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Egil, the Viking Poet focuses on one of the best-known Icelandic sagas, that of the extraordinary hero Egil Skallagrimsson. Descended from a lineage of trolls, shape-shifters, and warriors, Egil’s transformation from a precocious and... more
Egil, the Viking Poet focuses on one of the best-known Icelandic sagas, that of the extraordinary hero Egil Skallagrimsson. Descended from a lineage of trolls, shape-shifters, and warriors, Egil’s transformation from a precocious and murderous child into a raider, mercenary, litigant, landholder, and poet epitomizes the many facets of Viking legend.
The contributors to this collection of essays approach Egil’s story from a variety of perspectives, including psychology, philology, network theory, social history, and literary theory. Strikingly original, their essays will appeal not only to dedicated students of Old Norse-Icelandic literature but also to those working in the fields of Viking studies, comparative ethnology, and folklore.
The contributors to this collection of essays approach Egil’s story from a variety of perspectives, including psychology, philology, network theory, social history, and literary theory. Strikingly original, their essays will appeal not only to dedicated students of Old Norse-Icelandic literature but also to those working in the fields of Viking studies, comparative ethnology, and folklore.
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New Norse Studies, edited by Jeffrey Turco, gathers twelve original essays engaging aspects of Old Norse–Icelandic literature that continue to kindle the scholarly imagination in the twenty-first century. The assembled authors examine the... more
New Norse Studies, edited by Jeffrey Turco, gathers twelve original essays engaging aspects of Old Norse–Icelandic literature that continue to kindle the scholarly imagination in the twenty-first century. The assembled authors examine the arrière-scène of saga literature; the nexus of skaldic poetry and saga narrative; medieval and post-medieval gender roles; and other manifestations of language, time, and place as preserved in Old Norse–Icelandic texts. This volume will be welcomed not only by the specialist and by scholars in adjacent fields but also by the avid general reader, drawn in ever-increasing number to the Icelandic sagas and their world.
Table of Contents Preface; Jeffrey Turco, volume editor: Introduction; Andy Orchard: Hereward and Grettir: Brothers from Another Mother?; Richard L. Harris: “Jafnan segir inn ríkri ráð”: Proverbial Allusion and the Implied Proverb in Fóstbrœðra saga; Torfi H. Tulinius: Seeking Death in Njáls saga; Guðrún Nordal: Skaldic Poetics and the Making of the Sagas of Icelanders; Russell Poole: Identity Poetics among the Icelandic Skalds; Jeffrey Turco: Loki, Sneglu-Halla þáttr, and the Case for a Skaldic Prosaics; Thomas D. Hill: Beer, Vomit, Blood and Poetry: Egils saga, Chapters 44-45; Shaun F. D. Hughes: The Old Norse Exempla as Arbiters of Gender Roles in Medieval Iceland; Paul Acker: Performing Gender in the Icelandic Ballads; Joseph Harris: The Rök Inscription, Line 20; Sarah Harlan-Haughey: A Landscape of Conflict: Three Stories of the Faroe Conversions; Kirsten Wolf: Non-Basic Color Terms in Old Norse-Icelandic
Table of Contents Preface; Jeffrey Turco, volume editor: Introduction; Andy Orchard: Hereward and Grettir: Brothers from Another Mother?; Richard L. Harris: “Jafnan segir inn ríkri ráð”: Proverbial Allusion and the Implied Proverb in Fóstbrœðra saga; Torfi H. Tulinius: Seeking Death in Njáls saga; Guðrún Nordal: Skaldic Poetics and the Making of the Sagas of Icelanders; Russell Poole: Identity Poetics among the Icelandic Skalds; Jeffrey Turco: Loki, Sneglu-Halla þáttr, and the Case for a Skaldic Prosaics; Thomas D. Hill: Beer, Vomit, Blood and Poetry: Egils saga, Chapters 44-45; Shaun F. D. Hughes: The Old Norse Exempla as Arbiters of Gender Roles in Medieval Iceland; Paul Acker: Performing Gender in the Icelandic Ballads; Joseph Harris: The Rök Inscription, Line 20; Sarah Harlan-Haughey: A Landscape of Conflict: Three Stories of the Faroe Conversions; Kirsten Wolf: Non-Basic Color Terms in Old Norse-Icelandic
Research Interests: Mythology And Folklore, Gender Studies, Mythology, Death Studies, Proverbs, and 47 moreOld Norse Literature, Death & Dying (Thanatology), Oral Traditions, Sigmund Freud, Medieval Scandinavia, Icelandic Literature, Old Norse Language, Runic inscriptions, Ecocriticism, Psychoanalysis And Literature, Runestones, Skaldic Poetry, Icelandic Family Sagas, Mythology (Old Norse Literature), Sagas of Icelanders, Scandinavian Studies, Icelandic, Norse mythology, Old Norse, Medieval Icelandic Literature, Viking Age Scandinavia, Old Norse Religion, Iceland, Old Icelandic, Icelandic Sagas, Exempla, Old Norse Philology, Old Norse literature and culture, Cultural Landscape, Anglo-Latin Literature, Comparative medieval literature and culture (German, English, Old Norse & Old French), Medieval Icelandic society, The reception of Old Norse Myth, Old Norse Sorcery, Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture, Old Norse-Old Icelandic Literature, Faroe Islands, Ancient color terminology, Runes, Loki, Njáls saga, Fóstbrœðra saga, Egils saga, Grettir's Saga, Viking Age Iceland, Faroe Islands Viking Age, and Faroese Poetry
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Famously, the skalds of Iceland successfully took over the mantle of court poet in tenthand particularly eleventh-century Norway (and to an extent in England and other centers of Scandinavian diasporic populations as well). In this way... more
Famously, the skalds of Iceland successfully took over the mantle of court poet in tenthand particularly eleventh-century Norway (and to an extent in England and other centers of Scandinavian diasporic populations as well). In this way they sustained a partial livelihood. In this paper I am going to propose that we can detect a sense of Icelandic (and to a lesser extent Orkney) identity in some of their verses. These markers might already have been symptomatic of an emerging ideology, to be more explicitly expressed in later prose texts, where “ individual Icelanders, especially upwardly mobile young Icelandic men, are, on a case-by-case basis, represented as better, cleverer, and more gifted than any individual Norwegian, except perhaps the Norwegian king, against whom they frequently measure themselves. Their special talent thus enables them as individuals to be successful in Norwegian society, even though they come from the cultural margin.” 1 That the sense of a community identi...
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... so far as to posit a battle of Maldon fought in 988: mention of this battle is found, not in the Chronicle, but in Liber Eliensis and Byrhtferth's Life of Oswald; it would antedate the well-known (second) battle... more
... so far as to posit a battle of Maldon fought in 988: mention of this battle is found, not in the Chronicle, but in Liber Eliensis and Byrhtferth's Life of Oswald; it would antedate the well-known (second) battle of Maldon by three years.9 In these circumstances skaldic poetry may have ...
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To discuss the verses of a saga, rather than the work as a whole, may seem reactionary in an age when we are schooled to seek organic unity in almost all literary compositions?even in those, like the Old English Dream of the Rood, which... more
To discuss the verses of a saga, rather than the work as a whole, may seem reactionary in an age when we are schooled to seek organic unity in almost all literary compositions?even in those, like the Old English Dream of the Rood, which many of our predecessors would have seen as self-evidently the product of multiple authorship, of re vision and amplification. So if I isolate certain verses of Gunnlaugs saga from their prose contexts, it is, I hope, with good justification: that the prose and the verse arguably represent different strata of composition, and that the artistic merits of the verses have been ob scured by their prose setting. The verses I shall discuss are numbered 10, 11, 13, 14, and 16 in editions of the saga. They form a distinct group: Gunnlaugr is the speaker and he laments his thwarted love for Helga. This group is pre ceded by a more loosely knit group of verses most of which have to do with Gunnlaugr's peripatetic and lucrative existence as a court poet, and is followed by a third group which covers the hostilities between Gunnlaugr and Hrafn, his rival in poetry and love, and the death of both men.
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The heroes of mythology and fantasy are typically faced with plot progressions that are 'troublesome, challenging, [and] transformative'. Yet these words from Wisker and Robinson (2009, p. 318) are descriptive not of... more
The heroes of mythology and fantasy are typically faced with plot progressions that are 'troublesome, challenging, [and] transformative'. Yet these words from Wisker and Robinson (2009, p. 318) are descriptive not of mythology's generic formula but of the conceptual thresholds confronting novice scholars negotiating academic literacy. The challenges to heroes often entail their 'humbling' as they mature; yet this word describes the learning processes that enable 'critical moments of irreversible conceptual transformation' (Meyer and Land 2005, p. 376). The development of advanced literacy, 'a social process of enculturalisation into the values and practices of specialist communities' (Schleppegrell, 2002, p. 10) enables such transformation. This paper investigates a pedagogy enabling the development of advanced literacy. Any course for first year students must provide a threshold into the discipline. Like the liminal spaces within literature - the Erceldoune forest where True Thomas accesses a rule-bound yet enabling fairy world, for example - the liminal first year course needs to give ready access and to effectively link different cultures of the diverse entrants with those of academia.
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Vikingarvisur, a poem on the early exploits of Olafr Haraldsson, contains a series of stanzas describing Olafr' s battles in England during the troubled years that preceded Knutr's conquest of the country. Certain details in the... more
Vikingarvisur, a poem on the early exploits of Olafr Haraldsson, contains a series of stanzas describing Olafr' s battles in England during the troubled years that preceded Knutr's conquest of the country. Certain details in the poem remain obscure, and among them is Sighvatr's reference in verse 8 to an English people or tribe called the Partar. The main topic of the stanza is Olafr' s alleged subjugation of Canterbury.
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Research Interests: Art and Kormaks saga
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Submissions received by September 1, 2019, will be considered for publication in NNS 2 (2020). New Norse Studies: A Journal on the Literature and Culture of Medieval Scandinavia is the annual of Islandica, a series in Icelandic and Norse... more
Submissions received by September 1, 2019, will be considered for publication in NNS 2 (2020). New Norse Studies: A Journal on the Literature and Culture of Medieval Scandinavia is the annual of Islandica, a series in Icelandic and Norse studies, founded in 1908 and published in print and online by the Fiske Icelandic Collection, Cornell University Library. Devoted to all facets of the written tradition of medieval Iceland and Scandinavia, NNS seeks to bring the insights of multiple disciplines to bear upon Norse texts.
NNS welcomes contributions to scholarship relating to all aspects of Old Norse-Icelandic literature, including but not limited to: literary and textual culture; mythology, folklore, and history of religions; archaeology and material culture; language, linguistics, philology, and runology; medieval history; and comparative literary studies.
NNS does not solicit or publish reviews of individual books. Review essays concerning larger trends, topics, and bodies of scholarship are welcome.
NNS welcomes contributions to scholarship relating to all aspects of Old Norse-Icelandic literature, including but not limited to: literary and textual culture; mythology, folklore, and history of religions; archaeology and material culture; language, linguistics, philology, and runology; medieval history; and comparative literary studies.
NNS does not solicit or publish reviews of individual books. Review essays concerning larger trends, topics, and bodies of scholarship are welcome.