Heather O'Donoghue

Whether they focus on Thor's powerful hammer, the wailing Valkyrie, the palatial home of the gods - Asgard - or ravenous wolves and fierce elemental giants, the Norse myths are packed with rowdy incident. But at the centre of their cosmos stands a gnarled old ash tree, Yggdrasil, from which all distances and times are measured. When the old tree creaks, Ragnarok - the end of the world and of the gods themselves - is at hand. It is from this tree that Odin, father of the gods, hanged himself in search of the wisdom of the dead: a disturbing image of divine sacrifice far removed from the feasting and fighting of his otherworld home, Valhalla. And an image so problematic for thirteenth century Christians that they left it out when they wrote the myths down. From Asgard to Valhalla is the first book to show how and why the Norse myths have so powerfully resonated from era to era: from Viking-age stories of ice and fire to the epic poetry of Beowulf; and from Wagner's Ring to Marvel Comics' Mighty Thor. Heather O'Donoghue, who is an expert on Old Norse culture, shows in what ways the Norse myths have impacted on the western mind, across the fields of literature, art, music and politics. She considers the wider contexts of Norse mythology, including its origins, medieval expression and reception in post-medieval societies right up to the present. From Asgard to Valhalla is a book that will intrigue and delight anyone who is keen to understand how the Norse myths have so profoundly shaped, and continue to shape, the western cultural heritage.

The Remarkable History of the Norse Myths

From Asgard to Valhalla

Kevin Crossley-Holland

Beowulf is the longest and finest literary work to have come down to us from Anglo-Saxon times, and one of the world's greatest epic poems. This acclaimed translation is complemented by a critical introduction and substantial editorial apparatus.

The Fight at Finnsburh

Beowulf

Skaldic Verse and the Poetics of Saga Narrative is a detailed reading of a series of sophisticated medieval narratives, the Old Norse-Icelandic sagas. It shows how saga authors achieved a wide range of stylistic and psychological effects through the interplay of prose and verse: bringing history to life, presenting fiction as if it were history, and providing saga characters with dramatic dialogue and strange soliloquies.

Skaldic Verse and the Poetics of Saga Narrative

The Representation of External Time -- The Management of Narrative Time: Duration -- The Management of Narrative Time: Order -- The Voice of the Silent Narrator -- Withheld Knowledge -- Conclusion.

Meanings of Time in Old Norse Literature

Narrative in the Icelandic Family Saga

From runic inscriptions to sagas, this book introduces readers to the colourful world of Old Norse-Icelandic literature. An introduction to the colourful world of Old Norse-Icelandic literature. Covers mythology and family sagas, as well as less well-known areas, such as oral story-telling, Eddaic verse and skaldic verse. An introduction helps readers to appreciate the language and culture of the first settlers in Iceland. Looks at the reception of Old-Norse-Icelandic literature over the ages, as views of the vikings have changed. Shows how a whole range of authors from Shakespeare to Seamus Heaney have been influenced by Old Norse-Icelandic literature.

A Short Introduction

Old Norse-Icelandic Literature

Vigfusson Rausing Reader in Old Norse Heather O'Donoghue

The origins of many of the Icelandic sagas have long been the subject of critical speculation and controversy. This book demonstrates that an investigation of the relationship between verse and prose in saga narrative can be used to reconstruct how Icelandic sagas were composed; to this endit provides a detailed analysis of Kormaks saga, whose hero Kormakr is one of the most celebrated of Icelandic poets. Over sixty of his passionate, cryptic skaldic stanzas are quoted in the saga, and the way they and the saga prose are fitted together reveals that Kormaks saga, far from being aseamless narrative of either pre-Christian oral tradition or later medieval fiction, is in fact a patchwork of different kinds of literary materials. This book offers an original and productive way of understanding not only the compositional method and distinctive aesthetic qualities of Kormakssaga, but also the genesis of many other Icelandic saga narratives.

Verse and Prose in Kormaks Saga

The Genesis of a Saga Narrative

Representative of a unique literary genre and composed in the 13th and 14th centuries, the Icelandic Family Sagas rank among some of the world's greatest literature. Here, Heather O'Donoghue skilfully examines the notions of time and the singular textual voice of the Sagas, offering a fresh perspective on the foundational texts of Old Norse and medieval Icelandic heritage. With a conspicuous absence of giants, dragons, and fairy tale magic, these sagas reflect a real-world society in transition, grappling with major new challenges of identity and development. As this book reveals, the stance of the narrator and the role of time – from the representation of external time passing to the audience's experience of moving through a narrative – are crucial to these stories. As such, Narrative in the Icelandic Family Saga draws on modern narratological theory to explore the ways in which saga authors maintain the urgency and complexity of their material, handle the narrative and chronological line, and offer perceptive insights into saga society. In doing so, O'Donoghue presents a new poetics of family sagas and redefines the literary rhetoric of saga narratives.

Skaldic Verse and the Poetics of Saga Narrative is a study of the varying relationships between verse and prose in a series of Old Norse-Icelandic saga narratives. It shows how the interplay of skaldic verse, with its metrical intricacy and cryptic diction, and saga prose, with its habitual spare clarity, can be used to achieve a wide variety of sophisticated stylistic and psychological effects. In sagas, there is a fundamental distinction between verses which are ostensibly quoted to corroborate what is stated in the narrative, and verses which are presented as the speech of characters in the saga. Corroborative verses are typical of-but not confined to-historical writings, the verses acting as a footnote to the narrative. Dialogue verses, with their illusion that saga characters break into verse at crucial points in the story, belong to the realm of fiction. This study, which focuses on historical writings such as Ágrip and Heimskringla, and three of the major family sagas, Eyrbyggja saga, Gisla saga and Grettis saga, shows that a close reading of the prosimetrum in the narrative can be used to chart the complex and delicate boundaries between history and fiction in the sagas. When skaldic stanzas are presented as the dialogue of saga characters, the characteristic naturalism of these narratives is breached. But some saga authors, as this book shows, extend still further the expressiveness of saga narrative, presenting skaldic stanzas as the soliloquies of saga characters. This technique enables the direct articulation of emotion, and hence dramatic focalization of the narrative and the creation of psychological climaxes. As an epilogue, Heather O'Donoghue considers the absence of such effects in Hrafnkels saga-a highly literary narrative without verses.

English Poetry and Old Norse Myth: A History traces the influence of Old Norse myth on poetry in English from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day. Many major poets were inspired by this mythic material. Some, such as the Anglo-Saxon poet of Beowulf, or Walter Scott, used mythic references to set the scene of a distant but dramatic Northern past. Others, such as Thomas Gray, or Matthew Arnold, adapted actual Old Norse mythological texts in wayswhich both responded to and formed the literary tastes of their own times. Still others, such as William Blake, or David Jones, reworked central mythic elements -- valkyries weaving the fates of men, or the great WorldTree on which Odin sacrificed himself -- into their own poetry. This book shows how both major and minor poets in English have reflected changing attitudes towards the pagan North.

Heather O'Donoghue

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