COML 259 Vikings: Facts, Fictions, and Fantasies (HC)

Includes a range of original, translated, and annotated literary sources, including elegies, eulogies, laments and material on the Viking Wars in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Vikings gods and Icelandic sagas, Arthurian Romances, and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

Saxo was probably a canon of Lund Cathedral, at that period a Danish cathedral, and lived at the end of the twelfth century. He was in the service of Archbishop Absalon, who encouraged him to write a history of his own country from the beginnings up to his own time, with a strong Christian bias. Starting with the myths and heroic tales of early Scandinavia, he devoted the first nine of his sixteen books to legendary material before dealing with the first kings of the Viking age and finished in 1285.. In six of the first nine books he inserts poems, which are intended to parallel specimens of old Danish heroic poetry in Latin metres. Saxo is a lively and compelling story-teller, often displaying a rather sly sense of humour, and an interest in the supernatural.

Drawing on a wide range of original primary sources, this comprehensive reader illustrates many aspects of Old Norse culture. Chroniclers record European horror in the face of the Viking onslaught. An Arab diplomat gives a gripping account of an encounter with Norsemen in Russia. Great warriors and kings of the period are heralded in Skaldic poetry. With unusual power, saga literature narrates the lives of Norse women and men at home and abroad. The reader includes new translations of all of the Norse material.

Chronicles of the Vikings shows the Vikings through their own writings: runic inscriptions left behind, poems of their official skalds, literary works that entertained them, the few prose historical accounts that derive direct from Vikings, and eyewitness reports of how the northern peoples lived. Chronicles of the Vikings defines the social values of the Viking Age, their heroic view of life which sometimes contrasts with their more prosaic everyday life. It looks at the problems they encountered in discovering, populating, and cultivating new lands, the difficulties of keeping law and order and the solutions they tried. We discover how they coped with famine and other natural disasters, travel and its perils, something of their popular culture, proverbs and aphorisms, and their sometimes irreverent approach to their gods and goddesses, the supernatural, magic and charms.