Úlfar Bragason in mind. Collectively, they present a heartfelt offering to him on the occasion of his seventieth birthday in gratitude for his friendship and scholarly support through many years. This book will be welcomed not only by specialists and scholars in adjacent fields, but also by avid general readers. Contributors: T. M. Andersson, Margaret Clunies Ross, Kate Heslop, Shaun F. D. Hughes, Jón Atli Árnason, Jon Gunnar Jørgensen, Marianne Kalinke, Annette Lassen, John Lindow, Else Mundal, Natalie M. Van Deusen, Andrew Wawn, Kirsten Wolf, Sune Wolf Pulsiano.
Author: Line Cecilie Engh Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG ISBN: 3110773716 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 266
Book Description
We live in a world riven through with standards. To understand more of their deep, rich past is to understand ourselves better. The two volumes, Standardization in the Middle Ages. Volume 1: The North and Standardization in the Middle Ages. Volume 2: Europe, turn to the Middle Ages to give a deeper understanding of the medieval ideas and practices that produced--and were produced by--standards and standardization. At first glance, the Middle Ages might appear an unlikely place to look for standardization. The editors argue that, on the contrary, generating predictability is a precondition for meaningful cultural interaction in any historical period and that we may look to the Middle Ages to learn more about the historical, social, and cognitive processes of standardization. This multidisciplinary venture, which includes medievalists from the fields of history, intellectual history, art history, philology, numismatics, and more, as well as scholars of cognitive science, informatics, and anthropology, interrogates how medieval people and groups envisioned and enforced predictability, uniformity, and order, and how they attempted to obtain and maintain standards across vast distances and heterogeneous social and cultural structures.
Author: Brynja þOrgeirsdóttir Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG ISBN: 311128039X Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 279
Book Description
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 Íslendingasögur, but to date, the significance of verse to the aesthetic of the narrative has mainly been explored with reference to the sub-genre of the skáldasögur (sagas of poets), in which the proportion of verse to prose is at its highest. The contributions to the volume analyse the Íslendingasögur as prosimetrum - that is, they treat the combination of verse and prose as a salient generic and aesthetic feature of this body of sagas. The contributors are leading scholars in the field of Old Norse studies, and their work represents current research trends in the UK, USA, Iceland, Denmark, and Germany. Their innovative approaches will enable a better understanding on the literary mode of the corpus as a whole, as well as producing fresh insights into the compositional habits of the (anonymous) authors of individual sagas.
Author: Mikael Males Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG ISBN: 3110642379 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 474
Book Description
This book assesses the importance of poetry for the Old Icelandic literary flowering of c. 1150–1350. It addresses the apparent paradox that an extremely conservative form of literature, namely skaldic poetry, was at the core of the most innovative literary and intellectual experiments in the period. The book argues that this cannot simply be explained as a result of strong local traditions, as in most previous scholarship. Thus, for instance, the author demonstrates that the mix of prose and poetry found in kings’ sagas and sagas of Icelanders is roughly contemporary to the written sagas. Similarly, he argues that treatises on poetics and mythology, including Snorri’s Edda, are new to the period, not only in their textual form, but also in their systematic mode of analysis. The book contends that what is truly new in these texts is the method of the authors, derived from Latin learning, but applied to traditional forms and motifs as encapsulated in the skaldic tradition. In this way, Christian Latin learning allowed for its perceived opposite, vernacular oral literature of pagan extraction, to reach full fruition and to largely replace the very literature which had made this process possible in the first place.
Author: Annette Lassen Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1000469891 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 502
Book Description
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.
Author: Kate Heslop Publisher: Fordham University Press ISBN: 082329823X Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 288
Book Description
Viking Mediologies is a study of pre-modern multimedia rooted in the embodied poetic practice of Viking Age skalds. Prior study of the skaldic tradition has focused on authorship—distinctions of poetic style, historical contexts, and attention to the oeuvres of the skalds whose names are preserved in the written tradition. Kate Heslop reconsiders these not as texts but as pieces in a pre-modern media landscape, focusing on poetry’s medial capacity to embody memory, visuality, and sound. Mobile, hybrid, diasporic social formations—bands of raiders and traders, petty kingdoms, colonial expeditions—achieved new prominence in the Viking Age. Skalds offered the leaders of these groups something uniquely valuable. With their complicated poetry, they claimed to be able to capture shared contingent meanings and re-mediate them in named, memorable, reproducible works. The commemorative poetry in kviðuháttr remembers histories of ruin and loss. Skaldic ekphrasis discloses and reproduces the presence of the gods. Dróttkvætt encomium evokes for the leader’s retinue the soundscape of battle. As writing arrived in Scandinavia in the wake of Christianization, the media landscape shifted. In the poetry of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, skalds adjusted to the demands of a literate audience, while the historical and poetological texts of the Icelandic High Middle Ages opened a dialogue between Latin Christian ideas of mediation and local traditions. In the Second Grammatical Treatise, for example, the literate technology of the grid is used to analyze the complex resonances of dróttkvætt as the output of a syllable-spewing hurdy-gurdy—a poetry machine. Offering both new readings of both canonical works such as Ynglingatal, Ragnarsdrápa, and Háttatal, and examinations of lesser-known texts like Glymdrápa, Líknarbraut, and Sturla Þórðarson’s Hákonarkviða, Viking Mediologies explores the powers and limits of poetic mediation.
Author: Kathryn Klar Publisher: ISBN: Category : Foreign Language Study Languages : en Pages : 272
Book Description
Nineteen papers on early medieval Irish and Welsh texts. Contents include: St Patrick in Cornwall? The origin and transmission of Vita Tertia S. Patricii ( David Dumville ); Re-reading Dafydd ap Gwilym ( Patrick Ford ); The spoils of Annwn: Taliesin and material poetry ( Sarah Lynn Higley ); Aldfirth of Northumbria and the learning of a sapiens ( Colin Ireland ); Narrative openers and progress markers in Irish ( Proinsias Mac Cana ); The Hagiographic poetics of Canu Cadfan ( Catherine McKenna ); The introduction of alphabetic writing to Ireland ( Michael Richter ); Daring young men in their chariots ( Joseph Falaky Nagy ); The Celtic bard ( J. E. Caerwyn Bard ).
Author: Charles D. Wright Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 0521419093 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 337
Book Description
Charles Wright identifies the characteristic features of Irish Christian literature which influenced Anglo-Saxon vernacular authors. As a full-length study of Irish influence on Old English religious literature, the book will appeal to scholars in Old English literature, Anglo-Saxon studies, and Old and Middle Irish literature.
Author: Marianne E. Kalinke
Author: 
Author: Line Cecilie Engh
Author: Brynja þOrgeirsdóttir
Author: Mikael Males
Author: Annette Lassen
Author: Kate Heslop
Author: Kathryn Klar
Author: Charles D. Wright
Author: Halldór Hermannsson