Tag: medieval literature
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Raid 12: Norse Mythology in Saga Literature
This is our third and final raid covering the scanty sources we have for Norse Mythology. To most people, sagas are an odd and obscure group of medieval literature mostly from the equally odd and obscure Iceland. Their content typically covers things like feuding farmers or campaigning kings (occasionally featuring whack-a-mole spectral seals and red-shirt…
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Norse Mythology in Saga Literature
This is our third and final raid covering the scanty sources we have for Norse Mythology. To most people, sagas are an odd and obscure group of medieval literature mostly from the equally odd and obscure Iceland. Their content typically covers things like feuding farmers or campaigning kings (occasionally featuring whack-a-mole spectral seals and red-shirt…
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Special Raid: ‘Viking’ Love Stories
When it comes to love in the medieval North, these are some of the most essential stories to know. We start things off with a fairly detailed discussion about Freyja, the free-spirited goddess of love and war, including her ferocious cats and her experience with magic, aka seiðr. After that, we cringe (and laugh) through…
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Raid 11: Norse Mythology in Snorri and Saxo’s Salty Prose
When it comes to ‘primary’ source material about Norse mythology, few are better than the Prose Edda—but everyone hates on its 13th-century Icelandic author, the infamous Snorri Sturluson. There’s plenty of good reasons for that, but I think people take for granted that he was much less salty than his Danish contemporary, Saxo Grammaticus. This…
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Norse Mythology: Snorri and Saxo’s Salty Prose
When it comes to ‘primary’ source material about Norse mythology, few are better than the Prose Edda—but everyone hates on its 13th-century Icelandic author, the infamous Snorri Sturluson. There’s plenty of good reasons for that, but I think people take for granted that he was much less salty than his Danish contemporary, Saxo Grammaticus. This…
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Notes on Rings in Norse Legends
Anonymous asked: In one of your recent reblogs you said that “Rings worn on the finger, for example, have often played important roles in Norse legends.” Could you please explain more on that? I’ll have to scold my past self for that one. Not only did I leave the footnote for that statement lacking, but I…
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Harald Fairhair: Unification and Cultural Migration
This post was originally delivered as a virtual lecture to the New York Ancient Cultures MeetUp on September 20th, 2020. It was a group effort between myself (fjörn) and Joshua Gillingham (author of The Gatewatch). Below is the transcript I used while giving my portion of the talk. As such, I don’t have any footnotes,…
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Beowulf, Part 1: “Poetically Recreating the Past.”
Behold! the first episode of our read-through of R.M. Liuzza’s translation of Beowulf! In this gathering, we discuss pages 11 through 18 of the introduction, which provides us with the knowledge that we need to responsibly read this epic poem (and medieval literature as a whole). Along the way, we highlight the following questions: how…
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Notes on Old English Literature
Anonymous asked: Did Anglo-Saxon speaking peoples have anything similar to Nordic sagas? They most certainly did, although I know much less about their literature than I should. Based on what time has allowed us to recover, it seems that the Norse (but especially the Icelanders) produced more saga-type writing than their neighbors did in England. But,…
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A List of Old Norse Sagas and Eddas
historicaltimessoldier asked: Can you say how many sagas and eddas are there? And the name of these? I have done my best to list as many sagas as I could, but I am certain that I have not included them all. There are easily over 150 sagas to consider, and that is when we do not include…
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Notes on the Ylfings
justanotherelf-deactivated20200 asked: Hi Fjörn, the other day I was reading the annotated elder edda I have, and I came up to a note that said that Ylfings are asome kind of a “wolf clan”. I thought that wolves were seeing as (sort of) evil in the scandinavian tradition. The thing is that in my family’s coat…
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Freyja in Norse Mythology and Saga Literature
Anonymous asked: I’ve had a lot of instances lately where I’ve felt a pull towards Freyja, but I don’t know a lot about her. Could you share a little bit about her to help with my research?? Unfortunately, Freyja seems to be quite allusive in our sources, especially in the Prose Edda. Her brother Freyr gets…
