Old Norse News

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 »

The seventeenth book in the estimable Viking Collection from the University Press of Southern Denmark is Jens Peter Schjødt’s Initiation Between Two Worlds. Structure and Symbolism in Pre-Christian Scandinavia (Odense, 2008). Read more »

Exciting news! The Viking Society for Northern Research has made the majority of its publications available online, entirely free of charge, at

http://vsnrweb-publications.org.uk/

Among the highlights now available in this new open-access repository are:

The full list is a testament to the variety, depth, and quality of the Viking Society’s publications over the past century. And naturally it seems that its decision to go along the open-access route of dissemination can only be good for the field.

Please note: many of the files available from http://vsnrweb-publications.org.uk/ are still in copyright, and should not be distributed without the consent of the Society and (where applicable) the author.

The Viking World, edited by Stefan Brink with Neil Price, looks like being a very significant contribution to the field. It’s a comprehensive guide to all aspects of Viking-Age history and culture with contributions from many of the field’s leading experts. (Click here for full table of contents.) The publisher’s blurb describes it as follows:

Filling a gap in the literature for an academically oriented volume on the Viking period, this unique book is a one-stop authoritative introduction to all the latest research in the field.

Bringing together today’s leading scholars, both established seniors and younger, cutting-edge academics, Stefan Brink, in collaboration with Neil Price, have constructed the first single work to gather innovative research from a spectrum of disciplines (including archaeology, history, philology, comparative religion, numismatics and cultural geography) to create the most comprehensive Viking Age book of its kind ever attempted.

Read more »

Irmeli Valtonen sends details of her new book, The North in the Old English Orosius: A Geographical Narrative in Context, which has been published in the series Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique de Helsinki.

The description of the North in the Old English Orosius in the form of the travel accounts by Ohthere and Wulfstan and a catalogue of northern people are examined in this study in the context of ancient and medieval textual descriptions of the North, with special emphasis on Anglo-Saxon sources and the reign of King Alfred. This is the first time that these sources, an interdisciplinary approach and second literature, also from Scandinavia and Finland, have been brought together.

Please click the following link for full details of this important and most welcome contribution to the field: The North in the Old English Orosius.

I’ve been working for a scholarly publisher for almost a year, and so a question that I’ve been mulling over recently is how one could promote Old Norse Studies from a publishing standpoint. For example, as my former advisor at Cornell University, Tom Hill, pointed out to me, there seems to be a definite dearth of English-language journals that cater to Old Norse-Icelandic Studies (compare that to all the 20 or 30 journals out there devoted to Old English), and there is no place to publish short notes or English translations of Scandinavian-language articles or prefaces.

So how could a publisher best promote Old Norse Studies? What are the publication needs of the Old Norse academic community? Where are the gaps in the overall existing publication framework?