Scandinavian Literature

All the World's Reward presents ninety-eight tales from Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Swedish-speaking Finland, and Iceland. Each area is represented by the complete recorded repertoire of a single storyteller. Such a focus helps place the stories in the context of the communities in which they were performed and also reveals how individual folk artists used the medium of oral literature to make statements about their lives and their world. Some preferred jocular stories and others wonder tales; some performed mostly for adults, others for children; some used storytelling to criticize society, and others spun wish fulfillment tales to find relief from a harsh reality. For the most part collected a century ago, the stories were gleaned from archives and printed sources; the Icelandic repertoire was collected on audiotape in the 1960s. Each repertoire was selected by a noted folklorist. Introductions to the storytellers and collectors and commentaries and references for the tales are provided. A general introduction, a comprehensive bibliography, and an index of the tales according to Aarne-Thompson's typology are also included. Period illustrations add charm to the stories.

A collection of folk literature from five countries, with illustrations by native artists.

Here is a rich compendium of hundreds of legends, stories, beliefs, and magic collected from oral sources in preindustrial Scandinavia. In this rural society, the people lived close to nature and believed themselves an integral part of it. This volume focuses on beliefs that illustrate the central aspects of a traditional worldview, rather than on prose narratives considered for their literary value

A collection of approximately 175 Scandinavian folktales.

Twenty-four tales from the folklore of Denmark, Norway, Iceland, and Finland.

This book features a variety of essays about the folk songs, folktales, and legends of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and the Faroe Islands.

In recent years, increasing attention has been paid to the field of folk legends, past and present, and the information that they provide about the people who told them, the societies in which the storytellers lived, the worldview that they had, and the spaces they inhabited. This book, based on the plenary papers of the 5th Celtic-Nordic-Baltic Folklore Symposium, held in Reykjavik in 2005, provides a valuable insight into the various ways in which scholars are approaching this material today. Containing papers by some of the foremost scholars in the field in Ireland, Great Britain, the Nordic countries, Estonia and the United States (Jacqueline Simpson, Anna-Leena Siikala, Arne Bugge Amundsen, Seamas O Cathain, Ulrika Wolf-Knuts, John Shaw, Bengt af Klintberg, John Lindow, Ulf Palmenfelt, Timothy R. Tangherlini, Ulo Valk, and Bo Almqvist), the book touches on a wide range of material concerning the study of legends, from theory and function, to historical and social analysis, traditional case studies and analyis of the way in which some of the earliest legends were collected, recorded and published as a form of national heritage.

Nordic folklore studies have made major theoretical contributions to international folklore scholarship. The articles in this collection not only reflect areas in which Nordic folklore studies have been particularly strong, but also demonstrate recent changes in theoretical paradigms and empirical application.

The Nordic Storyteller: Essays in Honour of Niels Ingwersen consists of a set of nineteen research essays plus an introduction, written by colleagues and admirers of Niels and Faith Ingwersen, leaders in the field of Scandinavian Studies in North America for some four decades. A first section of seven essays, entitled Songs and Tales in Oral Tradition, presents research in the area of folklore studies, including balladry, saints' lives, incantations, healing, legendry, and personal experience narrative. Articles take up such issues as classification, thematics, cultural and historical change, and the effects of technology on daily life. A closely related second section, From Oral Tradition to Literature includes three essays which examine the adaptation of oral tradition to literary forms, focusing on the works of P. Chr. Asbjornsen, Esias Tegner, Elias Lonnrot, F. R. Kreutzwald, and the illustrations of Arthur Rackham-all figures important in the rise of folklore as a key interest of Romantic nationalism. A further set of nine essays grouped under the title Tales in Literary Form examine aspects of the writings of some of the greatest storytellers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including H. C. Andersen, Herman Bang, Henrik Ibsen, Johann Magnus Bjarnason, Charles Dickens, Thomas Mann, Isak Dinesen, Martin Andersen Nexo, Billy August, Hans Scherfig, Peter Hoeg, Klaus Rifbjerg, Leif Panduro, and Kjartan Flogstad. Articles address topics including autobiography, source criticism, symbolism, personal and national identities, and the representation of political ideals. Together the essays of this volume demonstrate the unflagging salience of narrative-of storytelling-in the personal lives and social experiences of Scandinavians and their neighbors, past and present.

This anthology of essays, Northern Myths, Modern Identities, explores the various ways in which ancient mythologies have been cultivated in the cultural construction of ethnic, national and supra-national identities from 1800 to the present. How were Old Norse, Finno-Ugric and Frisian myths employed as rhetorical devices in national narratives? And how did (and do) these new interpretations convey a sense of 'northernness'? This volume approaches these issues from an interdisciplinary and international perspective, and brings together case studies from Scandinavia, the Baltic region, Friesland, Britain, the United States and even Japan. Thus, it provides a unique insight into the reception history and uses of northern myths in the present, and their role in the creation of modern identities. Contributors are: Tim van Gerven, Gylfi Gunnlaugsson, Simon Halink, Sumarli i R. sleifsson, Otto S. Knottnerus, Joep Leerssen, Daisy Neijmann, Han Nijdam, Robert A. Saunders, Katja Schulz, Tom Shippey, Carline Tromp, and Kendra Willson.

Trolls lurk under bridges waiting to eat children, threaten hobbits in Middle-Earth, and invade the dungeons of Hogwarts. Often they are depicted as stupid, slow, and ugly creatures, but they also appear as comforting characters in some children's stories or as plastic dolls with bright, fuzzy hair. Today, the name of this fantastic being from Scandinavia has found a wider reach: it is the word for the homeless in California and slang for the antagonizing and sometimes cruel people on the Internet. But how did trolls go from folktales to the World Wide Web?   To explain why trolls still hold our interest, John Lindow goes back to their first appearances in Scandinavian folklore, where they were beings in nature living beside a preindustrial society of small-scale farming and fishing. He explores reports of actual encounters with trolls--meetings others found plausible in spite of their better judgment--and follows trolls' natural transition from folktales to other domains in popular culture. Trolls, Lindow argues, would not continue to appeal to our imaginations today if they had not made the jump to illustrations in Nordic books and Scandinavian literature and drama. From the Moomins to Brothers Grimm and Three Billy Goats Gruff to cartoons, fantasy novels, and social media, Lindow considers the panoply of trolls that surround us and their sometimes troubling connotations in the contemporary world. Taking readers into Norwegian music and film and even Yahoo Finance chat rooms, Trolls is a fun and fascinating book about these strange creatures.