Old Norse News

A brand-new history of the Vikings!

Penguin have just published The Hammer and the Cross: A New History of The Vikings by the UCL alumnus Robert Ferguson. Ferguson is something of a new name in Viking Studies — although he’s published widely on more modern Scandinavian topics — so it will be very interesting to see what new spin he brings to the subject (as it’s apparently forbidden to write a non-revisionist book about the Vikings these days).

Here’s how the blurb describes it:

For those living outside Scandinavia, the Viking Age effectively began in 793 with an attack on the monastery at Lindisfarne. The attack on Lindisfarne was a characteristically violent harbinger of what was in store for Britain and much of Europe from the Vikings for the next 300 years, until the final destruction of the heathen temple to the Norse gods at Uppsala around 1090. Robert Ferguson is a sure guide across what he calls ‘the treacherous marches which divide legend from fact in Viking Age history’. His long familiarity with the literary culture of Scandinavia – the eddas, the poetry of the skalds and the sagas – is combined with the latest archaeological discoveries and the evidence of picture-stones, runes, ships and objects scattered all over northern Europe, to make the most convincing modern portrait of the Viking Age in any language. The Hammer and the Cross ranges from Scandinavia itself to Kievan Rus and Byzantium in the east, to Iceland, Greenland and the north American settlements in the west. Beyond its geographical boundaries the book takes us on a journey to a misty region inhabited by Hallfred the Troublesome Poet, Harald Bluetooth, Ragnar Hairy-Breeches, Ivar the Boneless and Eyvind the Plagiarist, in which literature, history and myth dissolve into one another.

It’s certainly a handsomely-produced volume, and would I’m sure make an ideal festive gift for anybody interested in the Vikings. There are one or two things that make me initially wary about it, but I’ll reserve judgement until I’ve read the whole thing.

It’s substantially discounted at Amazon.co.uk right now, and if you buy it after clicking on this link, a tiny portion of the proceeds will go towards the upkeep of Old Norse News.

The new academic year is kicking into gear now, and that means that all around the world a gratifying number of brand new students will be opening Old Norse textbooks for the first time, and getting stuck into the declensions. As ever, I’m feeling nervous about the prospect of facing an unknown class, full of people with radically different expectations and levels of experience–particularly in language-learning. I usually am very lucky with my classes, but I’m in the (probably very unusual position) of teaching in a department where Norse is a compulsory first-year course, so I always have some students who would rather be doing something else and for whom learning a dead language is difficult, boring, and superficially pointless. Not many, but one or two. Read more »

First, apologies for the very long gap between posts. I can only plead pressure of (other)  work! I hope that regular posting will now resume. Apologies also to anybody who sent me an announcement that I’ve missed during my time away from the site.

To get things going again, here are a few new books that have come to my attention over the past couple of months.

First, we have the festschrift for Marianne Kalinke, Romance and Love in Late Medieval and Early Modern Iceland, edited by Kirsten Wolf and Johanna Denzin, Islandica 54 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Library, 2008) ISBN 978-0-935995-15-2. Read more »

There’s no doubt about it: Open-Access publishing is the coming thing, and Medieval Scandinavian Studies are gradually starting to reap the benefits. The latest e-publishing initiative in the field is Cornell University Press’s decision to publish all future volumes in the famous Islandica series on the internet, as well as in print. Volume 53, Joseph Harris’s collected essays, is now available free to anybody with a computer. Readers will also be able to order volumes over the net on a print-on-demand basis.

Without wishing to be greedy, I just hope that they’ll also decide to digitize the first fifty-two volumes in the series as well!

Tolkien fans will hardly need Old Norse News to make them aware of this, but J.R.R. Tolkien’s previously unpublished Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún comes out next week.

Details from the jacket blurb:

Many years ago, J.R.R. Tolkien composed his own version, now published for the first time, of the great legend of Northern antiquity, in two closely related poems to which he gave the titles The New Lay of the Völsungs and The New Lay of Gudrún.

In the Lay of the Völsungs is told the ancestry of the great hero Sigurd, the slayer of Fáfnir most celebrated of dragons, whose treasure he took for his own; of his awakening of the Valkyrie Brynhild who slept surrounded by a wall of fire, and of their betrothal; and of his coming to the court of the great princes who were named the Niflungs (or Nibelungs), with whom he entered into blood-brotherhood. In that court there sprang great love but also great hate, brought about by the power of the enchantress, mother of the Niflungs, skilled in the arts of magic, of shape-changing and potions of forgetfulness.

In scenes of dramatic intensity, of confusion of identity, thwarted passion, jealousy and bitter strife, the tragedy of Sigurd and Brynhild, of Gunnar the Niflung and Gudrún his sister, mounts to its end in the murder of Sigurd at the hands of his blood-brothers, the suicide of Brynhild, and the despair of Gudrún. In the Lay of Gudrún her fate after the death of Sigurd is told, her marriage against her will to the mighty Atli, ruler of the Huns (the Attila of history), his murder of her brothers the Niflung lords, and her hideous revenge.

Deriving his version primarily from his close study of the ancient poetry of Norway and Iceland known as the Poetic Edda (and where no old poetry exists, from the later prose work the Völsunga Saga), J.R.R. Tolkien employed a verse-form of short stanzas whose lines embody in English the exacting alliterative rhythms and the concentrated energy of the poems of the Edda.

It will be fascinating to see the Great Man’s take on the legend (though I have to confess to finding his poetry only bearable in small doses!)

Quite a lot of interesting new publications seem to be in the offing at the moment. Katja Schultz sends details of volume 6 of the Frankfurt Edda Commentary–unquestionably one of the most important and useful projects in the field in recent years, which together with volumes 4-5 covers the eddic heroic poems:

Klaus von See, Beatrice La Farge, Eve Picard, Katja Schulz und Matthias Teichert, Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda. Bd. 6: Heldenlieder (Brot af Sigurðarkviðo, Guðrúnarkviða I, Sigurðarkviða in skamma, Dráp Niflunga, Helreið Brynhildar, Guðrúnarkviða II, Guðrúnarkviða III, Oddrúnar­grátr, Strophenbruchstücke aus der Völsunga saga) Read more »

Thanks to Stefano Mazza for bringing another recent publication on Old Norse mythology to my attention:

Analyzing Ten Poems from the Poetic Edda: Oral Formula and Mythic Patterns
by Scott A. Mellor, with a foreword by Stephen A. Mitchell.

Description

This work investigates the syntax of ten poems from the Poetic Edda, a medieval Icelandic text, offering data that reveals some of the composition processes and the remnants of the oral tradition from which poetry came. This work demonstrates that the Icelandic poet not only employed verbatim and variable formulae when composing, but also that the structure of the half-lines are formulaic and that their semantic function aids a poet in composition. Read more »