Laxdaela Saga

Laxdaela Saga

Author: Magnus Magnusson

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 1969

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9780140442182

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Written around 1245 by an unknown author, the Laxdaela Saga is an extraordinary tale of conflicting kinships and passionate love, and one of the most compelling works of Icelandic literature. Covering 150 years in the lives of the inhabitants of the community of Laxriverdale, the saga focuses primarily upon the story of Gudrun Osvif's-daughter: a proud, beautiful, vain and desirable figure, who is forced into an unhappy marriage and destroys the only man she has truly loved – her husband's best friend. A moving tale of murder and sacrifice, romance and regret, the Laxdaela Saga is also a fascinating insight into an era of radical change – a time when the Age of Chivalry was at its fullest flower in continental Europe, and the Christian faith was making its impact felt upon the Viking world.


White Settler Reserve

White Settler Reserve

Author: Ryan Eyford

Publisher: UBC Press

Published: 2016-07-01

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0774831618

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In 1875, Icelandic immigrants established a colony on the southwest shore of Lake Winnipeg. The timing and location of New Iceland was not accidental. Across the Prairies, the Canadian government was creating land reserves for Europeans in the hope that the agricultural development of Indigenous lands would support the state’s economic and political ambitions. In this innovative history, Ryan Eyford expands our understanding of the creation of western Canada: his nuanced account traces the connections between Icelandic colonists, the Indigenous people they displaced, and other settler groups while exposing the ideas and practices integral to building a colonial society.


The Viking Immigrants

The Viking Immigrants

Author: Laurie K Bertram

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2020-02-24

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1442663014

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A Viking statue, a coffee pot, a ghost story, and a controversial cake: What can the things that immigrants treasured tell us about their history? Between 1870 and 1914 almost one-quarter of Iceland’s population migrated to North America, forming enclaves in both the United States and Canada. This book examines the multi-sensory side of the immigrant past through rare photographs, interviews, artefacts, and early recipes. By revealing the hidden histories behind everyday traditions, The Viking Immigrants maps the transformation of Icelandic North American culture over a century and a half.


Home and Native Land

Home and Native Land

Author: May Chazan

Publisher: Between the Lines

Published: 2011-07

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 1771130288

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"Home and Native Land takes its vastly important topic and places it under a new, penetrating light, shifting focus from the present grounds of debate onto a more critical terrain. The book's articles, by some of the foremost critical thinkers and activists on issues of difference, diversity, and Canadian policy, challenge sedimented thinking on the subject of multiculturalism. Not merely "another book" on race relations, national identity, or the post 9-11 security environment, this collection forges new and innovative connections by examining how multiculturalism relates to issues of migration, security, labour, environment/nature, and land. These novel pairings illustrate the continued power, limitations, and, at times, destructiveness of multiculturalism, both as policy and as discourse."--Publisher's note.


North American Icelandic

North American Icelandic

Author: Birna Arnbjornsdottir

Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press

Published: 2006-12-15

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 0887553494

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North American Icelandic evolved mainly in Icelandic settlements in Manitoba and North Dakota and is the only version of Icelandic that is not spoken in Iceland. But North American Icelandic is a dying language with few left who speak it.North American Icelandic is the only book about the nature and development of this variety of Icelandic. It details the social and linguistic constraints of one specific feature of North American Icelandic phonology undergoing change, namely Flámæli, which is the merger of two sets of front vowels. Although Flámæli was once a part of traditional Icelandic, it was considered too confusing and was systematically eradicated from the language. But in North America, Flámæli use spread unchecked, allowing the rare opportunity of viewing the evolution of a dialect from its birth to its impending demise.


The Far Traveler

The Far Traveler

Author: Nancy Marie Brown

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9780156033978

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"Brown's enthusiasm is infectious as she re-teaches us our history."--The Boston Globe Five hundred years before Columbus, a Viking woman named Gudrid sailed off the edge of the known world. She landed in the New World and lived there for three years, giving birth to a baby before sailing home. Or so the Icelandic sagas say. Even after archaeologists found a Viking longhouse in Newfoundland, no one believed that the details of Gudrid's story were true. Then, in 2001, a team of scientists discovered what may have been this pioneering woman's last house, buried under a hay field in Iceland, just where the sagas suggested it could be. Joining scientists experimenting with cutting-edge technology and the latest archaeological techniques, and tracing Gudrid's steps on land and in the sagas, Nancy Marie Brown reconstructs a life that spanned--and expanded--the bounds of the then-known world. She also sheds new light on the society that gave rise to a woman even more extraordinary than legend has painted her and illuminates the reasons for its collapse. "Brown rightly leaves scholarly work to scholars. Instead, her account presents an enthusiastic appreciation of her education in how fieldwork and literature offer insights into the past."--The Seattle Times "[Brown has] a lovely ear for storytelling."--Los Angeles Times Book Review NANCY MARIE BROWN is the author of A Good Horse Has No Color and Mendel in the Kitchen. She lives in Vermont with her husband, the writer Charles Fergus.


The History of Iceland

The History of Iceland

Author: Gunnar Karlsson

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 436

ISBN-13: 9780816635894

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Iceland is unique among European societies in having been founded as late as the Viking Age and in having copious written and archaeological sources about its origin. Gunnar Karlsson, that country's premier historian, chronicles the age of the Sagas, consulting them to describe an era without a monarch or central authority. Equating this prosperous time with the golden age of antiquity in world history, Karlsson then marks a correspondence between the Dark Ages of Europe and Iceland's "dreary period", which started with the loss of political independence in the late thirteenth century and culminated with an epoch of poverty and humility, especially during the early Modern Age. Iceland's renaissance came about with the successful struggle for independence in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and with the industrial and technical modernization of the first half of the twentieth century. Karlsson describes the rise of nationalism as Iceland's mostly poor peasants set about breaking with Denmark, and he shows how Iceland in the twentieth century slowly caught up economically with its European neighbors.


Thrashing Seasons

Thrashing Seasons

Author: C. Nathan Hatton

Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press

Published: 2016-05-03

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0887554970

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Horseback wrestling, catch-as-catch-can, glima; long before the advent of today’s WWE, forms of wrestling were practised by virtually every cultural group. C. Nathan Hatton’s Thrashing Seasons tells the story of wrestling in Manitoba from its earliest documented origins in the eighteenth century to the Great Depression. Wrestling was never merely a sport: residents of Manitoba found meaning beyond the simple act of two people struggling for physical advantage on a mat, in a ring, or on a grassy field. Frequently controversial and often divisive, wrestling was nevertheless a popular and resilient cultural practice that proved adaptable to the rapidly changing social conditions in western Canada during its early boom period. In addition to chronicling the colourful exploits of the many athletes who shaped wrestling’s early years, Hatton explores wrestling as a social phenomenon intimately bound up with debates around respectability, ethnicity, race, class, and idealized conceptions of masculinity. In doing so, Thrashing Seasons illuminates wrestling as a complex and socially significant cultural activity, one that has been virtually unexamined by Canadian historians looking at the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.