The Lay of Kraka. Millions love the hit television show Vikings—but how many fans know that its main character, Ragnar, is based on an actual Viking king whose ambitious and terrifying exploits have been legend since the ninth century AD? As fierce, cunning, and determined as the character he inspired, King Ragnar Lodbrok is perhaps most famous for his sacking of Paris in AD.
He is also widely regarded to be among the first Viking leaders to target the riches of the British Isles not simply for plunder, but also for Danish settlement.
The Legend of Ragnar Lodbrok presents fascinating translations of ninth, twelfth, and thirteenth-century writings—including sagas, poems, and historical accounts—that describe, in vivid detail, the adventures of Ragnar, his sons, and his formidable wives, Lagertha the Shieldmaiden and Princess Aslaug.
Whether Ragnar was a single man of a thousand deeds or an amalgam of heroes may never be proven, but The Legend of Ragnar Lodbrok offers thrilling insight into his brutal, unforgettable world. From the translator of the bestselling Poetic Edda Hackett, comes a gripping new rendering of two of the greatest sagas of Old Norse literature. Together the two sagas recount the story of seven generations of a single legendary heroic family and comprise our best source of traditional lore about its members--including, among others, the dragon-slayer Sigurd, Brynhild the Valkyrie, and the Viking chieftain Ragnar Lothbrok.
The first manuscript of this book presents a version of Ragnar's saga compiled from different modern sources, along with information providing additional historical and documentary context, followed by a discussion of some aspects of modern appropriations and representations of ancient Norse culture.
Rarely translated into English before, the saga tells of Sigurds daughter and her husband, the unparalleled Viking king and hero, Ragnar, who is also a dragon-slayer. Lively and fresh, with gripping dialogue and intense scenes of action, the saga has long deserved to be better known. This volume presents new and.
The Saga of Ragnar Lodbrok. The Lay of Kraka. The Saga of the Volsungs. The ancient Celts displaced earlier indigenous peoples, only to find themselves displaced in turn by the Romans, who then abandoned the islands to Germanic tribes, a people themselves nearly overcome in time by an influx of Scandinavians. With each wave of invaders came a battle for the mythic mind of the Isles as the newcomer's belief system met with the existing systems of gods, legends, and myths.
In Gods, Heroes, and Kings, medievalist Christopher Fee and veteran myth scholar David Leeming unearth the layers of the British Isles' unique folkloric tradition to discover how this body of seemingly disparate tales developed. The authors find a virtual battlefield of myths in which pagan and Judeo-Christian beliefs fought for dominance, and classical, Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, and Celtic narrative threads became tangled together.
The resulting body of legends became a strange but coherent hybrid, so that by the time Chaucer wrote "The Wife of Bath's Tale" in the fourteenth century, a Christian theme of redemption fought for prominence with a tripartite Celtic goddess and the Arthurian legends of Sir Gawain-itself a hybrid mythology. Without a guide, the corpus of British mythology can seem impenetrable. Taking advantage of the latest research, Fee and Leeming employ a unique comparative approach to map the origins and development of one of the richest folkloric traditions.
Copiously illustrated with excerpts in translation from the original sources,Gods, Heroes, and Kings provides a fascinating and accessible new perspective on the history of British mythology. The badasses populating the pages of Badass are the most savagely awesome historical figures to ever strap on a pair of chain mail gauntlets and run screaming into battle. Patton, and Bruce Lee. Their bone-breaking exploits are illustrated by top artist from the fields of gaming, comics, and cards—DC Comics illustrator Matt Haley and Thomas Denmark, illustrator for the collectible card game Magic: The Gathering.
This is not your boring high school history—this is tough, manly, unrelentingly Badass! The action of the saga takes place at the end of the tenth century, at about the time Scandinavia was converting from worship of Norse gods to Christianity. A masterpiece of medieval literature, the story focuses on two families — that of Hoskuld, a prominent farmer with several sons, and that of Gudrun, the most beautiful woman ever born in Iceland.
Wrecked by storms, stricken by disease and plagued by navigational mishaps, some survived the North Atlantic to pass down this compelling tale of the first Europeans to talk with, trade with, and war with the Native Americans.
Profound and intriguing, Grettir's Saga is the last of the great Icelandic sagas. It tells of the life and death of Grettir, a great rebel, individualist, and romantic hero viewed unromantically. Grettir spends his childhood violently defying authority: as a youth of sixteen he kills a man and is outlawed; all the rest of his life he devotes, with remarkable composure, to fighting more and more formidable enemies.
He pits himself against bears, berserks, wraiths, trolls, and finally, it seems, the whole population of Iceland. They are also tales about an action-oriented people who compete against other families for the scarce resources of the harsh Icelandic natural environment. The reader sees intense love and equally intense hatred. In either case, the stories are not dull and their cumulative effect is to leave the reader with a sense of the tragedy and inevitability of a never-ending fight for survival, love, and the vengeance of the blood-feud.
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