Old Norse News

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 »

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 »

October’s Journal Round-Up concludes with Saga-Book, Northern Studies, and the latest number of JEGP.

The new edition of the Viking Society‘s Saga-Book has just been sent out to members. (If you’re not a member, might I urge you to consider joining?) Volume 32 contains three articles and no fewer than 17 reviews:
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After a slightly longer delay than planned, here is the second of our surveys of what is going on in recent periodical literature in the field of Medieval Scandinavian Studies. There’s something of a historical slant to today’s selection, which includes no fewer than three historiske tidsskrifter and the Norwegian journal Collegium Medievale. Finally, we have a recent edition of Skírnir from Iceland. In a second post we’ll have details — hot off the press — of the 2008 numbers of Saga-Book from the Viking Society for Northern Research and its Scottish equivalent, Northern Studies. Don’t forget that these journals are listed with their web addresses and publication details on our links > journals page.

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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.

A new–and I think rather important–volume in the Toronto Old Norse-Icelandic Studies series is out now (at least in Canada: it might take a while longer to be distributed elsewhere). Kevin J. Wanner’s Snorri Sturluson and the Edda: The Conversion of Cultural Capital in Medieval Scandinavia revitalises author-centred criticism of Snorra Edda, and makes a persuasive case for its unity and purpose within the context of what we know about Snorri’s life, career, and interests. As the publisher’s blurb describes it:

Why would Snorri Sturluson (c. 1179-1241), the most powerful and rapacious Icelander of his generation, dedicate so much time and effort to producing the “Edda”, a text that is widely recognized as the most significant medieval source for pre-Christian Norse myth and poetics? Kevin J. Wanner brings us a new account of the interests that motivated the production of this text, and resolves the mystery of its genesis by demonstrating the intersection of Snorri’s political and cultural concerns and practices.The author argues that the “Edda” is best understood not as an antiquarian labour of cultural conservation, but as a present-centered effort to preserve skaldic poetry’s capacity for conversion into material and symbolic benefits in exchanges between elite Icelanders and the Norwegian court. Employing Pierre Bourdieu’s economic theory of practice, Wanner shows how modern sociological theory can be used to illuminate the cultural practices of the European Middle Ages. In doing so, he provides the most detailed analysis to-date of how the “Edda” relates to Snorri’s biography, while shedding light on the arenas of social interaction and competition that he negotiated.A fascinating look at the intersections of political interest and cultural production, “Snorri Sturluson and the Edda” is a detailed portrait of both an important man and the society of his times.

I had the good fortune to read a pre-publication copy, and I found the book enormously interesting, even if I didn’t agree with all its arguments. I think it certainly provides the best biography of Snorri presently available in English, and it’s very well written indeed. Something to recommend your local library to purchase?