Comic Sagas and Tales from Iceland

Author:
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141975520
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 375

Book Description
Comic Sagas and Tales brings together the very finest Icelandic stories from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, a time of civil unrest and social upheaval. With feuding families and moments of grotesque violence, the sagas see such classic mythological figures as murdered fathers, disguised beggars, corrupt chieftains and avenging sons do battle with axes, words and cunning. The tales, meanwhile, follow heroes and comical fools through dreams, voyages and religious conversions in medieval Iceland and beyond. Shaped by Iceland's oral culture and their conversion to Christianity, these stories are works of ironic humour and stylistic innovation.

Hrafnkel's Saga and Other Icelandic Stories

Author:
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141961422
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 162

Book Description
Written around the thirteenth century AD by Icelandic monks, the seven tales collected here offer a combination of pagan elements tightly woven into the pattern of Christian ethics. They take as their subjects figures who are heroic, but do not fit into the mould of traditional heroes. Some stories concern characters in Iceland - among them Hrafknel's Saga, in which a poor man's son is murdered by his powerful neighbour, and Thorstein the Staff-Struck, which describes an ageing warrior's struggle to settle into a peaceful rural community. Others focus on the adventures of Icelanders abroad, including the compelling Audun's Story, which depicts a farmhand's pilgrimage to Rome. These fascinating tales deal with powerful human emotions, suffering and dignity at a time of profound transition, when traditional ideals were gradually yielding to a more peaceful pastoral lifestyle.

Icelandic Folktales and Legends

Author: Jacqueline Simpson
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520021167
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description
A translated selection devoted to supernatural beings, ghosts, and magic practices.

Echoes of Valhalla

Author: Jón Karl Helgason
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1780237154
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Book Description
An account of how Icelandic eddas (poems of Norse mythology) and sagas (ancient prose accounts of Viking history, voyages, and battles) have been reinvented and adapted in comic books, plays, music, and films.

Independent People

Author: Halldor Laxness
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307486265
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 513

Book Description
From the Nobel Prize-winning Icelandic author: a magnificent novel that recalls Iceland's medieval epics and classics, set in the early twentieth century starring an ordinary sheep farmer and his heroic determination to achieve independence. • "A strange story, vibrant and alive…. There is a rare beauty in its telling." —Atlantic Monthly If Bjartur of Summerhouses, the book's protagonist, is an ordinary sheep farmer, his flinty determination to free himself is genuinely heroic and, at the same time, terrifying and bleakly comic. Having spent eighteen years in humiliating servitude, Bjartur wants nothing more than to raise his flocks unbeholden to any man. But Bjartur's spirited daughter wants to live unbeholden to him. What ensues is a battle of wills that is by turns harsh and touching, elemental in its emotional intensity and intimate in its homely detail. Vast in scope and deeply rewarding, Independent People is a masterpiece.

An Introduction to the Sagas of Icelanders

Author: Carl Phelpstead
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813057566
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 180

Book Description
Combining an accessible approach with innovative scholarship, An Introduction to the Sagas of Icelanders provides up-to-date perspectives on a unique medieval literary genre that has fascinated the English-speaking world for more than two centuries. Carl Phelpstead draws on historical context, contemporary theory, and close reading to deepen our understanding of Icelandic saga narratives about the island’s early history. Phelpstead explores the origins and cultural setting of the genre, demonstrating the rich variety of oral and written source traditions that writers drew on to produce the sagas. He provides fresh, theoretically informed discussions of major themes such as national identity, gender and sexuality, and nature and the supernatural, relating the Old Norse-Icelandic texts to questions addressed by postcolonial studies, feminist and queer theory, and ecocriticism. He then presents readings of select individual sagas, pointing out how the genre’s various source traditions and thematic concerns interact. Including an overview of the history of English translations that shows how they have been stimulated and shaped by ideas about identity, and featuring a glossary of critical terms, this book is an essential resource for students of the literary form. A volume in the series New Perspectives on Medieval Literature: Authors and Traditions, edited by R. Barton Palmer and Tison Pugh

Orkneyinga Saga

Author:
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780140443837
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Book Description
Written around AD 1200 by an unnamed Icelandic author, the Orkneyinga Saga is an intriguing fusion of myth, legend and history. The only medieval chronicle to have Orkney as the central place of action, it tells of an era when the islands were still part of the Viking world, beginning with their conquest by the kings of Norway in the ninth century. The saga describes the subsequent history of the Earldom of Orkney and the adventures of great Norsemen such as Sigurd the Powerful, St Magnus the Martyr and Hrolf, the conqueror of Normandy. Savagely powerful and poetic, this is a fascinating depiction of an age of brutal battles, murder, sorcery and bitter family feuds. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The Folk-stories of Iceland

Author: Einar Ólafur Sveinsson
Publisher: Viking Society for Northern Research University College
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 328

Book Description
In Iceland, people do not compose verse just to comfort themselves; they worship poetry and believe in it. In poetry is a power which rules men's lives and health, governs wind and sea. This book contains an account of the various types of Icelandic folk-story, their origins and sources, the folk-beliefs they represent, and their meanings.

Ring of Seasons

Author: Terry G. Lacy
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472086610
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 334

Book Description
Iceland in all of its extraordinary glory

Erik the Red

Author: Soren Mosdal
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780993395147
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
In the year 982 Erik Torvaldsson, also called Erik the Red, left Iceland after a bloody neighbour feud. He went out to find a mysterious island to the north. He found it and called it Greenland, so that many people would follow him. Thanks to gifts and bribes, he ruled his colony unchallenged by Christian priests and kings, all the way to the beginning of the year 1000 A.D.