Old Norse News

News of an exciting and potentially extremely useful new book from University of Toronto Press:

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.

[Apologies for the long hiatus between posts -- now that the semester is over in London I hope to resume more regular updates.]

François-Xavier Dillmann has written to inform us that the latest issue of the excellent French-language journal of Medieval Scandinavian Studies, Proxima Thulé, has now been published. Here is the list of contents, followed by details of how to order a copy:

Éditée depuis 1994 par le professeur François-Xavier Dillmann, corres­pondant de l’Institut, directeur d’études à l’École pratique des Hautes Études, la revue Proxima Thulé est le seul périodique de langue française entièrement consacré à la Scandinavie ancienne et médiévale.

Le volume VI de Proxima Thulé (automne 2009, 192 pages, une trentaine d’illustrations) vient d’être publié en ce début du mois de mars 2010. Il comprend les études suivantes :

Anders Hultgård, Fimbulvetr ou le Grand Hiver. Étude comparative d’un aspect du mythe eschatologique des anciens Scandinaves.

François-Xavier Dillmann, « Brûler ses vaisseaux ». Remarques compa­ratives sur un épisode de l’Histoire des rois de Norvège de Snorri Sturlu­son.

Jan Ragnar Hagland, Les inscriptions runiques d’Irlande.

Lennart Elmevik, « Il était hospitalier et éloquent ». Sur les épithètes laudatives dans les inscriptions runiques de Suède à l’époque viking.

Elena Balzamo, Olaus Magnus savait-il dessiner ? Quelques réflexions et hypothèses au sujet des vignettes de l’Historia de gentibus septen­trionalibus.

Marie-Christine Skuncke, Gustave III de Suède et l’Opéra.

Les commandes du volume VI (et des volumes antérieurs) de Proxima Thulé (au prix de 30 euros l’exemplaire) sont à adresser — directement ou par l’intermédiaire d’un libraire — à De Boccard Édition-Diffusion

11, rue Médicis. 75006 Paris

Téléphone : 01 43 26 00 37  Télécopie : 01 43 54 85 83

Adresse de messagerie électronique : deboccard@wanadoo.fr

Site Internet : www.deboccard.com

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.

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 »