Icelandic Farmhouses. Identity, Landscape and Construction (1790-1945) retraces the history of Icelandic rural architecture between the late eighteenth century and the mid-twentieth century. Through the study of Icelandic rural buildings, this book narrates a very special history of architecture: one of adaptation and tradition, scarcity of building materials and transfers of knowledge with Europe. The history of Icelandic farmhouses is intermixed with construction issues, nationalistic debates, and a quest for a much-needed modernization of the standards of living. The book aims to retrace the role of modern building techniques in the development of Icelandic rural architecture and society.

The founding of the Old Icelandic Commonwealth in 930 A.D. is one of the most significant events in the history of early Western Europe. This pioneering work of historiography provides a comprehensive history of Iceland from 870 A.D. to the end of the Commonwealth in 1262.

Memoirs of an Icelandic Bookworm is only partly a memoir. More than half the volume consists of Icelandic folktales, many of which have never been translated into English before. These tales are uniquely presented here as part of a fabric of life extending from a long-ago past through times affected by the Second World War and to the present. The book is a first-hand and humorous account of Icelandic culture and an Icelandic childhood. In the memoir-sections, the bookworm of the title is growing up in a small town in Northern Iceland; her emerging world-view is expanded by family-influences or challenged by sojourns into Icelandic and international literature. Her family is memorably represented, for example by her grandmother, the robust Stefana, who speaks in verse and learns to dance rockn roll, and the white-haired patriarch Jn, who steps in to save the family home from burning and introduces his great-granddaughter to an ancient feminist folktale. The memoirs mostly describe the 1940s and 50s, but the author is constantly looking back, beyond her own memories and even the memories of her great-parents, toward an older culture, preserved in the folktales and exerting its influence through the centuries to touch her own childhood. On occasion, the authors cultural associations reach even further back, to the times of the Icelandic sagas; at other times, with periodic returns to her current vantage point in the 21st century, she touches down in the more recent past for a humorous look at Laxness or up-to-date cultural developments. As a writer of memoirs, the author makes two general observations. The first one is that children should be introduced to imaginative literature as early as possible. Although this is not a new idea, it is illustrated here with an example of highly auspicious conditions: the bookworm and her peers grow up in a cultural climate where literature and poetry are integrated into daily life. The authors second observation is that a small and seemingly insular society may actually contain a great deal of cultural and literary sophistication, as she shows in her descriptions of daily small-town life in Northern Iceland. The sixty-some folktales which occupy the larger part of the book are introduced as flashbacks to earlier times. Reflecting the national past and narrated by long departed country-people, the folktales run through the bookworms own present and link her living family to long-ago forebears. The human characters in these colorful tales are just like the narrators themselves: farmers and their wives, serving maids, clergymen, bishops, or hired hands: a familiar mixture in any farming society. The non-humans are a sinister lot, ranging from The Evil One himself through ghosts and ogres with whom ordinary folk must struggle as best they can. In addition, the ever-present elves are a law unto themselves: loyal as friends but lethal as foes. Being an Icelander and thus receptive to mysticism, the bookworm has ample contact with the supernatural, partly through the folktales but also as elements of daily life. Real people gifted with second sight are still commonplace in the girls own times; in fact, her family owes its very existence to the advice of such a seer. In addition, the bookworms world teems with an international cast of fictional and fantastic characters. Dickenss Mr. Bumble, Anna of Green Gables, Alice in Wonderland, a nameless drunken fisherman (courtesy of Halldr Kiljan Laxness), and the Hunchback of Notre Dame, among others, make cameo appearances next to child-stealing elf-women, man-devouring giantesses, and a dreaded ghost-monster called Thorgeirs Bull. The first folktale, a horrific account of a legendary sorcerer, is presented by itself both as a preview of the dark supernatural mysteries in store for the reader and as a preview of the fascination and excitement such readin

This anthology of international scholarship offers new critical approaches to the study of the many manifestations of the paranormal in the Middle Ages. The guiding principle of the collection is to depart from symbolic or reductionist readings of the subject matter in favor of focusing on the paranormal as human experience and, essentially, on how these experiences are defined by the sources. The authors work with a variety of medieval Icelandic textual sources, including family sagas, legendary sagas, romances, poetry, hagiography and miracles, exploring the diversity of paranormal activity in the medieval North. This volume questions all previous definitions of the subject matter, most decisively the idea of saga realism, and opens up new avenues in saga research.

The medieval Norse-Icelandic saga is one of the most important European vernacular literary genres of the Middle Ages. This Introduction to the saga genre outlines its origins and development, its literary character, its material existence in manuscripts and printed editions, and its changing reception from the Middle Ages to the present time. Its multiple sub-genres - including family sagas, mythical-heroic sagas and sagas of knights - are described and discussed in detail, and the world of medieval Icelanders is powerfully evoked. The first general study of the Old Norse-Icelandic saga to be written in English for some decades, the Introduction is based on up-to-date scholarship and engages with current debates in the field. With suggestions for further reading, detailed information about the Icelandic literary canon, and a map of medieval Iceland, this book is aimed at students of medieval literature and assumes no prior knowledge of Scandinavian languages.

During the Middle Ages, artistic ideas were transmitted from one region to another and passed on from one generation to the next, in the form of drawings. This kind of handmade reproduction, 'exemplum' in Latin, was used to record the form and content of works of art. Some of those drawings have survived in 'model books'. The author presents a fascinating account of many and various aspects of these drawings with special emphasis on how they contribute to our understanding of the genesis of medieval works of art. Exemplum will be a standard work of reference for many years to come

This book is mainly an English translation of Jón Magnússon's A Story of Sufferings. Magnússon, a seventeenth-century Lutheran priest in Iceland, endured intense physical and mental sufferings, which he attributed to the black magic of three alleged sorcerers. The two male sorcerers were tried, convicted, and burned to death, but the third (a woman) was acquitted. The work may have been written as material for appealing the acquittal of the woman to a higher court. This book also includes a historical introduction, a chronology of Jón Magnússon's life, and the rulings from the trials. Though hardly pleasant to read, A Story of Sufferings is a literary masterpiece in the original. It should be of interest to students of mystical religion and to historians of the witchcraft craze that plagued Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

In this first historical study of High-Medieval Iceland to be published in English, Dr Vesteinsson investigates the influence of the Christian Church on the formation of the earliest state structures in Iceland, from the conversion in 1000 to the union with Norway in 1262. In the history of mankind states and state structures have usually been established before the advent of written records. As a result historians are rarely able to trace with certainty the early development of complex structures of government. In Iceland, literacy and the practice of native history writing had been established by the beginning of the twelfth century; whereas the formation of a centralised government did not occur until more than a hundred years later. The early development of statelike structures has therefore been unusually well chronicled, in the Icelandic Sagas, and in the historical records of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Based on this wealth of material,The Christianization of Iceland is an important contribution to the discussion on the formation of states.