Imagining the Supernatural North

Imagining the Supernatural North PDF Author: Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough
Publisher: University of Alberta
ISBN: 1772122939
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
“Turning to face north, face the north, we enter our own unconscious. Always, in retrospect, the journey north has the quality of dream.” Margaret Atwood, “True North” In this interdisciplinary collection, sixteen scholars from twelve countries explore the notion of the North as a realm of the supernatural. This region has long been associated with sorcerous inhabitants, mythical tribes, metaphysical forces of good and evil, and a range of supernatural qualities. It was both the sacred abode of the gods and a feared source of menacing invaders and otherworldly beings. Whether from the perspective of traditional Jewish lore or of contemporary black metal music, few motifs in European cultural history show such longevity and broad appeal. Contributors: Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough, Angela Byrne, Danielle Marie Cudmore, Stefan Donecker, Brenda S. Gardenour Walter, Silvije Habulinec, Erica Hill, Jay Johnston, Maria Kasyanova, Jan Leichsenring, Shane McCorristine, Jennifer E. Michaels, Ya’acov Sarig, Rudolf Simek, Athanasios Votsis, Brian Walter

Imagining the Supernatural North

Imagining the Supernatural North PDF Author: Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough
Publisher: University of Alberta
ISBN: 1772122939
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Get Book Here

Book Description
“Turning to face north, face the north, we enter our own unconscious. Always, in retrospect, the journey north has the quality of dream.” Margaret Atwood, “True North” In this interdisciplinary collection, sixteen scholars from twelve countries explore the notion of the North as a realm of the supernatural. This region has long been associated with sorcerous inhabitants, mythical tribes, metaphysical forces of good and evil, and a range of supernatural qualities. It was both the sacred abode of the gods and a feared source of menacing invaders and otherworldly beings. Whether from the perspective of traditional Jewish lore or of contemporary black metal music, few motifs in European cultural history show such longevity and broad appeal. Contributors: Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough, Angela Byrne, Danielle Marie Cudmore, Stefan Donecker, Brenda S. Gardenour Walter, Silvije Habulinec, Erica Hill, Jay Johnston, Maria Kasyanova, Jan Leichsenring, Shane McCorristine, Jennifer E. Michaels, Ya’acov Sarig, Rudolf Simek, Athanasios Votsis, Brian Walter

Imagining the Supernatural North

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The Spectral Arctic

The Spectral Arctic PDF Author: Shane McCorristine
Publisher: UCL Press
ISBN: 1787352463
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
Visitors to the Arctic enter places that have been traditionally imagined as otherworldly. This strangeness fascinated audiences in nineteenth-century Britain when the idea of the heroic explorer voyaging through unmapped zones reached its zenith. The Spectral Arctic re-thinks our understanding of Arctic exploration by paying attention to the importance of dreams and ghosts in the quest for the Northwest Passage. The narratives of Arctic exploration that we are all familiar with today are just the tip of the iceberg: they disguise a great mass of mysterious and dimly lit stories beneath the surface. In contrast to oft-told tales of heroism and disaster, this book reveals the hidden stories of dreaming and haunted explorers, of frozen mummies, of rescue balloons, visits to Inuit shamans, and of the entranced female clairvoyants who travelled to the Arctic in search of John Franklin’s lost expedition. Through new readings of archival documents, exploration narratives, and fictional texts, these spectral stories reflect the complex ways that men and women actually thought about the far North in the past. This revisionist historical account allows us to make sense of current cultural and political concerns in the Canadian Arctic about the location of Franklin’s ships.

Beyond the Northlands

Beyond the Northlands PDF Author: Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191004480
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
In the dying days of the eighth century, the Vikings erupted onto the international stage with brutal raids and slaughter. The medieval Norsemen may be best remembered as monk murderers and village pillagers, but this is far from the whole story. Throughout the Middle Ages, long-ships transported hairy northern voyagers far and wide, where they not only raided but also traded, explored and settled new lands, encountered unfamiliar races, and embarked on pilgrimages and crusades. The Norsemen travelled to all corners of the medieval world and beyond; north to the wastelands of arctic Scandinavia, south to the politically turbulent heartlands of medieval Christendom, west across the wild seas to Greenland and the fringes of the North American continent, and east down the Russian waterways trading silver, skins, and slaves. Beyond the Northlands explores this world through the stories that the Vikings told about themselves in their sagas. But the depiction of the Viking world in the Old Norse-Icelandic sagas goes far beyond historical facts. What emerges from these tales is a mixture of realism and fantasy, quasi-historical adventures, and exotic wonder-tales that rocket far beyond the horizon of reality. On the crackling brown pages of saga manuscripts, trolls, dragons, and outlandish tribes jostle for position with explorers, traders, and kings. To explore the sagas and the world that produced them, Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough now takes her own trip through the dramatic landscapes that they describe. Along the way, she illuminates the rich but often confusing saga accounts with a range of other evidence: archaeological finds, rune-stones, medieval world maps, encyclopaedic manuscripts, and texts from as far away as Byzantium and Baghdad. As her journey across the Old Norse world shows, by situating the sagas against the revealing background of this other evidence, we can begin at least to understand just how the world was experienced, remembered, and imagined by this unique culture from the outermost edge of Europe so many centuries ago.

Nordic Terrors

Nordic Terrors PDF Author: Robert William Rix
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 1839990465
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 119

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Book Description
In late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British literature, Scandinavia emerged as a setting for Gothic terror. This book explores the extensive use of Nordic superstition as it provided a vocabulary for Gothic texts, examining the cultural significance these references held for writers exploring Britain’s northern heritage. In Gothic publications, Nordic superstition sometimes parallels the representations of Catholicism, allowing writers to gloat at its phantasms and delusions. Thus, runic spells, incantations, and necromantic communications (of which Norse tradition afforded many examples) could replace practices usually assigned to Catholic superstition. Yet Nordic lore did more than merely supplant hackneyed Gothic formulas; it presented readers with an alternative conception of ‘Otherness’. Nordic texts—chiefly based on the Edda and the supernatural Scandinavian ballad tradition—were seen as pre-Christian beliefs of the Gothic (i.e., Germanic) peoples, including the Anglo-Saxons. The book traces the development of this Nordic Gothic, situating it within wider literary, historical, political, and cultural contexts.

Haunted Soundtracks

Haunted Soundtracks PDF Author: Kevin J. Donnelly
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501389564
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
The turn of the millennium has heralded an outgrowth of culture that demonstrates an awareness of the ephemeral nature of history and the complexity underpinning the relationship between location and the past. This has been especially apparent in the shifting relationship between landscape, memory and sound in film, television and other media. The result is growing interest in soundtracks, as part of audiovisual culture, as well as an interest in the spectral aspects of culture more generally. This collection of essays focuses on audiovisual forms that foreground landscape, sound and memory. The scope of inquiry emphasises the ghostly qualities of a certain body of soundtracks, extending beyond merely the idea of 'scary films' or 'haunted houses.' Rather, the notion of sonic haunting is tied to ideas of trauma, anxiety or nostalgia associated with spatial and temporal dislocation in contemporary society. Touchstones for the approach are the concepts of psychogeography and hauntology, pervasive and established critical strategies that are interrogated and refined in relation to the reification of the spectral within the soundtracks under consideration here.

A Scientific, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour

A Scientific, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour PDF Author: Angela Byrne
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429762348
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 398

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Book Description
A Scientific, Antiquarian, and Picturesque Tour: John Lee In England, Wales and Ireland, 1806–7, is a critical edition of the travel diaries and sketchbooks of Dr John Lee FRS (né Fiott, 1783–1866), published for the first time. Shortly after graduating from Cambridge University, Lee set out on a seven-month walking tour through England, Wales, and Ireland on 31 July 1806. His itinerary included most of the key sites on the ‘home tour’, such as Llangollen, the Lakes of Killarney, and the Wicklow Mountains, but also less- visited sites such as the Blasket Islands, Co. Kerry. Best known later in life as an astronomer, antiquary, Liberal campaigner for women’s suffrage, and generous philanthropist, Lee’s lifelong interest in mineralogy, antiquities, industry, and popular culture, and his concern for the poor, are evident throughout these early diaries. Most of the content relates to Ireland, where Lee arrived on 29 August 1806 and remained until 6 March 1807. His observations paint a picture of Irish social, cultural, and political life in the aftermath of the 1798 and 1803 rebellions, and the 1801 Act of Union. The memory of 1798 looms large in the diaries, as Lee recorded conversations with witnesses and participants on both sides. These observations are laid against the backdrop of Lee’s assessments of the Irish landscape, evaluated verbally and pictorially within the frameworks of the sublime and picturesque. Lee also paid much attention to the physical remains of Irish history (earthen forts, early-Christian religious sites) and to the endurance of Gaelic culture (the Irish language, Gaelic games, ‘pattern’ days) that made Ireland exotic to the English visitor. The volume includes an annotated transcription of Lee’s five diaries and notes from his three sketchbooks, reproductions of some of his sketches, and a critical introduction setting Lee’s diaries within their historical, cultural, and intellectual contexts. It makes Lee’s detailed observations available to researchers for the first time, a valuable resource for Irish social, cultural, and political history, local history, and the histories of travel and antiquarianism.

Relational Engagements of the Indigenous Americas

Relational Engagements of the Indigenous Americas PDF Author: Melissa R. Baltus
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498555365
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
In Relational Engagements of the Indigenous Americas, Melissa R. Baltus and Sarah E. Baires critically examine the current understanding of relationality in the Americas, covering a diverse range of topics from Indigenous cosmologies to the life-world of the Inuit dog. The contributors to this wide-ranging edited collection interrogate and discuss the multiple natures of relational ontologies, touching on the ever-changing, fluid, and varied ways that people, both alive and dead, relate and related to their surrounding world. While the case studies presented in this collection all stem from the New World, the Indigenous histories and archaeological interpretations vary widely and the boundaries of relational theory challenge current preconceptions about earlier ways of life in the Indigenous Americas.

Traditions, Traps and Trends

Traditions, Traps and Trends PDF Author: Jarich Oosten
Publisher: University of Alberta
ISBN: 1772124028
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
The transfer of knowledge is a key issue in the North as Indigenous Peoples meet the ongoing need to adapt to cultural and environmental change. In eight essays, experts survey critical issues surrounding the knowledge practices of the Inuit of northern Canada and Greenland and the Northern Sámi of Scandinavia, and the difficulties of transferring that knowledge from one generation to the next. Reflecting the ongoing work of the Research Group Circumpolar Cultures, these multidisciplinary essays offer fresh understandings through history and across geography as scholars analyze cultural, ecological, and political aspects of peoples in transition. Traditions, Traps and Trends is an important book for students and scholars in anthropology and ethnography and for everyone interested in the Circumpolar North. Contributors: Cunera Buijs, Frédéric Laugrand, Barbara Helen Miller, Thea Olsthoorn, Jarich Oosten, Willem Rasing, Kim van Dam, Nellejet Zorgdrager

Gift-Giving and Materiality in Europe, 1300-1600

Gift-Giving and Materiality in Europe, 1300-1600 PDF Author: Lars Kjaer
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350183709
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Gift-giving played an important role in political, social and religious life in medieval and early modern Europe. This volume explores an under-examined and often-overlooked aspect of this phenomenon: the material nature of the gift. Drawing on examples from both medieval and early modern Europe, the authors from the UK and across Europe explore the craftsmanship involved in the production of gifts and the use of exotic objects and animals, from elephant bones to polar bears and 'living' holy objects, to communicate power, class and allegiance. Gifts were publicly given, displayed and worn and so the book explores the ways in which, as tangible objects, gifts could help to construct religious and social worlds. But the beauty and material richness of the gift could also provoke anxieties. Classical and Christian authorities agreed that, in gift-giving, it was supposed to be the thought that counted and consequently wealth and grandeur raised worries about greed and corruption: was a valuable ring payment for sexual services or a token of love and a promise of marriage? Over three centuries, Gift-Giving and Materiality in Europe, 1300-1600: Gifts as Objects reflects on the possibilities, practicalities and concerns raised by the material character of gifts.