The Sagas of Icelanders

The Sagas of Icelanders PDF Author: Annette Lassen
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040268927
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 126

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Book Description
This book offers an accessible and concise introduction to the sagas of Icelanders, perfect for both general and academic readers. Authored by a recognized expert, it immerses readers in the sagas’ world, exploring their cultural and historical context. The book surveys major themes such as belief systems, family dynamics, legal matters, honor, and gender roles, elucidating Icelandic society’s fundamental worldview. Covering diverse tales from the Middle Ages, the sagas depict the struggles of ordinary farmers, fierce heroes, and shrewd women, including epic expeditions to Greenland and Vinland. The book also examines the influence of foreign literature, manuscript evidence, and dating, categorizing the sagas into three periods. Additionally, it explores their unique literary style, including paranormal elements and skaldic poetry. The final section provides concise summaries and information about the dating, manuscripts, and transmission of the forty preserved sagas, offering a comprehensive understanding of these captivating narratives.

The Sagas of Icelanders

The Sagas of Icelanders PDF Author: Annette Lassen
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040268927
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 126

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book offers an accessible and concise introduction to the sagas of Icelanders, perfect for both general and academic readers. Authored by a recognized expert, it immerses readers in the sagas’ world, exploring their cultural and historical context. The book surveys major themes such as belief systems, family dynamics, legal matters, honor, and gender roles, elucidating Icelandic society’s fundamental worldview. Covering diverse tales from the Middle Ages, the sagas depict the struggles of ordinary farmers, fierce heroes, and shrewd women, including epic expeditions to Greenland and Vinland. The book also examines the influence of foreign literature, manuscript evidence, and dating, categorizing the sagas into three periods. Additionally, it explores their unique literary style, including paranormal elements and skaldic poetry. The final section provides concise summaries and information about the dating, manuscripts, and transmission of the forty preserved sagas, offering a comprehensive understanding of these captivating narratives.

An Introduction to the Sagas of Icelanders

An Introduction to the Sagas of Icelanders PDF Author: Carl Phelpstead
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813057566
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
Combining an accessible approach with innovative scholarship, An Introduction to the Sagas of Icelanders provides up-to-date perspectives on a unique medieval literary genre that has fascinated the English-speaking world for more than two centuries. Carl Phelpstead draws on historical context, contemporary theory, and close reading to deepen our understanding of Icelandic saga narratives about the island’s early history. Phelpstead explores the origins and cultural setting of the genre, demonstrating the rich variety of oral and written source traditions that writers drew on to produce the sagas. He provides fresh, theoretically informed discussions of major themes such as national identity, gender and sexuality, and nature and the supernatural, relating the Old Norse-Icelandic texts to questions addressed by postcolonial studies, feminist and queer theory, and ecocriticism. He then presents readings of select individual sagas, pointing out how the genre’s various source traditions and thematic concerns interact. Including an overview of the history of English translations that shows how they have been stimulated and shaped by ideas about identity, and featuring a glossary of critical terms, this book is an essential resource for students of the literary form. A volume in the series New Perspectives on Medieval Literature: Authors and Traditions, edited by R. Barton Palmer and Tison Pugh

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.

The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, Including 49 Tales: An epic : Njal's saga

The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, Including 49 Tales: An epic : Njal's saga PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Old Norse literature
Languages : en
Pages : 488

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Book Description
The set contains "the first complete, coordinated English translation of The sagas of Icelanders, forty in all, together with forty-nine of the shorter Tales of Icelanders."--Preface.

Comic Sagas and Tales from Iceland

Comic Sagas and Tales from Iceland PDF Author:
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141975520
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 375

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Book Description
Comic Sagas and Tales brings together the very finest Icelandic stories from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, a time of civil unrest and social upheaval. With feuding families and moments of grotesque violence, the sagas see such classic mythological figures as murdered fathers, disguised beggars, corrupt chieftains and avenging sons do battle with axes, words and cunning. The tales, meanwhile, follow heroes and comical fools through dreams, voyages and religious conversions in medieval Iceland and beyond. Shaped by Iceland's oral culture and their conversion to Christianity, these stories are works of ironic humour and stylistic innovation.

The Sagas of the Icelanders

The Sagas of the Icelanders PDF Author: Jane Smiley
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141933267
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 1195

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Book Description
In Iceland, the age of the Vikings is also known as the Saga Age. A unique body of medieval literature, the Sagas rank with the world’s great literary treasures – as epic as Homer, as deep in tragedy as Sophocles, as engagingly human as Shakespeare. Set around the turn of the last millennium, these stories depict with an astonishingly modern realism the lives and deeds of the Norse men and women who first settled in Iceland and of their descendants, who ventured farther west to Greenland and, ultimately, North America. Sailing as far from the archetypal heroic adventure as the long ships did from home, the Sagas are written with psychological intensity, peopled by characters with depth, and explore perennial human issues like love, hate, fate and freedom.

Saga

Saga PDF Author: Jeff Janoda
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
ISBN: 089733812X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
This retelling of the ancient Saga of the People of Eyri is a modern classic. Absolutely gripping and compulsively readable, Booklist said this book, "does what good historical fiction is supposed to do: put a face on history that is recognizable to all." And medieval expert Tom Shippey, writing for the Times Literary Supplement said, "Sagas look like novels superficially, in their size and layout and plain language, but making their narratives into novels is a trick which has proved beyond most who have tried it. Janoda's Saga provides a model of how to do it: pick out the hidden currents, imagine how they would seem to peripheral characters, and as with all historical novels, load the narrative with period detail drawn from the scholars. No better saga adaptation has been yet written."

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

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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.

Saga Land

Saga Land PDF Author: Richard Fidler
Publisher: HarperCollins Australia
ISBN: 1460708202
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
'I adored this book - a wondrous compendium of Iceland's best sagas' - Hannah Kent A new friendship. An unforgettable journey. A beautiful and bloody history. This is Iceland as you've never read it before ... Broadcaster Richard Fidler and author Kári Gíslason are good friends. They share a deep attachment to the sagas of Iceland - the true stories of the first Viking families who settled on that remote island in the Middle Ages.These are tales of blood feuds, of dangerous women, and people who are compelled to kill the ones they love the most. The sagas are among the greatest stories ever written, but the identity of their authors is largely unknown. Together, Richard and Kári travel across Iceland, to the places where the sagas unfolded a thousand years ago. They cross fields, streams and fjords to immerse themselves in the folklore of this fiercely beautiful island. And there is another mission: to resolve a longstanding family mystery - a gift from Kari's Icelandic father that might connect him to the greatest of the saga authors.

Men and Masculinities in the Sagas of Icelanders

Men and Masculinities in the Sagas of Icelanders PDF Author: Gareth Lloyd Evans
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192566857
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
This volume is the first book-length study of masculinities in the Sagas of Icelanders. Spanning the entire corpus of the Sagas of Icelanders—and taking into account a number of little-studied sagas as well as the more well-known works—it comprehensively interrogates the construction, operation, and problematization of masculinities in this genre. Men and Masculinities in the Sagas of Icelanders elucidates the dominant model of masculinity that operates in the sagas, demonstrates how masculinities and masculine characters function within these texts, and investigates the means by which the sagas, and saga characters, may subvert masculine dominance. Combining close literary analysis with insights drawn from sociological theories of hegemonic and subordinated masculinities, notions of homosociality and performative gender, and psychoanalytic frameworks, the book brings to men and masculinities in saga literature the same scrutiny traditionally brought to the study of women and femininities. Ultimately, the volume demonstrates that masculinity is not simply glorified in the sagas, but is represented as being both inherently fragile and a burden to all characters, masculine and non-masculine alike.