Eddic, Skaldic, and Beyond

Poetic Variety in Medieval Iceland and Norway

Martin Chase

Fordham Series in Medieval Studies

Pages: 296

Fordham University Press

This book can be opened with

Hardback

ISBN: 9780823257812

Published: 02 June 2014

$55.00

eBook (ePub)

ISBN: 9780823257836

Published: 02 June 2014

$54.99

Description

Eddic, Skaldic, and Beyond shines light on traditional divisions of Old Norse–Icelandic poetry and awakens the reader to work that blurs these boundaries. Many of the texts and topics taken up in these enlightening essays have been difficult to categorize and have consequently been overlooked or undervalued. The boundaries between genres (Eddic and Skaldic), periods (Viking Age, medieval, early modern), or cultures (Icelandic, Scandinavian, English, Continental) may not have been as sharp in the eyes and ears of contemporary authors and audiences as they are in our own. When questions of classification are allowed to fade into the background, at least temporarily, the poetry can be appreciated on its own terms. Some of the essays in this collection present new material, while others challenge long-held assumptions. They reflect the idea that poetry with “medieval” characteristics continued to be produced in Iceland well past the fifteenth century, and even beyond the Protestant Reformation in Iceland (1550). This superb volume, rich in up-to-date scholarship, makes little-known material accessible to a wide audience.

Praise

A wide-ranging and thoughtful collection of essays which challenges our conceptions of medieval Icelandic poetry, its categorizations and its links with European literature. From early translations to late ballad reflexes of traditional material, Eddic, Skaldic, and Beyond offers fresh new readings of poems, probes into the complex nature of Icelandic poetics and unpacks the contexts and connections of literary production over a five-hundred year period. Laying down a crucial foundation for the future study of Icelandic poetry, this book inspires scholars and students to take up the unfamiliar and to rethink the familiar.—Carolyne Larrington, St John's College

This volume, which brings together studies by eleven scholars, represents a major contribution to the study of Old Norse-Icelandic poetry, not least by following its subject well beyond the end of the middle ages proper. Any other approach, as editor Martin Chase argues in his introduction, fails to appreciate the continuity to Old Norse-Icelandic literary history over a far longer period of time, a continuity due in part to the persistence of manuscript culture in Iceland long after the introduction of print. The essays thus address topics ranging from some of the earliest poetic works extant, such as Merlínússpá, to some of latest, such as ballads and rímur (metrical romances). While many of these topics will be familiar to students of Old Norse-Icelandic – Snorri Sturluson and his Edda, for example – others, such as editor Martin Chase’s own excellent contribution on Icelandic devotional poetry of the 15th and 16th century, have hitherto received little or no scholarly attention.—M. J. Driscoll, Arnamagnæan Institute, University of Copenhagen

This wide-ranging and innovative volume offers a welcome reminder that the study of Old Norse-Icelandic poetry has much to contribute to the field of medieval studies as a whole.——Speculum

This is a collection of thought-provoking pieces, the best of which not only raise our consciousness of unjustly neglected works and genres, but also carry out insightful analyses of them.—Viking Society for Northern Research

Author(s)

Martin Chase is Associate Professor of English and Medieval Studies at Fordham University, where he teaches Old and Middle English and Old Norse. His current research is on late- medieval Icelandic devotional poetry. He edited Geisli and Lilja for the Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages series.