Carolyne Larrington

Paul Acker

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Essays on Old Norse Mythology

The Poetic Edda

First published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Formulaic Composition in Old English and Old Icelandic Verse

Revising Oral Theory

Bringing alive the dramatic poems of Old Norse heroic legend, this new collection offers accessible, ground-breaking and inspiring essays which introduce and analyse the exciting legends of the two doomed Helgis and their valkyrie lovers; the dragon-slayer Sigurðr; Brynhildr the implacable shield-maiden; tragic Guðrún and her children; Attila the Hun (from a Norse perspective!); and greedy King Fróði, whose name lives on in Tolkien’s Frodo. The book provides a comprehensive introduction to the poems for students, taking a number of fresh, theoretically-sophisticated and productive approaches to the poetry and its characters. Contributors bring to bear insights generated by comparative study, speech act and feminist theory, queer theory and psychoanalytic theory (among others) to raise new, probing questions about the heroic poetry and its reception. Each essay is accompanied by up-to-date lists of further reading and a contextualisation of the poems or texts discussed in critical history. Drawing on the latest international studies of the poems in their manuscript context, and written by experts in their individual fields, engaging with the texts in their original language and context, but presented with full translations, this companion volume to The Poetic Edda: Essays on Old Norse Mythology (Routledge, 2002) is accessible to students and illuminating for experts. Essays also examine the afterlife of the heroic poems in Norse legendary saga, late medieval Icelandic poetry, the nineteenth-century operas of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, and the recently published (posthumous) poem by Tolkien, The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún.

Essays on Old Norse Heroic Legend

Revisiting the Poetic Edda

Paul Leonard Acker

This unique collection of essays applies significant critical approaches to the mythological poetry of the Poetic Edda, a principal source for Old Norse cosmography and the legends of Odin, Loki, and Thor. The volume also provides very useful introductions that sketch the critical history of the Eddas. By applying new theoretical approaches (feminist, structuralist, post-structuralist) to each of the major poems, this book yields a variety of powerful and convincing readings. Contributors to the collection are both young scholars and senior figures in the discipline, and are of varying nationalities (American, British, Australian, Scandinavian, and Icelandic), thus ensuring a range of interpretations from different corners of the scholarly community. The new translations included here make available for the first time to English-speaking students the intriguing methodologies that are currently developing in Scandinavia. An essential collection of scholarship for any Old Norse course, The Poetic Edda will also be of interest to scholars of Indo-European myth, as well as those who study the theory of myth.

Traitant une question qui sort du cadre habituel de la littérature, Paul Acker transpose tout le drame des Alsaciens dans son roman Les Exilés. C’est l’histoire des jeunes Alsaciens de France qui, nés peu avant ou peu après la guerre, ont accompagné leurs pères dans leur exode vers la France et se sont trouvés des déracinés, subissant toutes les influences successives et changeantes qui, depuis 1870, se sont exercées sur l'esprit français. Paru en 1910, ce roman relate la façon dont Claude Héring, un Alsacien installé à Paris, découvre qui il est et d'où il vient. Professeur à l'école libre des sciences politiques, il est indifférent à ses origines jusqu'à ce que son père lui montre des archives familiales et qu'il découvre le destin de générations de bourgeois morts au service des rois et de l'empereur.

Paul Acker

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