1. Download the catalogue from the Society’s website. [It's also available as a pdf file.]

2. Choose which books you’d like to bid on, and the amount you’d be prepared to pay.

3. Send a list of your bids to Alison Finlay at a.finlay@bbk.ac.uk by 31 July.

4. In August, the people who bid the highest amount for each book (you don’t get to see what others have bid, and you can’t revise your initial bids) will be contacted and invoiced for the books and price of postage. Please bear in mind that the cost of postage may be substantial if you win several books or live overseas.

5. Wait for your books! (It may take some time for them to be delivered, owing to the sheer volume of orders to be processed.)

All proceeds from the sale will go towards the Peter Foote Memorial Fund, which has been established to support postgraduate students in the field of Medieval Scandinavian Studies through the provision of bursaries and prizes.

There are lots of really special items in the list, all of them made much more special by their association with Peter. So please do take a look at the catalogue, and happy bidding!

The Viking Age: A Reader

Edited by Angus A. Somerville and R. Andrew McDonald

April 2010 / 450pp / 6×9 paperback / ISBN 9781442601482 / $39.95

Drawing on a wide range of original sources, and tracing the astonishing development of the Viking Age from the first foreign raids to the rise and fall of Viking empires, this comprehensive reader is essential to an understanding of Viking history.

There’s a much more detailed account of the contents available at the UTP website. To me, this looks like filling a really important gap in the market, and I’m sure Professors Somerville and McDonald’s book will find its way onto plenty of university reading lists.

It’s out now in North America and will officially be launched in the UK in June, although it seems that it’s already possible to order a copy.

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.

Of course, one learns strategies for coping with the uninterested or poorly prepared student, but it’s led me to think a bit more about how we start beginners on the path towards learning Old Norse. And one aspect of the proccess that I return to is the adequacy or otherwise of the resources at our disposal. And by this I mean the books: I use the Viking Society’s New Introduction to Old Norse (ed. Barnes, Faulkes, et al.). Or more precisely, I use the Reader and Glossary in class, strongly suggest to students that they also purchase the Grammar, and then sit back and watch as most of them never look inside the ‘red book’. Second-hand copies of the NION Grammar that float around my department always tend to be pristine, since the students who do use it would never part with it.

Perhaps it’s my own fault: I find Barnes’s Grammar incredibly useful as a reference resource, but highly frustrating to use when teaching. There’s no index, and the programmatic aspects of the work never seem to be pitched at the right level. I know plenty of people use it for independent study, but I wouldn’t like to do so myself.  So I made a simplified digest of the grammar, a Barnes-Lite perhaps, which is pinned more closely to the structure of the course as I like to teach it. And nowadays I do lots of PowerPoint alongside it, which can be a useful tool.

But what I want is a single-volume all purpose Introduction to Old Norse that students can use as grammatical reference, text reader, and progressive course book all at once. I do not think that such a thing exists. (I’m thinking along the lines of Peter Baker’s Introduction to Old English, which I think is very good and would always be my first choice for an Old English text book.) There are rumours floating around that Jesse Byock has something in the works, and I know that our colleagues at Durham are also working on such a project. But is there anything out there already that I’ve missed? Should I already be using a different text book? What do other people do?

To answer this last question, I’ve prepared a little survey, and I’d be delighted if you took the time to complete it. And then, please use the comments to, well, comment on how you see the state of the pedagogical resources in the field. In particular, I’d be glad if people could let me know of any books that I’ve missed out from the survey. And please leave your comments below!

Quick Survey: Old Norse Text Books

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.

In line with Islandica’s new policy, this book is being published online, free of charge, as well as in hard cover. It contains fourteen essays by many Official Big Names of our discipline, mainly Icelanders and North American scholars. Appropriately, bearing in mind Professor Kalinke’s important work in these fields, the contributions centre on Norse Romance and on the theme of love in Medieval and Early Modern Icelandic literature.

Novus forlag in Oslo were kind enough to send me a copy of a collection of essays on the legends of Barlaam and Josaphat in Old Norse literature, which is the first volume in a new series, Bibliotheca Nordica. Barlaam i nord, ed. Karl G. Johansson and Maria Arvidsson (ISBN 978-82-7099-519-6), contains seven essays on this important but under-studied cluster of narratives, covering topics from the expected (Barlaams saga ok Josaphats) to the novel and intriguing (the treatment of the narrative in Scandinavian medieval iconography and in Old Swedish legends). It looks like being a really welcome contribution to the study of Old Norse Christian literature. I’ll also look out with interest for future volumes in the Bibliotheca Nordica series.

The Viking Society for Northern Research has published a new edition of the eddic poem Grottasöngr (ISBN 978-0-903521-78-9), by Clive Tolley. Tolley’s edition is designed to serve as a supplement to Ursula Dronke’s monumental Poetic Edda, in which no place for Grottasöngr could be found. Not only does this Grottasöngr resemble the Dronke edition in its attractive salmon-pink cover, it also meets the exacting standards of textual criticism and detailed annotation that we’ve come to expect from this project. At a cost of £8 (or a mere £4 to members of the Viking Society), there’s not much excuse not to own a copy!

The Viking Society has also reissued Matthew Driscoll’s edition (with facing page translation) of Ágrip af Nóregskonungasögum (ISBN 978-0-903521-75-8). This second edition contains revised readings and some corrections  to the text first published in 1995. See The Society’s Website for more details.

Finally for now, I’m pleased to report that Lena Rohrbach’s book, Der tierische Blick: Mensch-Tier-Relationen in der Sagaliteratur (ISBN 978-3-7720-8307-5) has been published by Gunter Narr Verlag. Based on Lena’s doctoral dissertation, it offers a unique conspectus of the place of animals in the sagas — I heard Lena give talks deriving from this work on several occasions, and it’s fascinating stuff.

As ever, I’d be very pleased to hear of any other new books in the field — it’s very difficult to keep track of publishing in so many languages and countries on one’s own!

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!

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!)

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)

The commentary to each poem comprises two parts:

a) an introduction with 10 sections on: Bibliographie, Ueberlieferungszustand (manuscript transmission), Forschungsgeschichte (history of criticism), Stoffgeschichte und literarisches Nachleben (history of the subject matter), Gedankliche Konzeption (plot conception), Komposition (structure), Strophen- und Versform, Wortschatz und stilistische Eigentuemlichkeiten (vocabulary and stylistic features), Literaturgeschichtliche Standortbestimmung (relationship to other texts), Datierung (date of composition);

b) Commentary to the individual stanzas. At the beginning of the section on each stanza the text of the stanza in question is quoted in full length in Old Icelandic and translated into German.

Included in the commentaries to the nine texts in Volume 6 are excurses on the following topics:

- the name Niflungar (Brot af Sigurðarkviðo 16)

- the term hauk­staldr (term used of a man; Sigurðarkviða in skamma 31)

- suicide of women (Sigurðarkviða in skamma 47)

- the snake-pit (Oddrúnargrátr 28)

- the background and development of the motif ‘Gunnar plays the harp in the snake-pit’ (Oddrúnargrátr 29)

- ordeals (Guðrúnarkviða III 6)

- bog corpses and the motif ‘drowning in a bog’ (Guðrúnarkviða III 11).

Preliminary indices to the excurses in previously published volumes of the commentary as well as to motifs, points of grammar and phonology treated in all five volumes published thus far are available on the homepage of the Frankfurt commentary (www.skandinavistik.uni-frankfurt.de/edda/download/)

While I was looking for details of the new Frankfurt volume on line, I came across another commentary on the eddic poems: one which I’d not previously heard of, and which promises a rather different approach.

Géza von Neményi’s Kommentar zu den Götterliedern der Edda: Teil 1 – Die Odinslieder (Kersken-Canbaz Verlag, 2008) offers a commentary on some of the mythological poems from an explicitly neo-pagan/ neo-heathen/ ‘ásatrú’ perspective. As the author’s description of the book describes it:

Das wachsende Interesse vieler Menschen am alten Heidentum unserer Vorfahren, das damit verbundene Wiederaufleben des Alt-Heidentums und das Entstehen neuheidnischer Kulte (Ásatrú) zeigen, daß die heidnischen Mythen heute wieder auf größeres, religiös bedingtes Interesse stoßen und auf dem Wege sind, ihre einstige Bedeutung wiederzuerlangen. Mittlerweile sind heidnische Gemeinschaften in mehreren Ländern Europas als Religionsgemeinschaften staatlich anerkannt und den Kirchen gleichgestellt. Deswegen wurde es notwendig, eine kommentierte Ausgabe der Götterlieder der älteren Edda aus heidnischer Sicht vorzulegen, die Grundlage für eine heidnische Deutung der Mythen bilden will und zur Arbeit in den heidnischen Gemeinschaften geeignet ist. Ich bin seit 1991 Allsherjargode (oberster Priester) der Alt-Heiden, der traditionellen germanischen Heiden in Deutschland. Meine Sichtweise ist subjektiv wie jede individuelle Sichtweise, meine Deutungen sind meine Deutungen und müssen von anderen Alt- und Neuheiden nicht unbedingt geteilt werden. Das Buch stellt insofern nur eine unverbindliche Anregung dar, wie man die Götterlieder sehen und deuten kann und ist nicht als Deutungsdogma zu verstehen.

There’s a preview of the book available through amazon.de, and it at once looks a good deal more scholarly in its approach than many pagan-revivalist treatments of Norse myths are. It will be very interesting to see what both Old Norse scholars and ‘ásatrúir’ make of it. As we’ve discussed on Old Norse News, though, since participants in neo-pagan movements make up a growing proportion of the audience for Norse studies, it wouldn’t surprise me if this type of approach becomes more popular — and quite possibly increasingly legitimate — in the near future.

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.

Reviews

“[The author’s] analysis of ten poems from the Codex Regius clearly advances our appreciation of formulaic composition and the interplay between orality and literary text not only in the Poetic Edda but also in related Icelandic traditions. His findings are theoretically sound and linguistically impressive.” – Prof. Margaret H. Beissinger, Princeton University

“Mellor’s expert command of contemporary linguistics ensures that his findings and proposals are firmly grounded in lexical, morphological and semantic verities. The linguistic detail and reliability of his work distinguishes it from many previous forays into oral formulaic theory offered by medievalists and provides a model for how such analyses may be undertaken in the future.” – Prof. Thomas A. DuBois, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Table of Contents

Foreword by Prof. Stephen A. Mitchell
Acknowledgements
1. A Theoretical and Historical Introduction
2. The Manuscript and Text of the Poetic Edda
3. The Structure of the Poetic Edda
4. Oral-Formulaic Theory and Old Norse Poetry
5. Eddic Verse and Other Germanic Poetry
Appendix A
Appendix B
Appendix C
Bibliography
Index

Published by the Edwin Mellen Press, 2008
ISBN10: 0-7734-4856-X ISBN13: 978-0-7734-4856-8

…is to apply theories and perspectives from the Study of Religion, or Comparative Religion as some would prefer, to the study of pre-Christian culture in the North … This means that the book deals with problems within the Study of Religion as well as within Scandinavian Studies … As an historian of religion, occupied with Old Norse myth, religion and ideology, the application mentioned seems to be an undertaking that is all the more relevant because much research done from the point of view of so-called modern philology or from the point of view of traditional historical studies argues that our access to this field is severely limited by the situation surrounding the source material. I hope to show that the situation is not all bad and that studies into the Old Norse world do not have to be critical in only a negative way.

I’m pretty sure this is going to be a really important book in the field of Scandinavian religious history. I’m not sure whether I’ll agree with it, but I can’t wait to give it a try…

The ISBN is 978 87 7674 327 7 and the book costs 405DKR. I’ve not managed to find it outside Denmark yet, but it’s available online from booksellers like Harders.

Less directly relevant to Old Norse, but still likely to be of interest to many readers, is Indo-European Poetry and Myth by M. L. West (new in paperback from OUP, 2008):

The Indo-Europeans, speakers of the prehistoric parent language from which most European and some Asiatic languages are descended, most probably lived on the Eurasian steppes some five or six thousand years ago. Martin West investigates their traditional mythologies, religions, and poetries, and points to elements of common heritage. In The East Face of Helicon (1997), West showed the extent to which Homeric and other early Greek poetry was influenced by Near Eastern traditions, mainly non-Indo-European. His new book presents a foil to that work by identifying elements of more ancient, Indo-European heritage in the Greek material. Topics covered include the status of poets and poetry in Indo-European societies; metre, style, and diction; gods and other supernatural beings, from Father Sky and Mother Earth to the Sun-god and his beautiful daughter, the Thunder-god and other elemental deities, and earthly orders such as Nymphs and Elves; the forms of hymns, prayers, and incantations; conceptions about the world, its origin, mankind, death, and fate; the ideology of fame and of immortalization through poetry; the typology of the king and the hero; the hero as warrior, and the conventions of battle narrative. (From the publisher’s blurb)

West’s book certainly looks like it will become essential reading for those who want to look at Old Norse from a comparative perspective. (And now it’s out in paperback a few of us will be able to afford it!)

Finally, there’s now a welcome reissue of Tim William Machan’s edition of Vafþrúðnismál. Originally published by the University of Durham in 1989, the new edition is (I think) the first book to come out of a new collaboration between Durham and the Pontifical Institute for Medieval Studies in Toronto. I’m not sure about its distribution status in Europe, but North American readers can order it from amazon.com (and doubtless other book stores and websites). The ISBN is 978-0888445612.

[NOTE: David Ashurst has informed me that the volumes published under the Durham/PIMS partnership will be distributed in Europe by Brepols. You should be able to order Vafþrúðnismál directly from them.]