Includes entries for maps and atlases.

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

First published in 1993, Medieval Scandinavia: An Encyclopedia covers every aspect of the region during the Middle Ages, including rulers and saints, overviews of the countries, religion, education, politics and law, culture and material life, history, literature, and art. Written by a team of expert contributors, the encyclopedia offers those who lack command of the various Scandinavian languages a basic tool for the study of Medieval Scandinavia from roughly the Migration Period to the Reformation. With full-page maps, useful supplementary photos, cross-references and a comprehensive index, this work will be a valuable and absorbing volume for students of the Norse sagas, the Viking age, and Old English history and literature, and for anyone interested in the cultural and historical heritage of Scandinavia.

In this volume, the persistence, resurgence, threat, fascination, and repression of various forms of pagan culture are studied in an interdisciplinary perspective from late antiquity to the upcoming Renaissance. The contributions deal with the survival of pagan beliefs and practices as well as with the Christianization of pagan rural populations and with the different strategies of oppression of pagan beliefs. They deal with the problems raised by the encounter with pagan cultures outside the Muslim world and examine how philosophers attempted to "save" the great philosophers and poets from ancient culture notwithstanding their paganism. The contributors also study the fascination of classic "pagan" culture among friars in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and the imitation of pagan models of virtue and mythology in Renaissance poetry. Contributors: Carlos Steel, KU Leuven-University of Leuven; John Marenbon, Trinity College, Cambridge; Ludo Milis, University of Ghent; Marc-André Wagner, Brigitte Meijns, University of Leuven; Rob Meens, University of Utrecht; Edina Bozoky, Université de Poitiers; Henryk Anzulewicz, Albertus-Magnus Institut, Bonn; Robrecht Lievens, KU Leuven-University of Leuven; Stefano Pittaluga, Università di Genova; Anna Akasoy, Ruhr-Universitat Bochum