Cultural Legacies of Old Norse Literature

An exciting new collection of essays exploring the startling variety of transformations of Old Norse texts, and their legacy in later literary cultures.

An exciting new collection of essays exploring the startling variety of transformations of Old Norse texts, and their legacy in later literary cultures.

The "Viking Age" of medieval Scandinavia, with its heathen religion and heroic literature, continues to fascinate readers, writers, students, scholars, poets, artists, and creators of all kinds around the world. This cultural legacy is preserved in Old Norse literature, much of it composed and produced in Iceland, an island with a unique position in relation to the ebb and flow of religions, institutions, and empires.

The chapters in this book examine many topics in Old Norse literature: the mysterious personas of the god Odin, the strange origins of poetry and scholarship, the cryptic lore of the elusive dwarfs, the fame of the dragon-slayer Sigurd and the defiant "Sworn Brothers", the early settlement of Iceland, trade in the medieval north, and the history of literary production. Several contributors upend traditional interpretations of their topics, while others offer new insights into the rich modern artistic reception of Norse myth. These studies reveal the striking resilience and adaptability of Old Norse narrative traditions, which retain their timeless appeal through a startling variety of contexts and changes in form.

List of Illustrations
List of Contributors
Foreword: Old Norse and the Porous Boundaries of MedievalismTom Shippey
Acknowledgements
Note on the Text

IntroductionChristopher Crocker and Dustin Geeraert
1. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in Medieval Iceland: Saga Realism and the Sworn BrothersÁrmann Jakobsson
2. The Malleability of the Past:Íslendingabókas Narrative HistoryMartina Ceolin
3. Women's Work and Material Culture in Medieval Iceland: Gender, Narrative, and Cloth ProductionMeghan Korten
4.Vafþrúðnismál, from Parchment to Print: Stability and Change in the Transmission of Eddic PoetryAndrew McGillivray
5. The Odinic Motif: The Wanderer in the MistRyan E. Johnson
6. What has Darwin to do with Óðinn? Shapeshifting, God, and Nature in the 'Great Story of the North'Dustin Geeraert
7. Madness, Mythology, and Mitteleuropa: Günter Grass's Transformation of Old Norse Myth inThe Tin Drum, Heather O'Donoghue
8. Once More, with Fiction: Transforming Myth in Gerður Kristný'sBlóðhófnir and The Eddic PoemSkírnismál, Christopher Crocker
Afterword: Ethnographic MedievalismsM.J. Toswell

Bibliography
Index