Dialogues with the Viking Age

Dialogues with the Viking Age PDF Author: Vésteinn Ólason
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description

Dialogues with the Viking Age

Dialogues with the Viking Age PDF Author: Vésteinn Ólason
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 312

Get Book Here

Book Description


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

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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.

Icelanders in the Viking Age

Icelanders in the Viking Age PDF Author: William R. Short
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786447273
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
The Sagas of Icelanders are enduring stories from Viking-age Iceland filled with love and romance, battles and feuds, tragedy and comedy. Yet these tales are little read today, even by lovers of literature. The culture and history of the people depicted in the Sagas are often unfamiliar to the modern reader, though the audience for whom the tales were intended would have had an intimate understanding of the material. This text introduces the modern reader to the daily lives and material culture of the Vikings. Topics covered include religion, housing, social customs, the settlement of disputes, and the early history of Iceland. Issues of dispute among scholars, such as the nature of settlement and the division of land, are addressed in the text.

Norsemen in the Viking Age

Norsemen in the Viking Age PDF Author: Eric Christiansen
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470692766
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
This history of the Nordic peoples in the period 750-1050 focuses on their homelands and colonies, demonstrating the fluidity and incoherence of the world in which they lived. Considers the Nordic peoples in Viking times without undue recourse to developmental theories. Guides readers through some of the scholarly controversies surrounding these peoples. Illustrated by reference to runic, poetic and archaeological evidence.

The Routledge Research Companion to the Medieval Icelandic Sagas

The Routledge Research Companion to the Medieval Icelandic Sagas PDF Author: Ármann Jakobsson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317041461
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 516

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Book Description
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.

Laughing Shall I Die

Laughing Shall I Die PDF Author: Tom Shippey
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1780239505
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 544

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Book Description
Laughing Shall I Die explores the Viking fascination with scenes of heroic death. The literature of the Vikings is dominated by famous last stands, famous last words, death songs, and defiant gestures, all presented with grim humor. Much of this mindset is markedly alien to modern sentiment, and academics have accordingly shunned it. And yet, it is this same worldview that has always powered the popular public image of the Vikings—with their berserkers, valkyries, and cults of Valhalla and Ragnarok—and has also been surprisingly corroborated by archaeological discoveries such as the Ridgeway massacre site in Dorset. Was it this mindset that powered the sudden eruption of the Vikings onto the European scene? Was it a belief in heroic death that made them so lastingly successful against so many bellicose opponents? Weighing the evidence of sagas and poems against the accounts of the Vikings’ victims, Tom Shippey considers these questions as he plumbs the complexities of Viking psychology. Along the way, he recounts many of the great bravura scenes of Old Norse literature, including the Fall of the House of the Skjoldungs, the clash between the two great longships Ironbeard and Long Serpent, and the death of Thormod the skald. One of the most exciting books on Vikings for a generation, Laughing Shall I Die presents Vikings for what they were: not peaceful explorers and traders, but warriors, marauders, and storytellers.

The Vikings

The Vikings PDF Author: Martin Arnold
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 1461646030
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
This concise and balanced history traces the 300-year saga of the pirates and warlords who poured out of Scandinavia between the eighth and eleventh centuries, terrorizing, conquering, and ultimately settling vast tracts of land throughout Europe. Undaunted by the might of the Arab caliphates and the Byzantine Empire, they founded Russia, originated the bloodline that came to rule France, and created a North Sea empire that included England. They also established settlements across the North Atlantic, notably in Iceland and Greenland, and their adventurous spirit and extraordinary seafaring skills led them to explore and briefly build colonies in North America. These were the Vikings, initially ferocious pagan warriors seeking land and booty under the banners of their gods, but eventually belligerent Christian kings commanding vast armies. Martin Arnold provides a lively and accessible account of the early medieval period that became known as the Viking Age. Drawing on rich literary and archaeological source material, the first half of the book focuses especially on Viking culture, religious beliefs, and battle tactics and weaponry. The second half ranges over the four main theaters of Viking activity—the British Isles, Western Europe, the Slavic regions, and the North Atlantic settlements. Arnold vividly illustrates the two faces of the Vikings: on the one hand, savage, greedy, and implacable; on the other, adventurous, innovative, and artistic.

Vikings and the Vikings

Vikings and the Vikings PDF Author: Paul Hardwick
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476673748
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
This essay collection is a wide-ranging exploration of Vikings, the television series that has successfully summoned the historical world of the Norse people for modern audiences to enjoy. From a range of critical viewpoints, these all fresh essays explore the ways in which past and present representations of the Vikings converge in the show's richly textured dramatization of the rise and fall of Ragnar Loobrok--and the exploits of his heirs--creating what many viewers label a "true" representation of the age. From the show's sources in both saga literature and Victorian revival, to its engagement with contemporary concerns regarding gender, race and identity, via setting, sex, society and more, this first book-length study of the History Channel series appeals to fans of the show, Viking enthusiasts, and anyone with an interest in medievalist representation in the 21st century.

The Vikings

The Vikings PDF Author: Neil Price
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 0429632819
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
The Vikings provides a concise but comprehensive introduction to the complex world of the early medieval Scandinavians. In the space of less than 300 years, from the mid-eighth to the mid-eleventh centuries CE, people from what are now Norway, Sweden, and Denmark left their homelands in unprecedented numbers to travel across the Eurasian world. Over the last half-century, archaeology and its related disciplines have radically altered our understanding of this period. The Vikings explores why we now perceive them as a cosmopolitan mix of traders and warriors, craftsworkers and poets, explorers, and settlers. It details how, over the course of the Viking Age, their small-scale rural, tribal societies gradually became urbanised monarchies firmly emplaced on the stage of literate, Christian Europe. In the process, they transformed the cultures of the North, created the modern Nordic nation-states, and left a far-flung diaspora with legacies that still resonate today. Written by leading experts in the period and exploring the society, economy, identity and world-views of the early medieval Scandinavian peoples, and their unique religious beliefs that are still of enduring interest a millennium later, this book presents students with an unrivalled guide through this widely studied and fascinating subject, revealing the fundamental impacts of the Vikings in shaping the later course of European history.

Narrative in the Icelandic Family Saga

Narrative in the Icelandic Family Saga PDF Author: Heather O'Donoghue
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1786726254
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
Representative of a unique literary genre and composed in the 13th and 14th centuries, the Icelandic Family Sagas rank among some of the world's greatest literature. Here, Heather O'Donoghue skilfully examines the notions of time and the singular textual voice of the Sagas, offering a fresh perspective on the foundational texts of Old Norse and medieval Icelandic heritage. With a conspicuous absence of giants, dragons, and fairy tale magic, these sagas reflect a real-world society in transition, grappling with major new challenges of identity and development. As this book reveals, the stance of the narrator and the role of time – from the representation of external time passing to the audience's experience of moving through a narrative – are crucial to these stories. As such, Narrative in the Icelandic Family Saga draws on modern narratological theory to explore the ways in which saga authors maintain the urgency and complexity of their material, handle the narrative and chronological line, and offer perceptive insights into saga society. In doing so, O'Donoghue presents a new poetics of family sagas and redefines the literary rhetoric of saga narratives.