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Tolkien fans will hardly need Old Norse News to make them aware of this, but J.R.R. Tolkien’s previously unpublished Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún comes out next week.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

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 »