Theorizing Old Norse Myth
Author : Stefan Brink
Publisher :
Page : 270 pages
File Size : 47,86 MB
Release : 2017
Category : Electronic books
ISBN : 9782503554211
Theorizing Old Norse Myth
Author : Stefan Brink
Publisher : Brepols Publishers
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 49,8 MB
Release : 2017
Category : Mythology
ISBN : 9782503553030
Book Description
This collection explores the theoretical and methodological foundations through which we understand Old Norse myths and the mythological world, and the medieval sources in which we find expressions of these. Some contributions take a broad, comparative perspective; some address specific details of Old Norse myths and mythology; and some devote their attention to questions concerning either individual gods and deities, or more topographical and spatial matters (such as conceptions of pagan cult sites). The elements discussed provide an introductory and general overview of scholarly enquiry into myth and ritual, as well as an attempt to define myth and theory for Old Norse scholarship. The articles also offer a rehabilitation of the comparative method alongside a discussion of the concept of 'cultural memory' and of the cognitive functions that myths may have performed in early Scandinavian society. Particular subjects of interest include analyses of the enigmatic god Heimdallr, the more well-known Oðinn, the deities, the female asynjur, and the 'elves' or alfar. Text-based discussions are set alongside recent archaeological discoveries of cult buildings and cult sites in Scandinavia, together with a discussion of the most enigmatic site of all: Uppsala in Sweden. The key themes discussed throughout this volume are brought together in the concluding chapter, in a comprehensive summary that sheds new light on current scholarly perspectives.
Theorizing Myth
Author : Bruce Lincoln
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 328 pages
File Size : 20,2 MB
Release : 1999
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9780226482019
Book Description
In Theorizing Myth, Bruce Lincoln traces the way scholars and others have used the category of "myth" to fetishize or deride certain kinds of stories, usually those told by others. He begins by showing that mythos yielded to logos not as part of a (mythic) "Greek miracle," but as part of struggles over political, linguistic, and epistemological authority occasioned by expanded use of writing and the practice of Athenian democracy. Lincoln then turns his attention to the period when myth was recuperated as a privileged type of narrative, a process he locates in the political and cultural ferment of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Here, he connects renewed enthusiasm for myth to the nexus of Romanticism, nationalism, and Aryan triumphalism, particularly the quest for a language and set of stories on which nation-states could be founded. In the final section of this wide-ranging book, Lincoln advocates a fresh approach to the study of myth, providing varied case studies to support his view of myth—and scholarship on myth—as ideology in narrative form.
Old Norse Mythology
Author : John Lindow
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 249 pages
File Size : 27,2 MB
Release : 2020
Category : History
ISBN : 0190852259
Book Description
"This book treats from the perspective of the series "World mythologies in theory and in everyday life" the body of texts from medieval Scandinavia, mostly Iceland, usually known as "Norse mythology" or "Scandinavian mythology." Specifically, it constitutes a case study of a "literary or textual mythology," that is, a mythology from the past that we know only through written texts that have been left to us, augmented in a few cases by artifacts and images. This case is particularly interesting because the texts (with a tiny handful of enigmatic exceptions) were recorded centuries after the Nordic peoples had abandoned the religion associated with the mythology and converted to Christianity. The mythology lived on without direct connection to ritual activity or religious conviction. Drawing both on sources from before the conversion and on comparative analysis, it is certainly possible to reach informed inferences about the mythology before the conversion to Christianity-that is, when it existed as part of the pre-Christian religion of the Nordic peoples and their successors. From the perspective of the mythologies of the world, what is perhaps most important about these inferences is that this pre-Christian mythology was not a canonical mythology, since it almost certainly lacked a canon of sacred texts such as one finds in the great world religions of today. The focus of the book is not the mythology in and of itself, as would be true of a handbook, but rather how particular historical and intellectual circumstances formed conceptions about it."--
Studies in the Transmission and Reception of Old Norse Literature
Author : Judy Quinn
Publisher : Brepols Publishers
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 17,7 MB
Release : 2016
Category : European literature
ISBN : 9782503555539
Book Description
The compelling world of the Vikings and their descendants, preserved in the sagas, poetry, and mythology of medieval Iceland, has been an important source of inspiration to artists and writers across Europe, as well as to scholars devoted to editing and interpreting the manuscript texts. A variety of creative ventures have been born of the processes of imagining this distant 'hyperborean' world. The essays in this volume, by scholars from Italy, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Germany, and the UK, examine the scholarly and artistic reception of a variety of Old Norse texts from the beginnings of the manuscript tradition in twelfth-century Iceland to contemporary poetry, crime fiction, and graphic novels produced in Britain, Ireland, Italy, and Iceland. The influence of Old Norse literature is further explored in the context of Shakespeare's plays, eighteenth-century Italian opera, the Romantic movement in Sweden and Denmark, and the so-called 'nordic renaissance' of the late nineteenth century (including the works of August Strindberg and William Morris), as well as in some of the political movements of twentieth-century northern Europe. Interest in Old Norse literature is charted as it spread beyond intellectual centres in Europe and out to a wider reading and viewing public. The influence of the 'hyperborean muse' is evident throughout this book, as the idea of early Nordic culture has been refashioned to reflect contemporary notions and ideals.
Explaining, Interpreting, and Theorizing Religion and Myth
Author : Nickolas P. Roubekas
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 405 pages
File Size : 42,4 MB
Release : 2020-07-20
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9004435026
Book Description
Taking its cue from Robert A. Segal’s work, Explaining, Interpreting, and Theorizing Religion and Myth: Contributions in Honor of Robert A. Segal offers a set of essays by renowned scholars addressing the persisting question of how to approach religion and myth as academic categories.
The Nordic Apocalypse
Author : Terry Gunnell
Publisher : Brepols Pub
Page : 238 pages
File Size : 23,16 MB
Release : 2013
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9782503541822
Book Description
This book, with roots in a conference held in Iceland in May 2008, contains a series of articles reflecting modern approaches to the text, context, and performance of the Old Norse poem Voluspa, perhaps the best known and most discussed of all the Eddic poems. Rather than attempting to cover Eddic or Skaldic poetry as a genre, the main aim of this book is to present an overview of the 'state of the art' with regard to one particular Eddic poem. It focuses especially on the poem's possible context within the apocalyptic tradition of Northern Europe in the early medieval period. The approaches of the articles range from placing the poem within the pre-Christian oral tradition to placing it within the written and liturgical context of Christianity. Two other chapters offer a possible context for the poem by examining the nature and background of the early medieval image of the Apocalypse known to have been on display in the Cathedral of Holar in northern Iceland. While the approaches are focused on one specific poem, they are nonetheless applicable to many other Eddic works.
Mnemonic Echoing in Old Norse Sagas and Eddas
Author : Pernille Hermann
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 276 pages
File Size : 32,98 MB
Release : 2022-08-22
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 3110674955
Book Description
This book brings together Old Norse-Icelandic literature and critical strategies of memory, and argues that some of the particularities of this vernacular textual tradition are explained by the fact that this literature derives from, represents, and incorporates into its designs mnemonic devices of different kinds. Even if Old Norse-Icelandic manuscript culture is relatively silent about the mnemonic context of the literature, the texts themselves exhibit multiple reminiscences of memory. By showing that this literature reveals glimpses of mnemonic technologies at the same time as it testifies to a cultural memory, this study demonstrates how ‘the past’, and narrative traditions about the past, were constructed in a dynamic relationship with ideas that existed at the time the texts were written. Moreover, the book deals with the function of memory in early book-culture, with metaphors of memory, and with mnemonic cues such as spatiality and visuality. With its new readings of canonical texts like the Íslendingasǫgur, the Prose Edda and selected eddic poems, as well as of less widely studied branches of Old Norse-Icelandic literature, such as the sagas of bishops and religious texts, this book will be of interest to Old Norse scholars and to scholars interested in medieval Scandinavia and memory studies.
Handbook of Pre-Modern Nordic Memory Studies
Author : Jürg Glauser
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 1190 pages
File Size : 41,66 MB
Release : 2018-11-19
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 311043136X
Book Description
In recent years, the field of Memory Studies has emerged as a key approach in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and has increasingly shown its ability to open new windows on Nordic Studies as well. The entries in this book document the work-to-date of this approach on the pre-modern Nordic world (mainly the Viking Age and the Middle Ages, but including as well both earlier and later periods). Given that Memory Studies is an ever expanding critical strategy, the approximately eighty contributors in this volume also discuss the potential for future research in this area. Topics covered range from texts to performance to visual and other aspects of material culture, all approached from within an interdisciplinary framework. International specialists, coming from such relevant fields as archaeology, mythology, history of religion, folklore, history, law, art, literature, philology, language, and mediality, offer assessments on the relevance of Memory Studies to their disciplines and show it at work in case studies. Finally, this handbook demonstrates the various levels of culture where memory had a critical impact in the pre-modern North and how deeply embedded the role of memory is in the material itself.
Adam of Bremen’s Gesta Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae Pontificum
Author : Grzegorz Bartusik
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 344 pages
File Size : 45,48 MB
Release : 2022-07-26
Category : History
ISBN : 1000610381
Book Description
Adam of Bremen’s Gesta Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae Pontificum is one of the most important accounts documenting the history, geography and ethnology of Northern and Central-Eastern Europe in the period between the ninth and eleventh centuries. Its author, a canon of the archdiocese of Hamburg-Bremen, remains an almost anonymous figure but his text is an essential source for the study of the early medieval Baltic. However, despite its undisputed status, past scholarship has tended to treat Adam of Bremen’s account as, on the one hand, an historically accurate document, or, alternatively, a literary artefact containing few, if any, reliable historical facts. The studies collected in this volume investigate the origins and context of the Gesta and will enable researchers to better understand and evaluate the historical veracity of the text.
