Women and Godesses in Old Norse Mythology and Folklore
While the pagan deities of the Old Norse world have long fascinated scholars, it has mainly been the male gods who have captured public attention, and scholars have followed this trend, interpreting late Iron Age Scandinavian society from a male perspective.
This volume aims to adjust the balance by bringing together leading scholars working on the Old Norse world and its mythology. The chapters gathered here cover a range of academic fields, from literature and history of religion to folklore, onomastics, and archaeology, with the aim of reassessing the roles played by both women and goddesses in Iron Age Scandinavia.
zum Buch im ULB-KatalogPlus
zum Buch auf der Verlags-Website
The Paganesque and The Tale of Volsi
A family of Norwegian pagans, stubbornly resisting the new Christian religion, worship a diabolically animated preserved horse penis, intoning verses as they pass it from hand to hand until King Olaf the Saint intervenes.
This is the matter of the medieval Tale of Volsi. Traditionally, it has been read as evidence of a pre-Christian fertility cult – or simply dismissed as an obscene trifle.
This book takes a new approach by developing the concept of the „paganesque“ – the air of a religious culture older than and inimical to Christianity. It shows how the Tale of Volsi deploys a range of vernacular genres, from verbal dueling and mythological poetry to folk belief about milk-stealing witches and the reanimated dead, to create the flavor of paganism for a fourteenth-century Icelandic audience: an imagined paganism that has theological stakes as well as satirical bite.
Throughout, the study challenges the notion that the horse penis is the key to understanding the narrative. Once the object is removed from the center of interpretation, the artistry and wit of the tale’s „Paganesque“ come fully into view.
zum Buch im ULB-KatalogPlus
zum Buch auf der Verlags-Website
Weitere Titel können Sie in unseren Neuerwerbungslisten für die Philologien im Fach-Cluster Geisteswissenschaften 2 entdecken!
Schreibe einen Kommentar