Read and Download eBook Full
Author: Thomas Andrew DuBois
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 1999-08-03
Total Pages: 281
ISBN-13: 0812217144
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThomas DuBois unravels for the first time the history of the Nordic religions in the Viking Age. "A seminal study of Nordic religions that future scholars will not be able to avoid."—Church History
Author: Thomas Andrew DuBois
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 1999-08-03
Total Pages: 288
ISBN-13: 9780812217148
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThomas DuBois unravels for the first time the history of the Nordic religions in the Viking Age. "A seminal study of Nordic religions that future scholars will not be able to avoid."—Church History
Author: Thomas Andrew DuBois
Publisher:
Published: 1999
Total Pages: 296
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThomas DuBois unravels for the first time the history of the Nordic religions in the Viking Age. "A seminal study of Nordic religions that future scholars will not be able to avoid."--Church History
Author: Anders Andrén
Publisher: Nordic Academic Press
Published: 2006-01-01
Total Pages: 417
ISBN-13: 918911681X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe study of Old Norse Religion is a truly multidisciplinary and international field of research. The rituals, myths and narratives of pre-Christian Scandinavia are investigated and interpreted by archaeologists, historians, art historians, historians of religion as well as scholars of literature, onomastics and Scandinavian studies. For obvious reasons, these studies belong to the main curricula in Scandinavia but are also carried out at many other universities in Europe, the United States and Australia a fact that is evident to any reader of this book. In order to bring this broad and varied field of research together, an international conference on Old Norse religion was held in Lund in June 2004. About two hundred delegates from more than fifteen countries took part. The intention was to gather researchers to encourage and improve scholarly exchange and dialogue, and Old Norse religion in long-term perspectives presents a selection of the proceedings from that conference. The 75 contributions elucidate topics such as worldview and cosmology, ritual and religious practice, myth and memory as well as the reception and present-day use of Old Norse religion. The main editors of this volume have directed the multidisciplinary research project Roads to Midgard since 2000. The project is based at Lund University and funded by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation.
Author: Catharina Raudvere
Publisher: Nordic Academic Press
Published: 2012-01-01
Total Pages: 289
ISBN-13: 918550971X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe religion of the Viking Age is conventionally identified through its mythology: the ambiguous character Odin, the forceful Thor, and the end of the world approaching in Ragnarök. But pre-Christian religion consisted of so much more than mythic imagery and legends, and lingered for long in folk tradition. Studying religion of the North with an interdisciplinary approach is exceptionally fruitful, in both empirical and theoretical terms, and in this book a group of distinguished scholars widen the interpretative scope on religious life among the pre-Christian Scandinavian people. The authors shed new light on topics such as rituals, gender relations, social hierarchies, and inter-regional contacts between the Nordic tradition and the Sami and Finnish regions. The contributions add to a more complex view of the pre-Christian religion of Scandinavia, with relevant new questions about the material and a broad analysis of religion as a cultural expression.
Author: Irene García Losquiño
Publisher: Brepols Publishers
Published: 2020
Total Pages: 336
ISBN-13: 9782503586045
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe contributions in this volume by world-leading scholars of archaeology, history, history of religion, literature and onomastics provide new insights into the construction of the sacred in Old Norse culture and society. The term 'sacred' is often used in relation to the pre-Christian religions of Iron Age and medieval Scandinavia. But what did sacred really mean? What made something sacred for people? Why was one particular person, place, act, or text perceived to hold a sacral quality, while others remained profane? And what impact did such sacrality have on wider society, culture, politics, and economics, both for contemporaries and for future generations? This volume seeks to engage with such questions by drawing together essays from many of the pre-eminent scholars of Old Norse in order to reinterpret the concept of the sacred in the Viking Age North and to challenge pre-existing frameworks for understanding the sacred in this space and time. Including essays from Margaret Clunies Ross, Stephen Mitchell, John Lindow, and Judy Quinn, it is a treasury of commentary and information that ranges widely across theories and sources of evidence to present significant primary research and reconsiderations of existing scholarship. This edited collection is dedicated to Stefan Brink, an outstanding figure in the study of early Scandinavian language, society, and culture, and it takes as its inspiration the diversity, interdisciplinarity and vitality of his own research in order to make a major new contribution to the field of Old Norse studies.
Author: Snorri (Sturluson)
Publisher:
Published: 1907
Total Pages:
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAuthor: Triin Laidoner
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-01-14
Total Pages: 143
ISBN-13: 0429815999
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAncestor worship is often assumed by contemporary European audiences to be an outdated and primitive tradition with little relevance to our societies, past and present. This book questions that assumption and seeks to determine whether ancestor ideology was an integral part of religion in Viking Age and early medieval Scandinavia. The concept is examined from a broad socio-anthropological perspective, which is used to structure a set of case studies which analyse the cults of specific individuals in Old Norse literature. The situation of gods in Old Norse religion has been almost exclusively addressed in isolation from these socio-anthropological perspectives. The public gravemound cults of deceased rulers are discussed conventionally as cases of sacral kingship, and, more recently, religious ruler ideology; both are seen as having divine associations in Old Norse scholarship. Building on the anthropological framework, this study introduces the concept of ‘superior ancestors’, employed in social anthropology to denote a form of political ancestor worship used to regulate social structure deliberately. It suggests that Old Norse ruler ideology was based on conventional and widely recognised religious practices revolving around kinship and ancestors and that the gods were perceived as human ancestors belonging to elite families.
Author: Stephen A. Mitchell
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2011-06-06
Total Pages: 384
ISBN-13: 0812203712
DOWNLOAD EBOOKStephen A. Mitchell here offers the fullest examination available of witchcraft in late medieval Scandinavia. He focuses on those people believed to be able—and who in some instances thought themselves able—to manipulate the world around them through magical practices, and on the responses to these beliefs in the legal, literary, and popular cultures of the Nordic Middle Ages. His sources range from the Icelandic sagas to cultural monuments much less familiar to the nonspecialist, including legal cases, church art, law codes, ecclesiastical records, and runic spells. Mitchell's starting point is the year 1100, by which time Christianity was well established in elite circles throughout Scandinavia, even as some pre-Christian practices and beliefs persisted in various forms. The book's endpoint coincides with the coming of the Reformation and the onset of the early modern Scandinavian witch hunts. The terrain covered is complex, home to the Germanic Scandinavians as well as their non-Indo-European neighbors, the Sámi and Finns, and it encompasses such diverse areas as the important trade cities of Copenhagen, Bergen, and Stockholm, with their large foreign populations; the rural hinterlands; and the insular outposts of Iceland and Greenland. By examining witches, wizards, and seeresses in literature, lore, and law, as well as surviving charm magic directed toward love, prophecy, health, and weather, Mitchell provides a portrait of both the practitioners of medieval Nordic magic and its performance. With an understanding of mythology as a living system of cultural signs (not just ancient sacred narratives), this study also focuses on such powerful evolving myths as those of "the milk-stealing witch," the diabolical pact, and the witches' journey to Blåkulla. Court cases involving witchcraft, charm magic, and apostasy demonstrate that witchcraft ideologies played a key role in conceptualizing gender and were themselves an important means of exercising social control.
Author: Daniel McCoy
Publisher:
Published: 2016-06-01
Total Pages: 318
ISBN-13: 9781533393036
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Viking Spirit is an introduction to Norse mythology like no other. As you'd expect from Daniel McCoy, the creator of the enduringly popular website Norse Mythology for Smart People (Norse-Mythology.org), it's written to scholarly standards, but in a simple, clear, and entertaining style that's easy to understand and a pleasure to read. It includes gripping retellings of no less than 34 epic Norse myths - more than any other book in the field - while also providing an equally comprehensive overview of the fascinating Viking religion of which Norse mythology was a part. You'll learn about the Vikings' gods and goddesses, their concept of fate, their views on the afterlife, their moral code, how they thought the universe was structured, how they practiced their religion, the role that magic played in their lives, and much more. With its inclusion of the latest groundbreaking research in the field, The Viking Spirit is the ultimate introduction to the timeless splendor of Norse mythology and religion for the 21st Century.
