| |
| |
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
296 pages
|
This is the first book in English to deal with the twin subjects of Old Norse poetry and the various vernacular treatises on native poetry that were a conspicuous feature of medieval intellectual life in Iceland and the Orkneys from the mid-twelfth to the fourteenth centuries. Its aim is to give a clear description of the rich poetic tradition of early Scandinavia, particularly in Iceland, where it reached its zenith, and to demonstrate the social contexts that favoured poetic composition, from the oral societies of the early Viking Age in Norway and its colonies to the devout compositions of literate Christian clerics in fourteenth-century Iceland. The author analyses the two dominant poetic modes, eddic and skaldic, giving fresh examples of their various styles and subjects; looks at the prose contexts in which most Old Norse poetry has been preserved; and discusses problems of interpretation that arise because of the poetry's mode of transmission. She is concerned throughout to link indigenous theory with practice, beginning with the pre-Christian ideology of poets as favoured by the god ódinn and concluding with the Christian notion that a plain style best conveys the poet's message. |
Contents
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
304 pages
|
Old Norse myths and
legends usually distinguish clearly between creatures of This World (gods and
human beings) and those of the Other (giants, giantesses, dwarves, prophetesses,
monsters and the dead). This book analyses ten traditional patterns of
cross-gender encounter between the two: 1. A god or king marries a giantess. 2. A goddess helps her human lover to gain knowledge from a giantess. 3. A king or god consults a hostile prophetess. 4. A prophetess predicts a hero's career against his will. 5. Thor or a human transformation of him destroys a hostile giantess, or 6. Receives help from a friendly one. 7. Othinn seduces a giantess. 8. A human devotee of Othinn has an affair with a giantess. 9. A human being calls up a dead relative to gain magical protection. 10. A widow calls her dead husband back for one night. It considers the evidence for their pre-Christian origins, discusses how far individual poets and prose writers were free to modify them, and suggests that they survived in medieval Christian society because they provided a non-dogmatic way of resolving social and psychological problems connected with growing up, succession from one generation to the next, sexual relationships and bereavement. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
