Anglo-Saxon England in Icelandic Medieval Texts

Anglo-Saxon England in Icelandic Medieval Texts PDF Author: Magnús Fjalldal
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 0802038379
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 177

Get Book Here

Book Description
Medieval Icelandic authors wrote a great deal on the subject of England and the English. This new work by Magnús Fjalldal is the first to provide an overview of what Icelandic medieval texts have to say about Anglo-Saxon England in respect to its language, culture, history, and geography. Some of the texts Fjalldal examines include family sagas, the shorter þættir, the histories of Norwegian and Danish kings, and the Icelandic lives of Anglo-Saxon saints. Fjalldal finds that in response to a hostile Norwegian court and kings, Icelandic authors - from the early thirteenth century onwards (although they were rather poorly informed about England before 1066) - created a largely imaginary country where friendly, generous, although rather ineffective kings living under constant threat welcomed the assistance of saga heroes to solve their problems. The England of Icelandic medieval texts is more of a stage than a country, and chiefly functions to provide saga heroes with fame abroad. Since many of these texts are rarely examined outside of Iceland or in the English language, Fjalldal's book is important for scholars of both medieval Norse culture and Anglo-Saxon England.

Anglo-Saxon England in Icelandic Medieval Texts

Anglo-Saxon England in Icelandic Medieval Texts PDF Author: Magnús Fjalldal
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 0802038379
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 177

Get Book Here

Book Description
Medieval Icelandic authors wrote a great deal on the subject of England and the English. This new work by Magnús Fjalldal is the first to provide an overview of what Icelandic medieval texts have to say about Anglo-Saxon England in respect to its language, culture, history, and geography. Some of the texts Fjalldal examines include family sagas, the shorter þættir, the histories of Norwegian and Danish kings, and the Icelandic lives of Anglo-Saxon saints. Fjalldal finds that in response to a hostile Norwegian court and kings, Icelandic authors - from the early thirteenth century onwards (although they were rather poorly informed about England before 1066) - created a largely imaginary country where friendly, generous, although rather ineffective kings living under constant threat welcomed the assistance of saga heroes to solve their problems. The England of Icelandic medieval texts is more of a stage than a country, and chiefly functions to provide saga heroes with fame abroad. Since many of these texts are rarely examined outside of Iceland or in the English language, Fjalldal's book is important for scholars of both medieval Norse culture and Anglo-Saxon England.

Anglo-Saxon England: Volume 38

Anglo-Saxon England: Volume 38 PDF Author: Malcolm Godden
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521194067
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 361

Get Book Here

Book Description
Anglo-Saxon England was the first publication to consistently embrace 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 38 include: The Passio Andreae and The Dream of the Rood by Thomas D. Hill, Beowulf off the Map by Alfred Hiatt, Numerical Composition and Beowulf: A Re-consideration by Yvette Kisor, 'The Landed Endowment of the Anglo-Saxon Minster at Hanbury (Worcs.) by Steven Bassett, Scapegoating the Secular Clergy: The Hermeneutic Style as a Form of Monastic Self-Definition by Rebecca Stephenson, Understanding Numbers in MS London, British Library Harley by Daniel Anlezark, Tudor Antiquaries and the Vita 'dwardi Regis by Henry Summerso and Earl Godwine's Ship by Simon Keynes and Rosalind Love. A comprehensive bibliography concludes the volume, listing publications on Anglo-Saxon England during 2008.

AEthelstan

AEthelstan PDF Author: Sarah Foot
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300160372
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 487

Get Book Here

Book Description
The powerful and innovative King AEthelstan reigned only briefly (924-939), yet his achievements during those eventful fifteen years changed the course of English history. He won spectacular military victories (most notably at Brunanburh), forged unprecedented political connections across Europe, and succeeded in creating the first unified kingdom of the English. To claim for him the title of "first English monarch" is no exaggeration.In this nuanced portrait of AEthelstan, Sarah Foot offers the first full account of the king ever written. She traces his life through the various spheres in which he lived and worked, beginning with the intimate context of his family, then extending outward to his unusual multiethnic royal court, the Church and his kingdom, the wars he conducted, and finally his death and legacy. Foot describes a sophisticated man who was not only a great military leader but also a worthy king. He governed brilliantly, developed creative ways to project his image as a ruler, and devised strategic marriage treaties and gift exchanges to cement alliances with the leading royal and ducal houses of Europe. AEthelstan's legacy, seen in the new light of this masterful biography, is inextricably connected to the very forging of England and early English identity.

Torture and Brutality in Medieval Literature

Torture and Brutality in Medieval Literature PDF Author: Larissa Tracy
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 1843843935
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Get Book Here

Book Description
A new look at the way in which medieval European literature depicts torture and brutality.

The Barbarian North in Medieval Imagination

The Barbarian North in Medieval Imagination PDF Author: Robert Rix
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317589696
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book examines the sustained interest in legends of the pagan and peripheral North, tracing and analyzing the use of an ‘out-of-Scandinavia’ legend (Scandinavia as an ancestral homeland) in a wide range of medieval texts from all over Europe, with a focus on the Anglo-Saxon tradition. The pagan North was an imaginative region, which attracted a number of conflicting interpretations. To Christian Europe, the pagan North was an abject Other, but it also symbolized a place from which ancestral strength and energy derived. Rix maps how these discourses informed ‘national’ legends of ancestral origins, showing how an ‘out-of-Scandinavia’ legend can be found in works by several familiar writers including Jordanes, Bede, ‘Fredegar’, Paul the Deacon, Freculph, and Æthelweard. The book investigates how legends of northern warriors were first created in classical texts and since re-calibrated to fit different medieval understandings of identity and ethnicity. Among other things, the ‘out-of-Scandinavia’ tale was exploited to promote a legacy of ‘barbarian’ vigor that could withstand the negative cultural effects of Roman civilization. This volume employs a variety of perspectives cutting across the disciplines of poetry, history, rhetoric, linguistics, and archaeology. After years of intense critical interest in medieval attitudes towards the classical world, Africa, and the East, this first book-length study of ‘the North’ will inspire new debates and repositionings in medieval studies.

The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain, 4 Volume Set

The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain, 4 Volume Set PDF Author: Sian Echard
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118396987
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 2102

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain vereint erstmals wissenschaftliche Erkenntnisse zu Multilingualität und Interkulturalität im mittelalterlichen Britannien und bietet mehr als 600 fundierte Einträge zu Schlüsselpersonen, Zusammenhängen und Einflüssen in der Literatur vom fünften bis sechzehnten Jahrhundert. - Einzigartiger multilingualer, interkultureller Ansatz und die neuesten wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnisse. Das gesamte Mittelalter und die Bandbreite literarischer Sprachen werden abgedeckt. - Über 600 fundierte, verständliche Einträge zu Schlüsselpersonen, Texten, kritischen Debatten, Methoden, kulturellen Zusammenhängen sowie verwandte Terminologie. - Repräsentiert die gesamte Literatur der Britischen Inseln, einschließlich Alt- und Mittelenglisch, das frühe Schottland, die Anglonormannen, Nordisch, Latein und Französisch in Britannien, die keltische Literatur in Wales, Irland, Schottland und Cornwall. - Beeindruckende chronologische Darstellung, von der Invasion der Sachsen bis zum 5. Jahrhundert und weiter bis zum Übergang zur frühen Moderne im 16. Jahrhundert. - Beleuchtet die Überbleibsel mittelalterlicher britischer Literatur, darunter auch Manuskripte und frühe Drucke, literarische Stätten und Zusammenhänge in puncto Herstellung, Leistung und Rezeption sowie erzählerische Transformation und intertextuelle Verbindungen in dieser Zeit.

The Etiquette of Early Northern Verse

The Etiquette of Early Northern Verse PDF Author: Roberta Frank
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN: 0268202516
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Get Book Here

Book Description
In The Etiquette of Early Northern Verse, Roberta Frank peers into the northern poet’s workshop, eavesdropping as Old English and Old Norse verse reveal their craft secrets. This book places two vernacular poetries of the long Viking Age into conversation, revealing their membership in a single community of taste, a traditional stylistic ecology that did serious political and historical work. Each chapter seeks the codes of a now-extinct verse technique. The first explores the underlying architecture of the two poetries, their irregularities of pace, startling formal conventions, and tight verbal detail work. The passage of time has worn away most of the circumstantial details that literary scholars in later periods take for granted, but the public relations savvy and aural and syntactic signals of early northern verse remain to some extent retrievable and relatable, an etiquette prized and presumably understood by its audiences. The second and longest chapter investigates the techniques used by early northern poets to retrieve and organize the symmetries of language. It illustrates how supererogatory alliteration and rhyme functioned as aural punctuation, marking off structural units and highlighting key moments in the texts. The third and final chapter describes the extent to which both corpora reveled in negations, litotes, indirection, and down-toners, modes that forced audiences to read between half-lines, to hear what was not said. By decluttering and stripping away excess, by drawing words through a tight mesh of meter, alliteration, and rhyme, the early northern poet filtered out dross and stitched together a poetics of stark contrasts and forebodings. Poets and lovers of poetry of all periods and places will find much to enjoy here. So will students in Old English and Old Norse courses.

The Cambridge Introduction to the Old Norse-Icelandic Saga

The Cambridge Introduction to the Old Norse-Icelandic Saga PDF Author: Margaret Clunies Ross
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139492640
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 210

Get Book Here

Book Description
The medieval Norse-Icelandic saga is one of the most important European vernacular literary genres of the Middle Ages. This Introduction to the saga genre outlines its origins and development, its literary character, its material existence in manuscripts and printed editions, and its changing reception from the Middle Ages to the present time. Its multiple sub-genres - including family sagas, mythical-heroic sagas and sagas of knights - are described and discussed in detail, and the world of medieval Icelanders is powerfully evoked. The first general study of the Old Norse-Icelandic saga to be written in English for some decades, the Introduction is based on up-to-date scholarship and engages with current debates in the field. With suggestions for further reading, detailed information about the Icelandic literary canon, and a map of medieval Iceland, this book is aimed at students of medieval literature and assumes no prior knowledge of Scandinavian languages.

Reading the Runes in Old English and Old Norse Poetry

Reading the Runes in Old English and Old Norse Poetry PDF Author: Thomas Birkett
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317070992
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 223

Get Book Here

Book Description
Reading the Runes in Old English and Old Norse Poetry is the first book-length study to compare responses to runic heritage in the literature of Anglo-Saxon England and medieval Iceland. The Anglo-Saxon runic script had already become the preserve of antiquarians at the time the majority of Old English poetry was written down, and the Icelanders recording the mythology associated with the script were at some remove from the centres of runic practice in medieval Scandinavia. Both literary cultures thus inherited knowledge of the runic system and the traditions associated with it, but viewed this literate past from the vantage point of a developed manuscript culture. There has, as yet, been no comprehensive study of poetic responses to this scriptural heritage, which include episodes in such canonical texts as Beowulf, the Old English riddles and the poems of the Poetic Edda. By analysing the inflection of the script through shared literary traditions, this study enhances our understanding of the burgeoning of literary self-awareness in early medieval vernacular poetry and the construction of cultural memory, and furthers our understanding of the relationship between Anglo-Saxon and Norse textual cultures. The introduction sets out in detail the rationale for examining runes in poetry as a literary motif and surveys the relevant critical debates. The body of the volume is comprised of five linked case studies of runes in poetry, viewing these representations through the paradigm of scriptural reconstruction and the validation of contemporary literary, historical and religious sensibilities.

The Sagas of Ragnar Lodbrok

The Sagas of Ragnar Lodbrok PDF Author:
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 0578021382
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 151

Get Book Here

Book Description
Although based on historical persons from the 9th century, Ragnar Lodbrok and his sons are the subjects of compelling legends dating from the Viking era. Warriors, raiders, and rulers, Ragnar and his sons inspired unknown writers to set down their stories over seven centuries ago. This volume presents new and original translations of the three major Old Norse texts that tell Ragnar's story: the Saga of Ragnar Lodbrok, the Tale of Ragnar's Sons, and the Sogubrot. Ragnar's death song, the Krakumal, and a Latin fragment called the List of Swedish Kings, complete the story. Extensive notes and commentary are provided, helping the reader to enter the world of these timeless stories of Viking adventure.