Paranormal Encounters in Iceland 1150–1400

Download or read book Paranormal Encounters in Iceland 1150–1400 written by Ármann Jakobsson and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-03-23 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology of international scholarship offers new critical approaches to the study of the many manifestations of the paranormal in the Middle Ages. The guiding principle of the collection is to depart from symbolic or reductionist readings of the subject matter in favor of focusing on the paranormal as human experience and, essentially, on how these experiences are defined by the sources. The authors work with a variety of medieval Icelandic textual sources, including family sagas, legendary sagas, romances, poetry, hagiography and miracles, exploring the diversity of paranormal activity in the medieval North. This volume questions all previous definitions of the subject matter, most decisively the idea of saga realism, and opens up new avenues in saga research.