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New Titles

Holy Vikings: Saints’ Lives in the Old Icelandic Kings’ Sagas
By Carl Phelpstead (Cardiff University)
The biographies of royal saints in the Old Icelandic Kings’ Sagas are usually described as ‘secular’ or ‘profane’ texts and not ‘proper’ Saints’ Lives. This book argues that theoretical concepts developed by Mikhail Bakhtin can provide new insights into the role of hagiography in the origins of Icelandic saga-writing by enabling a reading of these texts as both Saint’s Life and saga. The book shows how different generic conventions are brought into dialogue in Orkneyinga saga, Snorri Sturluson’s Óláfs saga helga, and Knýtlinga saga in order to depict rulers as ‘holy vikings’, sometimes conforming to saintly ideals, but often far from doing so.
2007 / 274 + x / 978-0-86698-388-4 / MR 340 / $46, £32, €45

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St. Oswald of Northumbria: Continental Metamorphoses, with an Edition and Translation of Ósvalds saga and Van sunte Oswaldo deme konninghe
by Marianne E. Kalinke (University of Illinois)
St. Oswald of Northumbria: Continental Metamorphoses is a study of the development of the legend of St. Oswald, the Northumbrian king slain in battle against heathen forces in AD 642 who came to be venerated as a martyr. The legend of St. Oswald first appeared in literary form in Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, but Oswald’s cult quickly reached the continent and devotion to him flourished in the southern German-language area. Latin and vernacular texts were produced in support of the cult. Vernacular versions of his legend were transmitted in Der Heiligen Leben ('Lives of the Saints'), which enjoyed wide circulation in both manuscript and print in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, but the martyred saint's vita also became transformed into a hagiographic romance of the bridal-quest type, extant solely in 15th-century manuscripts, but thought by German scholars to be the oldest form of the legend on the continent. Additionally the legend was transmitted as Ósvalds saga in an early-sixteenth-century Icelandic legendary. The Icelandic translation derives from German sources at least 200 years older, and actually represents the earliest form of the legend in the German-language area. This proto-legend, known only in Icelandic translation, gave rise to two distinct vernacular types: a conversion/martyr legend with a bridal quest as the means of proselytizing pagan peoples; and a hagiographic bridal-quest romance in which the saint loses his standing as a martyr. The study of the development of the continental legend of St. Oswald is accompanied by an edition and translation of Ósvalds saga as well as an edition and translation of Van sunte Oswaldo deme konninghe, an abbreviated Low German version of the legend deriving ultimately from a longer German version known today only through the Icelandic translation. Although scholars have known about Ósvalds saga since the mid-nineteenth century, they have failed to understand its significance for the development of the legend on the continent. Germanists have consistently, and erroneously, considered the apocryphal German legend known as the Münchner Oswald, in which the saint does not die as a martyr, the founding legend of Oswald’s cult. This is not the case, as Kalinke argues in this study. Instead, the Icelandic legend represents the earliest German legend that accompanied the cult of St. Oswald on the continent.
The monograph, with the accompanying editions and translations, will be of interest to a wide audience of medievalists, including Germanists and scholars of Latin and vernacular hagiography.
2005 / 220 pages / ISBN-10: 0-86698-341-4, ISBN-13: 978-0-86698-341-9 / MR 297 / $43, €50

This is a copublication with Brepols Press (ASMAR vol. 15)
and can be purchased in North America through Cornell University Publishers Services
and outside of North America through Brepols.

The Shadow-Walkers: Jacob Grimm's Mythology of the Monstrous
Edited by Tom Shippey (Saint Louis University)

Near the start of the 19th century, Jacob Grimm began a "paradigm shift" in the humanities in several ways parallel to the Darwinian revolution in the natural sciences. Just as Darwin presented a solution to the problem of the origin of species in contradition to the mych of Noah's Ark, so Grimm offered an explanation of the origin of languages which replaced the Tower of Babel. Grimm's new science was comparative philology. It showed how the languages of Europe (and elsewhere) had developed from a common, long-extinct source, and its results are now universally accepted.

But Grimm went on to comparative mythology, in the hope of achieving a similar result, and here, while he has had many followers, from J.G. Frazer to Joseph Campbell, his own work has been generally forgotten, at least academically. Yet two of the most popular works of the Western world remain Grimms' Fairy Tales, and Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, another reconstruction of the mythological world which Grimm pioneered.

This volume reconsiders Grimm's "Teutonic Mythology," a work first published in 1835. It draws out into the open Grimm's "buried theses"--that an ancient and original mythology could be reconstructed from fragments, that contemporary folk- and fairy-tales could preserve concepts centuries old--and exposes them to challenge and corroboration. It brings into the discussion material which Grimm did not know, or was unable to integrate into his theories, both from ancient texts, such as Norse sagas, not yet edited in Grimm's time, and from folk-tale collections not made till after his death, such as Jon Arnason's Icelandic Tales. However, where Grimm tried to create a "monomythology" peculiar to Germany, this collection accepts from diversity, in many cases, of German, English, Scandinavian, and associated traditions.

The collection focuses on Grimm's "lower mythology," the non-human races of early European imagination. Separate essays consider the surviving evidence for elves and dwarves, trolls and giants, dragons, werewolves, valkyries, thurses, and theriomorphic transformations. They cover material in Old and Middle English, Old and Middle High German, Old Norse, and the modern languages of North-West Europe, especially of Iceland, home of the strongest living folk-tradition. Sagas, eddas, epics, and romances mix with folk-tales, place-name evidence, and surviving superstition. They throw unexpected light on "the shadow-walkers," the ancient creatures that still haunt the modern imagination. The collection will appeal both to the student of early literature and to all who take delight in the fantastic world, by its comprehensive coverage, careful scholarship, and strong defence of the legitimacy of myth.

2005 / 444 pages / ISBN: 978-0-86698-334-1 / MR 291 / $42, €50

This is a copublication with Brepols Publishers (ASMAR vol. 14)
and can be purchased in North America through Cornell University Press Services
and outside of North America through Brepols.

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Women in Early Modern Germany: An Anthology of Popular Texts
Edited and Translated by Joy Wiltenburg (Rowan University)
This collection of short works in English translation provides a unique view into the depictions of women that entertained broad audiences in early modern Germany. The twenty-one selections cover a range of themes: marriage, love and sex, heroines, anti-heroines, work and household. The introduction relates the texts to their historical context of early modern developments in gender relations. The rhymed translations convey the rhythmic appeal and popular language of the original texts. Though widely current in their time, such texts have long lain in obscurity, difficult to find even for German specialists. This anthology is the first to make them available to modern students and scholars in English translation. Including both German and English texts, the collection offers valuable sources for study at all levels, from undergraduate to specialist.
2002 / 86698-291-4 / MR249 / $36, £32

'Hie Lert uns der meister': Latin Commentary and the German Fable 1350-1500
A. E. Wright

"... a pioneer work" -- Ingeborg Glier, Yale University

This study reconceives and rewrites the history of the medieval German fable and is the fullest available on the animal narratives of Aesop and Avian and their reception in the Middle Ages. The author has assembled (and partly discovered) this corpus of more than seventy manuscripts from libraries in some twelve different countries--a major achievement in itself. From this rich collection of medieval fables and their pedagogical prose commentaries, Wright develops new perspectives on a number of larger issues of medieval culture, particularly the character of school life and the development of a learned vernacular literature. These fables and their commentaries served widely as textbooks throughout the Middle Ages, and Wright succeeds in explaining how they were taught in the medieval classroom. He also demonstrates their influence on five German fable collections of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
2001 / 328 pages / 86698-260-4 / MR218 / $32, £28

Libellus de arte coquinaria: An Early Northern Cookery Book
edited and translated by †Rudolf Grewe and Constance B. Hieatt
This critical edition of medieval culinary recipes probably dates from the early thirteenth century and is likely to contain the earliest versions of these recipes that appear again and again in later medieval collections. The thirty-five recipes from four Danish, Icelandic, and Low German manuscripts record culinary themes that were to flourish throughout the later Middle Ages and are a major contribution to the literature on food. The volume includes translations, textual notes, a commentary, and detailed indices covering utensils, procedures, ingredients, and dishes, and a glossary for each of the three languages.
2001 / 176 pages / 86698-264-7 / MR222 / $22, £19