The Saints in Old Norse and Early Modern Icelandic Poetry is a complimentary volume to The Legends of the Saints in Old Norse-Icelandic Prose (UTP 2013). While its predecessor dealt primarily with medieval prose texts about the saints, this volume not only focuses on medieval poems about saints but also on Icelandic devotional poetry created during the early modern period. The handlist organizes saints' names, manuscripts, and editions of individual poems with references to approximate dates of the manuscripts, as well as modern Icelandic editions and translations. Each entry concludes with secondary literature about the poem in question. These features combine to make The Saints in Old Norse and Early Modern Icelandic Poetry an invaluable resource for scholars and students in the field.

"The authors are among the leading authorities on this subject and their bibliographic research has been laudably thorough. The Saints in Old Norse and Early Modern Icelandic Poetry brings the account of hagiographic verse considerably further in time and with its companion volume provides an unbroken account of verse-making on this topic in Iceland from the early Middle Ages up to the nineteenth century." -- Russell Poole, Distinguished University Professor Emeritus, Department of English, Western University "The scholarship in The Saints in Old Norse and Early Modern Icelandic Poetry is thorough and groundbreaking. This book will save hours of poring over manuscript catalogues and sifting through boxes of archival material. It opens the way to a whole new area of research." -- Martin Chase, Department of English, Fordham University

About the Author
Kirsten Wolf is Kim Nilsson Professor and Torger Thompson Chair in the Department of Scandinavian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Natalie Van Deusen is Assistant Professor and Henry Cabot and Linnea Lodge Professor of Scandinavian Studies in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta.

Reviews

The Saints in Old Norse and Early Modern Icelandic Poetry is the first handbook of its kind and therefore extremely welcome, useful, and inspiring. Students and scholars are going to discover unedited material waiting to be researched and published. Hopefully, we shall see more editions, various studies on poetry and saints and, not least, on the manuscript and literary culture in early modern Iceland.

-- Marianne Kalinke * Journal of English and Germanic Philology, vol 117:01:2018 *

"Although some of the poems are not great literature, all are of interest to the scholar. The number of manuscripts indicates their popularity, and it should not be forgotten that poems of this kind were also orally transmitted. They express the ideology and emotions of their poets and their audiences."

-- Asdis Egilsdottir, University of Iceland * Speculum *



Book Information
ISBN 9781487500740
Author Kirsten Wolf
Format Hardback
Page Count 380
Imprint University of Toronto Press
Publisher University of Toronto Press
Weight(grams) 630g
Dimensions(mm) 235mm * 159mm * 22mm