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Influences of Pre-Christian Mythology and Christianity on Old Norse Poetry

Influences of Pre-Christian Mythology and Christianity on Old Norse Poetry PDF Author: Andrew McGillivray
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1580443362
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Book Description
The Eddic poem Vafþrúðnismál serves as a representation of early pagan beliefs or myths and as a myth itself; the poem performs both of these functions, acting as a poetic framework and functioning as sacred myth. In this study, the author looks closely at the journey of the Norse god Óðinn to the hall of the ancient and wise giant Vafþrúðnir, where Óðinn craftily engages his adversary in a life-or-death contest in knowledge.

Influences of Pre-Christian Mythology and Christianity on Old Norse Poetry

Influences of Pre-Christian Mythology and Christianity on Old Norse Poetry PDF Author: Andrew McGillivray
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1580443362
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Book Description
The Eddic poem Vafþrúðnismál serves as a representation of early pagan beliefs or myths and as a myth itself; the poem performs both of these functions, acting as a poetic framework and functioning as sacred myth. In this study, the author looks closely at the journey of the Norse god Óðinn to the hall of the ancient and wise giant Vafþrúðnir, where Óðinn craftily engages his adversary in a life-or-death contest in knowledge.

Influences of Pre-Christian Mythology and Christianity on Old Norse Poetry

Influences of Pre-Christian Mythology and Christianity on Old Norse Poetry PDF Author: Andrew McGillivray
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110625385
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Book Description
The Eddic poem Vafþrúðnismál serves as a representation of early pagan beliefs or myths and as a myth itself; the poem performs both of these functions, acting as a poetic framework and functioning as sacred myth. In this study, the author looks closely at the journey of the Norse god Óðinn to the hall of the ancient and wise giant Vafþrúðnir, where Óðinn craftily engages his adversary in a life-or-death contest in knowledge.

Old Norse Mythology

Old Norse Mythology PDF Author: John Lindow
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0190852259
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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."--

Cultural Legacies of Old Norse Literature

Cultural Legacies of Old Norse Literature PDF Author: Dustin Geeraert
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843846381
Category : Mythology, Norse, in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Book Description
The cultural and literary legacy of medieval Iceland, with its roots in Norse heathen religion, heroic literature, and Viking Age history, is the focus of this volume. Its chapters examine the history and reception of a particular text or topic within this remarkable tradition. They treat a number of topics, including the legendary dragon-slayer Sigurd, the many personas of the mysterious god Odin, aspects of the ancient mythology of gods and giants, the early settlement of Iceland, the defiant Viking warriors known as the "Sworn Brothers", the entrepreneurial role of cloth production in medieval Scandinavia, the codicology and book history of key literary works, the many references to medieval Nordic lore in modern fiction and poetry, and the cultural position of islands such as Iceland in relation to the ebb and flow of religions, institutions and empires. Reconsidering these areas of Old Norse-Icelandic literary culture reveals the striking resilience and adaptability of its traditions, through a startling variety of transformations.

Reflections on Old Norse Myths

Reflections on Old Norse Myths PDF Author: Pernille Hermann
Publisher: Brepols Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Book Description
When seeking to understand the function of mythology in the pagan past and in medieval Iceland scholars are confronted with the problem of how sources from the Middle Ages can properly be used. The articles in this volume demonstrate diverse angles from which Old Norse mythological texts can be viewed. Many discuss methodological problems in dealing with the texts and draw on expertise from different fields of study such as history, philology, literary studies, and history of religions. The authors are all established experts in the field, but demonstrate new approaches to the study of Old Norse mythology, and offer insights into possible new directions for research.

The Poetic Edda

The Poetic Edda PDF Author: Paul Acker
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113660135X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 318

Book Description
This unique collection of essays applies significant critical approaches to the mythological poetry of the Poetic Edda, a principal source for Old Norse cosmography and the legends of Odin, Loki, and Thor. The volume also provides very useful introductions that sketch the critical history of the Eddas. By applying new theoretical approaches (feminist, structuralist, post-structuralist) to each of the major poems, this book yields a variety of powerful and convincing readings. Contributors to the collection are both young scholars and senior figures in the discipline, and are of varying nationalities (American, British, Australian, Scandinavian, and Icelandic), thus ensuring a range of interpretations from different corners of the scholarly community. The new translations included here make available for the first time to English speaking students the intriguing methodologies that are currently developing in Scandinavia. An essential collection of scholarship for any Old Norse course, The Poetic Edda will also be of interest to scholars of Indo-European myth, as well as those who study the theory of myth.

More Than Mythology

More Than Mythology PDF Author: Catharina Raudvere
Publisher: Nordic Academic Press
ISBN: 918550971X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 287

Book Description
The religion of the Viking Age is conventionally identified through its mythology: the ambiguous character Odin, the forceful Thor, and the end of the world approaching in Ragnarök. But pre-Christian religion consisted of so much more than mythic imagery and legends, and lingered for long in folk tradition. Studying religion of the North with an interdisciplinary approach is exceptionally fruitful, in both empirical and theoretical terms, and in this book a group of distinguished scholars widen the interpretative scope on religious life among the pre-Christian Scandinavian people. The authors shed new light on topics such as rituals, gender relations, social hierarchies, and inter-regional contacts between the Nordic tradition and the Sami and Finnish regions. The contributions add to a more complex view of the pre-Christian religion of Scandinavia, with relevant new questions about the material and a broad analysis of religion as a cultural expression.

English Poetry and Old Norse Myth

English Poetry and Old Norse Myth PDF Author: Heather O'Donoghue
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199562180
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Book Description
English Poetry and Old Norse Myth: A History traces the influence of Old Norse myth -- stories and poems about the familiar gods and goddesses of the pagan North, such as Odin, Thor, Baldr and Freyja -- on poetry in English from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day. Especial care is taken to determine the precise form in which these poets encountered the mythic material, so that the book traces a parallel history of the gradual dissemination of Old Norse mythic texts. Very many major poets were inspired by Old Norse myth. Some, for instance the Anglo-Saxon poet of Beowulf, or much later, Sir Walter Scott, used Old Norse mythic references to lend dramatic colour and apparent authenticity to their presentation of a distant Northern past. Others, like Thomas Gray, or Matthew Arnold, adapted Old Norse mythological poems and stories in ways which both responded to and helped to form the literary tastes of their own times. Still others, such as William Blake, or David Jones, reworked and incorporated celebrated elements of Norse myth - valkyries weaving the fates of men, or the great World Tree Yggdrasill on which Odin sacrificed himself - as personal symbols in their own poetry. This book also considers less familiar literary figures, showing how a surprisingly large number of poets in English engaged in individual ways with Old Norse myth. English Poetry and Old Norse Myth: A History demonstrates how attitudes towards the pagan mythology of the north change over time, but reveals that poets have always recognized Old Norse myth as a vital part of the literary, political and historical legacy of the English-speaking world.

Myths of the Pagan North

Myths of the Pagan North PDF Author: Christopher Abram
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1441102000
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Book Description
As the Vikings began to migrate overseas as raiders or settlers in the late eighth century, there is evidence that this new way of life, centred on warfare, commerce and exploration, brought with it a warrior ethos that gradually became codified in the Viking myths, notably in the cult of Odin, the god of war, magic and poetry, and chief god in the Norse pantheon. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when most of Scandinavia had long since been converted to Christianity, form perhaps the most important era in the history of Norse mythology: only at this point were the myths of Thor, Freyr and Odin first recorded in written form. Using archaeological sources to take us further back in time than any written document, the accounts of foreign writers like the Roman historian Tacitus, and the most important repository of stories of the gods, old Norse poetry and the Edda, Christopher Abram leads the reader into the lost world of the Norse gods.

Heathen Gods in Old English Literature

Heathen Gods in Old English Literature PDF Author: Richard North
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521551830
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 104

Book Description
Heathen gods are hard to find in Old English literature. Most Anglo-Saxon writers had no interest in them, and scholars today prefer to concentrate on the Christian civilization for which the Anglo-Saxons were so famous. Richard North offers an interesting view of Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian paganism and mythology in the pre-Viking and Viking age. He discusses the pre-Christian gods of Bede's history of the Anglo-Saxon conversion with reference to an orgiastic figure known as Ingui, whom Bede called 'god of this age'. Using expert knowledge of comparative literary material from Old Norse-Icelandic and other Old Germanic languages, North reconstructs the slender Old English evidence in a highly imaginative treatment of poems such as Deor and The Dream of the Rood. Other gods such as Woden are considered with reference to Odin and his family in Old Norse-Icelandic mythology. In conclusion, it is argued that the cult of Ingui was defeated only when the ideology of the god Woden was sponsored by the Anglo-Saxon church. The book will interest students interested in Old English, Old Norse-Icelandic and Germanic literatures, Anglo-Saxon history and archaeology.