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Myth In Early Northwest Europe
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Author :Stephen O. Glosecki Publisher :Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS) ISBN 13 : Total Pages :392 pages Book Rating :4.3/5 (91 download)
Book Synopsis Myth in Early Northwest Europe by : Stephen O. Glosecki
Download or read book Myth in Early Northwest Europe written by Stephen O. Glosecki and published by Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS). This book was released on 2007 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis Origin Legends in Early Medieval Western Europe by :
Download or read book Origin Legends in Early Medieval Western Europe written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-07-25 with total page 477 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume contains work by scholars actively publishing on origin legends across early medieval western Europe, from the fall of Rome to the high Middle Ages. Its thematic structure creates dialogue between texts and regions traditionally studied in isolation.
Book Synopsis Vernacular Verse Histories in Early Medieval England and Francia by : Catalin Taranu
Download or read book Vernacular Verse Histories in Early Medieval England and Francia written by Catalin Taranu and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-03-08 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a provocative take on Germanic heroic poetry, Taranu reads texts like Beowulf, Maldon, and the Waltharius as participating in alternative modes of history-writing that functioned in a larger ecology of narrative forms, including Latinate Christian history and the biblical epic. These modes employed the conceit of their participating in a tradition of oral verse for a variety of purposes: from political propaganda to constructing origin myths for early medieval nationhood or heroic masculinity, and sometimes for challenging these paradigms. The more complex of these historical visions actively meditated on their own relationship to truthfulness and fictionality while also performing sophisticated (and often subversive) cultural and socio-emotional work for its audiences. By rethinking canonical categories of historiographical discourse from within medieval textual productions, Vernacular Verse Histories in Early Medieval England and Francia: The Bard and the Rag-Picker aims to recover a part of the wide array of narrative poetic forms through which medieval communities made sense of their past and structured their socio-emotional experience.
Book Synopsis Anglo-Saxon England: Volume 37 by : Malcolm Godden
Download or read book Anglo-Saxon England: Volume 37 written by Malcolm Godden and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-11-05 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anglo-Saxon England is the only publication which consistently embraces all the main aspects of study of Anglo-Saxon history and culture - linguistic, literary, textual, palaeographic, religious, intellectual, historical, archaeological and artistic - and which promotes the more unusual interests - in music or medicine or education, for example. Articles in volume 37 include: Record of the thirteenth conference of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists at the Institute of English Studies, University of London, 30 July to 4 August 2007; The virtues of rhetoric: Alcuin's Disputatio de rhetorica et de uirtutibus; King Edgar's charter for Pershore (972); Lost voices from Anglo-Saxon Lichfield; The Old English Promissio Regis; 'lfric, the Vikings, and an anonymous preacher in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College (162); Re-evaluating base-metal artifacts: an inscribed lead strap-end from Crewkerne, Somerset; Anglo-Saxon and related entries in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004); Bibliography for 2007.
Book Synopsis More Than Mythology by : Catharina Raudvere
Download or read book More Than Mythology written by Catharina Raudvere and published by Nordic Academic Press. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The religion of the Viking Age is conventionally identified through its mythology: the ambiguous character Odin, the forceful Thor, and the end of the world approaching in Ragnarök. But pre-Christian religion consisted of so much more than mythic imagery and legends, and lingered for long in folk tradition. Studying religion of the North with an interdisciplinary approach is exceptionally fruitful, in both empirical and theoretical terms, and in this book a group of distinguished scholars widen the interpretative scope on religious life among the pre-Christian Scandinavian people. The authors shed new light on topics such as rituals, gender relations, social hierarchies, and inter-regional contacts between the Nordic tradition and the Sami and Finnish regions. The contributions add to a more complex view of the pre-Christian religion of Scandinavia, with relevant new questions about the material and a broad analysis of religion as a cultural expression.
Book Synopsis The Waning Sword: Conversion Imagery and Celestial Myth in 'Beowulf' by : Edward Pettit
Download or read book The Waning Sword: Conversion Imagery and Celestial Myth in 'Beowulf' written by Edward Pettit and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2020-01-14 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 Christian symbols coalesce. In Part II, Pettit investigates the broader Germanic background to this image, especially in relation to the god Ing/Yngvi-Freyr, and explores the capacity of myths to recur and endure across time. Drawing on an eclectic range of narrative and linguistic evidence from Northern European texts, and on archaeological discoveries, Pettit suggests that the image of the giant sword, and the characters and events associated with it, may reflect an elemental struggle between the sun and the moon, articulated through an underlying myth about the theft and repossession of sunlight. The Waning Sword: Conversion Imagery and Celestial Myth in 'Beowulf' is a welcome contribution to the overlapping fields of Beowulf-scholarship, Old Norse-Icelandic literature and Germanic philology. Not only does it present a wealth of new readings that shed light on the craft of the Beowulf-poet and inform our understanding of the poem’s major episodes and themes; it further highlights the merits of adopting an interdisciplinary approach alongside a comparative vantage point. As such, The Waning Sword will be compelling reading for Beowulf-scholars and for a wider audience of medievalists.
Book Synopsis Ancestor Worship and the Elite in Late Iron Age Scandinavia by : Triin Laidoner
Download or read book Ancestor Worship and the Elite in Late Iron Age Scandinavia written by Triin Laidoner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-01-14 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ancestor worship is often assumed by contemporary European audiences to be an outdated and primitive tradition with little relevance to our societies, past and present. This book questions that assumption and seeks to determine whether ancestor ideology was an integral part of religion in Viking Age and early medieval Scandinavia. The concept is examined from a broad socio-anthropological perspective, which is used to structure a set of case studies which analyse the cults of specific individuals in Old Norse literature. The situation of gods in Old Norse religion has been almost exclusively addressed in isolation from these socio-anthropological perspectives. The public gravemound cults of deceased rulers are discussed conventionally as cases of sacral kingship, and, more recently, religious ruler ideology; both are seen as having divine associations in Old Norse scholarship. Building on the anthropological framework, this study introduces the concept of ‘superior ancestors’, employed in social anthropology to denote a form of political ancestor worship used to regulate social structure deliberately. It suggests that Old Norse ruler ideology was based on conventional and widely recognised religious practices revolving around kinship and ancestors and that the gods were perceived as human ancestors belonging to elite families.
Book Synopsis Ideology and Power in the Viking and Middle Ages by : Gro Steinsland
Download or read book Ideology and Power in the Viking and Middle Ages written by Gro Steinsland and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2011-04-21 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyses the Nordic pre-Christian ideology of rulership, and its confrontation with, survival into and adaptation to the European Christian ideals during the transition from the Viking to the Middle Ages from the ninth to the thirteenth century.
Book Synopsis Vera Lex Historiae? by : Catalin Taranu
Download or read book Vera Lex Historiae? written by Catalin Taranu and published by punctum books. This book was released on 2022-08-18 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writing circa 731 CE, Bede professes in the introduction to his Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum that he will write his account of the past of the English following only vera lex historiae. Whether explicitly or (most often) implicitly, historians narrate the past according to a conception of what constitutes historical truth that emerges in the use of narrative strategies, of certain formulae or textual forms, in establishing one's own ideological authority or that of one's informants, in faithfulness to a cultural, narrative, or poetic tradition. If we extend the scope of what we understand by history (especially in a pre-modern setting) to include not just the writings of historians legitimated by their belonging to the Latinate matrix of christianized classical history writing, but also collective narratives, practices, rituals, oral poetry, liturgy, artistic representations, and acts of identity - all re-enacting the past as, or as representation of, the present, we find a plethora of modes of constructions of historical truth, narrative authority, and reliability. Vera Lex Historiae? will be constituted by contributions that reveal the variety of evental strategies by which historical truth was constructed in late antiquity and the earlier Middle Ages, and the range of procedures by which such narratives were established first as being historical and then as "true" histories. This is not only a matter of narrative strategies, but also habitus, ways of living and acting in the world that feed on and back into the commemoration and re-enactment of the past by communities and by individuals. In doing this, we hope to recover something of the plurality of modes of preserving and reenacting the past available in late antiquity and the earlier middle ages which we pass by because of preconceived notions of what constitutes history writing.
Book Synopsis Evergreen Ash by : Christopher Abram
Download or read book Evergreen Ash written by Christopher Abram and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2019-02-06 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Norse mythology is obsessed with the idea of an onrushing and unstoppable apocalypse: Ragnarok, when the whole of creation will perish in fire, smoke, and darkness and the earth will no longer support the life it once nurtured. Most of the Old Norse texts that preserve the myths of Ragnarok originated in Iceland, a nation whose volcanic activity places it perpetually on the brink of a world-changing environmental catastrophe. As the first full-length ecocritical study of Old Norse myth and literature, Evergreen Ash argues that Ragnarok is primarily a story of ecological collapse that reflects the anxieties of early Icelanders who were trying to make a home in a profoundly strange, marginal, and at times hostile environment. Christopher Abram here contends that Ragnarok offers an uncanny foreshadowing of our current global ecological crisis—the era of the Anthropocene. Ragnarok portends what may happen when a civilization believes that nature can be mastered and treated only as a resource to be exploited for human ends. The enduring power of the Ragnarok myth, and its relevance to life in the era of climate change, lies in its terrifying evocation of a world in which nothing is what it was before, a world that is no longer home to us—and, thus, a world with no future. Climate change may well be our Ragnarok.
Book Synopsis Wolves in Beowulf and Other Old English Texts by : Elizabeth Marshall
Download or read book Wolves in Beowulf and Other Old English Texts written by Elizabeth Marshall and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2022-07-19 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fresh and sympathetic investigation of the depiction of wolves in early medieval literature, recuperating their reputation.
Book Synopsis The Art and Thought of the "Beowulf" Poet by : Leonard Neidorf
Download or read book The Art and Thought of the "Beowulf" Poet written by Leonard Neidorf and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-15 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Art and Thought of the Beowulf Poet, Leonard Neidorf explores the relationship between Beowulf and the legendary tradition that existed prior to its composition. The Beowulf poet inherited an amoral heroic tradition, which focused principally on heroes compelled by circumstances to commit horrendous deeds: fathers kill sons, brothers kill brothers, and wives kill husbands. Medieval Germanic poets relished the depiction of a hero's unyielding response to a cruel fate, but the Beowulf poet refused to construct an epic around this traditional plot. Focusing instead on a courteous and pious protagonist's fight against monsters, the poet creates a work that is deeply untraditional in both its plot and its values. In Beowulf, the kin-slayers and oath-breakers of antecedent tradition are confined to the background, while the poet fills the foreground with unconventional characters, who abstain from transgression, display courtly etiquette, and express monotheistic convictions. Comparing Beowulf with its medieval German and Scandinavian analogues, The Art and Thought of the Beowulf Poet argues that the poem's uniqueness reflects one poet's coherent plan for the moral renovation of an amoral heroic tradition. In Beowulf, Neidorf discerns the presence of a singular mind at work in the combination and modification of heroic, folkloric, hagiographical, and historical materials. Rather than perceive Beowulf as an impersonally generated object, Neidorf argues that it should be read as the considered result of one poet's ambition to produce a morally edifying, theologically palatable, and historically plausible epic out of material that could not independently constitute such a poem.
Book Synopsis Names and Naming in 'Beowulf' by : Philip A. Shaw
Download or read book Names and Naming in 'Beowulf' written by Philip A. Shaw and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-09-17 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Beowulf', one of the earliest poems in the English language, recounts a tale of heroism played out against the backdrop of Scandinavia in the 5th to 6th centuries AD. And yet, this Old English verse narrative set in Scandinavia is – a little surprisingly, perhaps – populated with names of German descent. This insight into the personal names of 'Beowulf' acts the starting point for Philip A. Shaw's innovative and nuanced study. As Shaw reveals, the origins of these personal names provide important evidence for the origins of Beowulf as it enables us to situate the poem fully in its continental contexts. As such, this book is not only a much-needed reassessment of 'Beowulf''s beginnings, but also sheds new light on the links between 'Beowulf' and other continental narrative traditions, such as the Scandinavian sagas and Continental German heroics. In doing so, Names and Naming in 'Beowulf' takes readers beyond the continuing debate over the dating of the poem and provides a compelling new model for the poem's origins.
Book Synopsis 101 Middle Eastern Tales and Their Impact on Western Oral Tradition by : Ulrich Marzolph
Download or read book 101 Middle Eastern Tales and Their Impact on Western Oral Tradition written by Ulrich Marzolph and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2020-08-18 with total page 729 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive exploration of the Middle Eastern roots of Western narrative tradition. Against the methodological backdrop of historical and comparative folk narrative research, 101 Middle Eastern Tales and Their Impact on Western Oral Tradition surveys the history, dissemination, and characteristics of over one hundred narratives transmitted to Western tradition from or by the Middle Eastern Muslim literatures (i.e., authored written works in Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish). For a tale to be included, Ulrich Marzolph considered two criteria: that the tale originates from or at least was transmitted by a Middle Eastern source, and that it was recorded from a Western narrator's oral performance in the course of the nineteenth or twentieth century. The rationale behind these restrictive definitions is predicated on Marzolph's main concern with the long-lasting effect that some of the "Oriental" narratives exercised in Western popular tradition—those tales that have withstood the test of time. Marzolph focuses on the originally "Oriental" tales that became part and parcel of modern Western oral tradition. Since antiquity, the "Orient" constitutes the quintessential Other vis-à-vis the European cultures. While delineation against this Other served to define and reassure the Self, the "Orient" also constituted a constant source of fascination, attraction, and inspiration. Through oral retellings, numerous tales from Muslim tradition became an integral part of European oral and written tradition in the form of learned treatises, medieval sermons, late medieval fabliaux, early modern chapbooks, contemporary magazines, and more. In present times, when national narcissisms often acquire the status of strongholds delineating the Us against the Other, it is imperative to distinguish, document, visualize, and discuss the extent to which the West is not only indebted to the Muslim world but also shares common features with Muslim narrative tradition. 101 Middle Eastern Tales and Their Impact on Western Oral Tradition is an important contribution to this debate and a vital work for scholars, students, and readers of folklore and fairy tales.
Book Synopsis Dating Beowulf by : Daniel C. Remein
Download or read book Dating Beowulf written by Daniel C. Remein and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2019-12-20 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. Featuring essays from some of the most prominent voices in early medieval studies, Dating Beowulf playfully redeploys the word ‘dating’, which usually heralds some of the most divisive critical impasses in the field, to provocatively phrase a set of new relationships with an Old English poem. The volume argues for the relevance of the early Middle Ages to affect studies and vice-versa, offering a riposte to antifeminist discourse and opening avenues for future work by specialists in the history of emotions, literary theorists, students of Old English literature and medieval scholars alike. To this end, the essays embody a range of critical approaches from queer theory to animal studies and ecocriticism to actor-network theory.
Book Synopsis Egil, the Viking Poet by : Laurence de Looze
Download or read book Egil, the Viking Poet written by Laurence de Looze and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributors to this collection of essays approach Egil's story from a variety of perspectives, including psychology, philology, network theory, social history, and literary theory.
Download or read book Vigor Mortis written by Scott G. Bruce and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-12-16 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the enduring presence and participation of the dead in the lives of premodern people from the Carolingian period to the end of the Middle Ages. Unlike modern states, which erect barriers to separate the dying and the deceased from their families, friends, and associates, premodern societies in western Europe fostered an on-going relationship between the living and the dead that was mutually beneficial to both parties. As these studies show, the dead had many means at their disposal to communicate their needs and disaffection, including ghostly visitations and unquiet corpses. For their part, medieval authors told stories about the fate of the dead and the geography of the afterlife to dissuade sinful behaviour and foster virtue in preparation for the Last Judgment. Premodern hauntings also serve as a useful metaphor for the uncertainty of archival research in recovering past voices and for the racial presumptions that inform our reconstruction of the western Middle Ages. This book will appeal to scholars and students of history and literature, especially those interested in the concept of death in the medieval period. The chapters in this book were originally published in the Journal of Medieval History.
