Icelandic Folklore and the Cultural Memory of Religious Change

Icelandic Folklore and the Cultural Memory of Religious Change PDF Author: Eric Shane Bryan
Publisher: ARC Humanities Press
ISBN: 9781641894654
Category : Folk literature, Icelandic
Languages : en
Pages : 162

Get Book Here

Book Description
A cultural memory of belief in the North placing Icelandic folktales in a context of religious doctrine, social history, and Old Norse sagas and poetry.

Icelandic Folklore and the Cultural Memory of Religious Change

Icelandic Folklore and the Cultural Memory of Religious Change PDF Author: Eric Shane Bryan
Publisher: ARC Humanities Press
ISBN: 9781641894654
Category : Folk literature, Icelandic
Languages : en
Pages : 162

Get Book Here

Book Description
A cultural memory of belief in the North placing Icelandic folktales in a context of religious doctrine, social history, and Old Norse sagas and poetry.

The Little Book of the Hidden People

The Little Book of the Hidden People PDF Author: Alda Sigmundsdóttir
Publisher: Little Books Publishing
ISBN: 1970125209
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 100

Get Book Here

Book Description
Icelandic folklore is rife with tales of elves and hidden people that inhabited hills and rocks in the landscape. But what do those elf stories really tell us about the Iceland of old and the people who lived there? In this book, author Alda Sigmundsdóttir presents twenty translated elf stories from Icelandic folklore, along with fascinating notes on the context from which they sprung. The international media has had a particular infatuation with the Icelanders’ elf belief, generally using it to propagate some kind of “kooky Icelanders” myth. Yet Iceland’s elf folklore, at its core, reflects the plight of a nation living in abject poverty on the edge of the inhabitable world, and its people’s heroic efforts to survive, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. That is what the stories of the elves, or hidden people, are really about. In a country that was, at times, virtually uninhabitable, where poverty was endemic and death and grief a part of daily life, the Icelanders nurtured a belief in a world that existed parallel to their own. This was the world of the hidden people, which more often than not was a projection of the most fervent dreams and desires of the human population. The hidden people lived inside hillocks, cliffs, or boulders, very close to the abodes of the humans. Their homes were furnished with fine, sumptuous objects. Their clothes were luxurious, their adornments beautiful. Their livestock was better and fatter, their sheep yielded more wool than regular sheep, their crops were more bounteous. They even had supernatural powers: they could make themselves visible or invisible at will, and they could see the future. To the Icelanders, stories of elves and hidden people are an integral part of the cultural and psychological fabric of their nation. They are a part of their identity, a reflection of the struggles, hopes, resilience, and endurance of their people. What you will read about in The Little Book of the Hidden People: • The fascination in the international media: why are they so obsessed with elves? • The meaning of elf: what do hidden people stories tell us about the psyche of the Icelanders of old? • The elves' badassery—they could make or break your fortune so you’d better be nice! • The ljúflingar ... hidden men who became the lovers of mortal women • Glamorous and regal: why were the elves so damn good-looking? • The grim realities: what do scholars believe about all those children abducted by elves? ... and so much more!

Icelandic Folktales and Legends

Icelandic Folktales and Legends PDF Author: Jacqueline Simpson
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520021167
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Get Book Here

Book Description
A translated selection devoted to supernatural beings, ghosts, and magic practices.

Icelandic Folktales and Legends

Icelandic Folktales and Legends PDF Author: Jacqueline Simpson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780520038356
Category : Folk literature, Icelandic
Languages : en
Pages : 206

Get Book Here

Book Description


Icelandic Folktales

Icelandic Folktales PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Folklore
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description


Bridges between Worlds

Bridges between Worlds PDF Author: Corinne G. Dempsey
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019062504X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book explores Icelandic spirit work, known as andleg mal, which features trance and healing practices that span earth and spirit realms, historical eras, scientific and supernatural worldviews, and cross-Atlantic cultures. Based on years of fieldwork conducted in the northern Icelandic town of Akureyri, Bridges between Worlds excavates andleg mal's roots in layers of Icelandic history, and examines how this practice steeped in ancient folklore functions in the modern world. Weaving personal stories and anecdotes with accessibly written accounts of Icelandic religious and cultural traditions, Corinne Dempsey humanizes spirit practices that are usually demonized or romanticized. While andleg mal may appear remote and exotic, those who practice it are not. Icelanders today are among the most highly educated people on the planet, well-connected to global technologies and economies. Andleg mal practitioners are no exception; many of them are members of mainstream society who work day jobs. They often keep their spirit involvement under wraps because, though their spirit encounters are celebrated, they can also be frightening and embarrassing. For those who claim the "gift" of openness to the spirit world, andleg mal offers a means of daily spiritual support, helping to diminish fear and self-doubt and providing benefits to those on both sides of the divide. While recent years have seen an unprecedented boom in tourist travel to Iceland, Dempsey sheds light on a profoundly important, but thus far poorly understood element of the region's culture. Her aim is not to explain away andleg mál but to build a bridge of comprehensibility through empathy for the participants who are, after all, not so different from the reader.

Icelandic Spiritualism

Icelandic Spiritualism PDF Author: Loftur Reimar Gissurarson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351292145
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 330

Get Book Here

Book Description
Icelandic Spiritualism is an engaging social anthropological study of the place of spiritualism in Icelandic church and society during the first half of the twentieth century. Challenging standard theoretical approaches to the study of religion, the book contributes a wealth of data on the history of religion and psychical research, presenting it in a vivid descriptive narrative. The authors trace the role of the spirit world in Icelandic culture, giving particular attention to the distinctive history of Iceland's "conversion" to Christianity. They focus on the appearance of "modern" spiritualism as a distinct phenomenon in Icelandic life. The book studies the interaction between various groups in fin-de-siecle Icelandic society, not least in the state church, as mediumistic phenomena became widely reported through the newspapers. To some, Icelandic spiritualism may be considered a deviant case of Protestantism. What makes this book interesting, however, is that the spiritualism is seen as integral to Iceland's transition to modernity. While Icelandic Spiritualism concentrates mainly on the first half of the twentieth century, it also provides a summary of the continuation of spiritualist phenomena up to the current period. This intriguing study will be of interest to theologians, philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists.

Iceland – Ireland

Iceland – Ireland PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004505334
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 221

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume offers the first comparative account from contemporary and historical perspectives of Irish and Icelandic memory cultures and addresses the broader dynamics of trans-cultural memory that are surfaced in such comparative approaches of geographically peripheral islands.

The Icelandic Sagas

The Icelandic Sagas PDF Author: Sir William Alexander Craigie
Publisher: Theclassics.Us
ISBN: 9781230408187
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 22

Get Book Here

Book Description
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1913 edition. Excerpt: ... / and outside of that, all that is known of early Germanic religion is meagre indeed. In the beliefs which lie on the borders of mythology and religion, in the supernatural of every kind, the sagas are extremely rich, and few literatures possess more impressive ghost-stories. On this account the sagas are of immense value to the student of folk-lore, even if great caution must be exercised in drawing inferences from them, for reasons which will appear in a subsequent chapter. HISTORICAL, SAGAS RELATING TO ICELAND AND GREENLAND Landndma-bdk, would be sufficient in themselves to show that a very great knowledge of the past history of the island existed in Iceland in the twelfth century; but it would have been impossible to imagine how rich and full the traditions actually were, if so many of them had not formed the bases of separate sagas. In almost every district of Iceland, but especially (as we have already said) in the west and north, the memory of great men and distinguished families had been handed down, and out of these traditions came CHAPTER III the collection of sagas now commonly grouped under the name of Mendinga sbgur. Although they may thus be classed under a common title, and have certain characteristic features in common, these sagas diner greatly from each other in length, and in the extent to which they can be regarded as having a genuinely historical character. Some are quite short, covering thirty or forty small pages, or even less, while the larger extend to two, three, or even four hundred. In most cases it is clear that the shorter sagas are more original, or represent an earlier literary stage, than the longer ones; the latter are either composite, made up by working together two or three separate narratives, or...

Icelandic Legends

Icelandic Legends PDF Author: Jón Árnason
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : English literature
Languages : en
Pages : 834

Get Book Here

Book Description