Welcome to our book review site www.go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
American/Medieval Goes North
"One of the great virtues of American/Medieval Goes North is ist wide range of contributors with fascinatingly diverse relationships to the main terms of analysis. There are academic scholars, poets, filmmakers, tribal elders, teachers at various levels; there are Indigenous people, people from settler colonial cultures, expats, immigrants. Their analytic and imaginative encounters with the North catch at the intensely symbolic and political charge of that locus. At a time when Medieval Studies cannot afford to ignore the period's popular uptake – cannot continue with business as usual in the face of white supremacists' brazen appropriations of the Middle Ages – this volume points to new possibilities for grappling with the uneasy relationships between the 'American' and the 'medieval'." – Prof Carolyn Dinshaw, New York University
Ásatrú for Beginners
Explore the ancient gods and goddesses of Ásatrú—and find your spiritual path Ásatrú is a spiritual belief system based around the pre-Christian folklore and mythology of Northern Europe. It gained popularity in the 1970s across Europe and North America and is still thriving today, sought out for its non-dogmatic structure and emphasis on individuality, hospitality, and community-based values. Ásatrú for Beginners is a newcomer's guide to this spirituality. It breaks down everything from the history and traditions to the gods and goddesses, ancient texts, sacred rituals, and the use of runes with simple language anyone can dive into. It's an inclusive and practical guide that makes i...
Contemporary Pagan and Native Faith Movements in Europe
Pagan and Native Faith movements have sprung up across Europe in recent decades, yet little has been published about them compared with their British and American counterparts. Though all such movements valorize human relationships with nature and embrace polytheistic cosmologies, practitioners’ beliefs, practices, goals, and agendas are diverse. Often side by side are groups trying to reconstruct ancient religions motivated by ethnonationalism—especially in post-Soviet societies—and others attracted by imported traditions, such as Wicca, Druidry, Goddess Spirituality, and Core Shamanism. Drawing on ethnographic cases, contributors explore the interplay of neo-nationalistic and neo-colonialist impulses in contemporary Paganism, showing how these impulses play out, intersect, collide, and transform.
Living Folk Religions
Living Folk Religions presents cutting-edge contributions from a range of disciplines to examine religious folkways across cultures. This collection embraces the non-elite and non-sanctioned, the oral, fluid, accessible, evolving religions of people (volk) on the ground. Split into five sections, this book covers: What Is Folk Religion? Spirit Beings and Deities Performance and Ritual Praxis Possession and Exorcism Health, Healing, and Lifestyle Topics include demons and ambivalent gods, tree and nature spirits, revolutionary renunciates, oral lore, possession and exorcism, divination, midwestern American spiritualism, festivals, queer sexuality among ritual specialists, the dead returned, vernacular religions, diaspora adaptations, esoteric influences underlying public cultures, unidentified flying objects (UFOs), music and sound experiences, death rituals, and body and wellness cultures. Living Folk Religions is a must-read for those studying Comparative Religions, World Religions, and Religious Studies, and it will also interest specialists and general readers, particularly enthusiastic readers of Anthropology, Folklore and Folk Studies, Global Studies, and Sociology.
Handbook of Pre-Modern Nordic Memory Studies
In recent years, the field of Memory Studies has emerged as a key approach in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and has increasingly shown its ability to open new windows on Nordic Studies as well. The entries in this book document the work-to-date of this approach on the pre-modern Nordic world (mainly the Viking Age and the Middle Ages, but including as well both earlier and later periods). Given that Memory Studies is an ever expanding critical strategy, the approximately eighty contributors in this volume also discuss the potential for future research in this area. Topics covered range from texts to performance to visual and other aspects of material culture, all approached from within...
Digressions and the Human Imagination
Digressions and the Human Imagination makes a significant contribution to our anthropological knowledge about human creativity. The creative force of the human imagination is widely considered as a key ingredient in understanding how social and cultural transformations occur. And yet, what we know about the nature of creative processes is surprisingly limited. Taking their cue from literary studies, the contributors to this volume explore digression as human creativity’s main impulse. They offer a series of experimental explorations of digression in different arenas of social life – literature, conversations, myths, humour, art, and wayfinding. In their examination of the relationship be...
Norse Mythology for Kids
Awaken a sense of adventure (and maybe a Kraken) with a collection of Norse mythology for kids 8 to 12 What is more awesome than the hammer-wielding thunder-god, Thor; the Queen of Asgard and all-knowing goddess, Frigg; or the gigantic sea serpent, Jormungand? Norse Mythology for Kids transports you into the Nordic lands where extraordinary creatures like giants, dwarfs, elves, and monsters walked among fearless gods and goddesses. Featuring timeless stories from such countries as Iceland, Norway, and Denmark, this is your entryway into the magical world of Scandinavian folklore. With vividly detailed illustrations that pair with each myth, you'll feel like you are defending Asgard on the ba...
Myth and Environment in Early Iceland
Volcanoes in Old Norse Mythology details how Viking Age Icelanders, migrating from Scandinavia to a new and volcanically active environment, used Old Norse mythology to understand and negotiate the hazards of the island. These pre-Christian myths recorded in medieval Iceland expound an indigenous Icelandic theory on volcanism that revolves around the activities of supernatural beings, such as the fire-demon Surtr and the gods Odin and Thor. Before the Icelanders were introduced to Christianity and its teachings, they formulated an indigenous theory of volcanism on basis of their traditional mythology much like other indigenous peoples across the world.
Old Norse Mythology
Old Norse Mythology is an accessible and multidisciplinary introduction to the field. It surveys the 13 most consequential Eddic poems and Snorri Sturluson’s Edda, with a text-by-text approach explaining the content of each, how they represent Old Norse mythology, and the relations between texts. Old Norse mythology was written in medieval Iceland and Scandinavia a couple of centuries after the conversion to Christianity. As such, Old Norse mythology is a literary phenomenon that was created based on cultural memories and attitudes, particularly among Icelandic scholars. Mathias Nordvig offers invaluable insight into the distinction between the historical religion that existed in pre-Chris...
