"A wide-ranging and thoughtful collection of essays which challenges our conceptions of medieval Icelandic poetry, its categorizations and its links with European literature. From early translations to late ballad reflexes of traditional material, Eddic, Skaldic, and Beyond offers fresh new readings of poems, probes into the complex nature of Icelandic poetics and unpacks the contexts and connections of literary production ... Read moreover a five-hundred year period. Laying down a crucial foundation for the future study of Icelandic poetry, this book inspires scholars and students to take up the unfamiliar and to rethink the familiar."
-Carolyne Larrington St John's College "This volume, which brings together studies by eleven scholars, represents a major contribution to the study of Old Norse-Icelandic poetry, not least by following its subject well beyond the end of the middle ages proper. Any other approach, as editor Martin Chase argues in his introduction, fails to appreciate the continuity to Old Norse-Icelandic literary history over a far longer period of time, a continuity due in part to the persistence of manuscript culture in Iceland long after the introduction of print. The essays thus address topics ranging from some of the earliest poetic works extant, such as Merlinusspa, to some of latest, such as ballads and rimur (metrical romances). While many of these topics will be familiar to students of Old Norse-Icelandic - Snorri Sturluson and his Edda, for example - others, such as editor Martin Chase's own excellent contribution on Icelandic devotional poetry of the 15th and 16th century, have hitherto received little or no scholarly attention."
-M. J. Driscoll Arnamagnaean Institute, University of Copenhagen "This wide-ranging and innovative volume offers a welcome reminder that the study of Old Norse-Icelandic poetry has much to contribute to the field of medieval studies as a whole." -Speculum Show Less