King Harald's Saga


Book Description

This compelling Icelandic history describes the life of King Harald Hardradi, from his battles across Europe and Russia to his final assault on England in 1066, less than three weeks before the invasion of William the Conqueror. It was a battle that led to his death and marked the end of an era in which Europe had been dominated by the threat of Scandinavian forces. Despite England's triumph, it also played a crucial part in fatally weakening the English army immediately prior to the Norman Conquest, changing the course of history. Taken from the Heimskringla - Snorri Sturluson's complete account of Norway from prehistoric times to 1177 - this is a brilliantly human depiction of the turbulent life and savage death of the last great Norse warrior-king.




Song, Dance and Poetry of the Court of Scotland Under King James VI


Book Description

This study examines the song repertory and two poets, Alexander Scott and Alexander Montgomerie, in sixteenth-century Scotland.







Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland


Book Description

This book explores the anxious and unstable relationship between court poetry and various forms of authority, political and cultural, in England and Scotland at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Through poems by Skelton, Dunbar, Douglas, Hawes, Lyndsay and Barclay, it examines the paths by which court poetry and its narrators seek multiple forms of legitimation: from royal and institutional sources, but also in the media of script and print. The book is the first for some time to treat English and Scottish material of its period together, and responds to European literary contexts, the dialogue between vernacular and Latin matter, and current critical theory. In so doing it claims that public and occasional writing evokes a counter-discourse in the secrecies and subversions of medieval love-fictions. The result is a poetry that queries and at times cancels the very authority to speak that it so proudly promotes.







Court poetry


Book Description




St. Nicholas


Book Description




Into the Twilight of Sanskrit Court Poetry


Book Description

At the turn of the twelfth-century into the thirteenth, at the court of King Laksmanasena of Bengal, Sanskrit poetry showed profound and sudden changes: a new social scope made its definitive entrance into high literature.Ê Courtly and pastoral, rural and urban, cosmopolitan and vernacular confronted each other in a commingling of high and low styles. A literary salon in what is now Bangladesh, at the eastern extreme of the nexus of regional courtly cultures that defined the age, seems to have implicitly reformulated its entire literary system in the context of the imminent breakdown of the old courtly world, as Turkish power expanded and redefined the landscape.Ê Through close readings of a little-known corpus of texts from eastern India, this ambitious book demonstrates how a local and rural sensibility came to infuse the cosmopolitan language of Sanskrit, creating a regional literary idiom that would define the emergence of the Bengali language and its literary traditions.




The Rats' Feast: A Tagore Omnibus


Book Description

A dry-fruit seller from Kabul with a heart of molten gold and a fist of iron. Escapades of naughty schoolboys travelling on a train with an unusual teacher. The decisive battle of skill and oratory between two poets in a king's court. The everydayjoys and sadness of a sick boy who sees the world through a half-open window of hope. A bemusing world of Cards/based on rules and class divides. Morning and night/life and death, poverty and riches, working girls and growing boys... everything touched Rabindranath Tagore's mind and heart/and flowed into writing through his magical, unstoppable pen. Tagore's genius has yet to be fathomed completely. His writings continue to stay fresh and crisp/ surprising us/ provoking us and moving us a hundred years after he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Original and touching/ intense and unforgettable, the stories, plays and poems in this volume have been carefully selected and translated into a definitive and valuable collection of Tagore's masterpieces.