Drauginir: Revenants in Old Icelandic Sagas
It is this humanity in a monster that helps to show why these draugar fascinate us so much. The “others” that exist outside the boundaries of society: the weird old ladies that people label as evil witches, the misshapen, the “freaks” that Tod Browning made famous are funhouse mirror images of ourselves.
The coming of the Christmas Visitors…Folk legends concerning the attacks on Icelandic farmhouses made by spirits at Christmas
The motif seems to have ancient roots connected to the ancient beliefs of the first Icelandic settlers that the island was already populated by various forms of spirits, both positive and negative, which unofficially ‘permitted’ people to take up residence on their territory.
“Far-off gleams of evangelium” : a study of how J. R. R. Tolkien’s The lord of the rings reflects the biblical “Kingdom of Heaven”
The findings of this thesis confirm that the values of LOTR and the Kingdom are notably similar, and that the reader of LOTR does indeed derive from it an experience of what the Kingdom ideally is. But all this is “under the surface”, and Tolkien did not impose his Christianity.
How Icelandic Legends Reflect the Prohibition on Dancing
The following article is about repression, and how repressed culture can find expression in legends.
Talk to the Dragon: Tolkien as Translator
When Bilbo, and the readers of The Hobbit, are confronted with the dragon, they are in for a surprise, as Smaug’s behaviour is somewhat unusual for a dragon.
Up Helly Aa: an ancient Viking festival?
Each year on the last Tuesday of January the town of Lerwick is awash with Vikings. The day culminates with the burning of an ornate longship, complete with dragon head and tail, thus creating a striking image of a Norse sea – king’s funeral pyre.
Nordic Witchcraft in Transition: Impotence, Heresy and Diabolism in 14th-century Bergen
Within the orbit of witchcraft, what is the relationship between sexuality, heresy, and diabolism?
Monstrosity in Old English and Old Icelandic Literature
In medieval Europe belief in monsters allowed for corresponding acceptance of the possibility of humans transforming into monsters. In medieval Iceland and Anglo-Saxon England the mixture of Christian and pagan world views and beliefs create a situation where the boundaries are not merely fluid but can be transgressed, in either direction.
Medieval Halloween! Great books for Ghosts, Goblins, Witches & Ghouls!
Some spooktacular reads to celebrate Medieval Halloween!
Medieval Snuff Drama
Did an onstage execution really take place in 1549 in the city of Tournai or not?
The Good, the Bad and the Undead: New Thoughts on the Ambivalence of Old Norse Sorcery
When taken collectively those sources imply that seiðr was a kind of operative magic which – among other things – enabled its practitioners to foresee the future, heal the sick, change weather conditions, reveal the hidden, shift into animal form or travel to other worlds in a state of trance.
When a Knight meets a Dragon Maiden: Human Identity and the Monstrous Animal Other
The amount of research into the field of medieval monsters has been growing within the past few decades, but the monster has not always been accepted as a worthwhile topic of serious study
Angelic Demons: Witchcraft and Sorcery in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales
In Chaucer’s tales regarding magic and sorcery, three stand out in particular: The Franklin’s Tale, the Wife of Bath’s Tale and the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale.
“A Swarm in July”: Beekeeping Perspectives on the Old English Wið Ymbe Charm
At the same time, however, their differing responses to the remedy attest both to the variation of beekeeping practices and the multivalence of Wið Ymbe itself. The fact that two beekeepers interviewed within two days and two hundred miles of each other can respond differently to the charm’s advice on swarms suggests that we reevaluate unilateral assertions regarding what the text might have meant across the hundreds of years that we now know as the Anglo-Saxon period.
The Virtuous Pagan in Middle English Literature
From the first through the fourteenth centuries, a succession of solutions to the problem of these virtuous pagans evolved. For the Early Church, an attractive solution was that Christ descended into Hell to convert the souls he found there.
Sources of Medieval Demonology
Greek philosophy, Jewish apocryphal literature, Biblical doctrine, and pagan Germanic folklore all contribute elements to the demons which flourished in men’s minds at the close of the medieval period.
The Mandrake Plant and its Legend
This study focuses on the mandrake legend and its growth in Western Europe.
The Riddle of Gollum: Was Tolkien Inspired by Old Norse Gold, the Jewish Golem, and the Christian Gospel?
I would like to speculate on Tolkien’s sources for Gollum. As a start, it is likely that Tolkien’s conscious sources for Gollum were the same as his sources for ents.
Pagan traces in medieval and early modern European witch-beliefs
The aim of this research is to explore how pre-Christian beliefs, cults and popular traditions may have indirectly survived in early modern and medieval European witch-beliefs.
Vilification of Identity and the Exilic Narrative: The Illustrated Pied Piper Story
This paper situates The Pied Piper story as an exilic narrative, part of a larger repertoire of stories that follow the romantic quest-myth formula, a formula that conveys a totla metaphor for the “journey of life”.
The Folk-Stories of Iceland
The imaginative life of the folk-stories was shaped by an Icelandic rural culture which was homogeneous, simple and poor looked at from the outside, but at the same time enriched by knowledge and practice of poetry, familiarity with a literary tradition and unbroken links with the ancient culture of the country.
Imagining Samarkand: Fruitful Themes in 13th-16th Century Literature on a Silk Road City
… Samarkand was seen as the last great urban Islamic stop.4 Perhaps because of this, the period between the Arab invasion of Samarkand and the Mongol invasion in 1220 fomented many of the mythologies about the city which will feature prominently in this paper.
Creativity, the trickster, and the cunning harper king: A study of the minstrel disguise entrance trick in “King Horn” and “Sir Orfeo”
What does a hero do when he finds himself in an impossible situation where customary tactics are useless; magic is not in the cards, and divine intervention unlikely? He could give up. Or he could use cunning. In both King Horn and Sir Orfeo, the hero wiggles out of just such a squeeze by using a minstrel disguise entrance trick—a sort of musical Trojan horse for which the enemy’s closely guarded gates swing open in welcome.