{"title":"Ralph O'connor","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"icelandic-histories-and-romances-book-ralph-o-connor-9780752419527","title":"Icelandic Histories and Romances","description":"Six medieval tales of trolls, vikings and arctic giants. The Icelandic sagas are one of the world’s great literary treasures. Between the twelfth and nineteenth centuries, countless heroes and heroines were commemorated, celebrated and mocked in hundreds of vivid, engaging prose narratives. These were copied and retold in many thousands of manuscripts, bringing the past to life for generations of Icelanders and helping them to while away the winter evenings – but only a few ‘classics’ are well-known to English-speaking readers today. This book takes a wider view, allowing glimpses of a colourful world where fact and fancy mingle, and myth blends into history. In these tales – some translated here for the first time – we encounter a humble Icelandic scholar dreaming of a glamorous Viking past, a royal adventurer evading the horrible lusts of trollwomen as he quests across the known world, a demon popping out of a lavatory, the terrifying death spasms of the old Northern gods, bloody and unnatural acts in Muslim Germany, and foggy Arctic shores, haunted by lost tales of vanished giants. Ralph O’Connor’s translations are faithful to the tone as much as the language of the originals. His introduction gives a lively account of the genre, enabling the reader to enjoy this richly varied literature on its own terms.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49558087598353,"sku":"GOR002552054","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51681548697873,"sku":"GOR001894117","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0752419528.jpg?v=1751200083"},{"product_id":"icelandic-histories-and-romances-book-ralph-o-connor-9780752428949","title":"Icelandic Histories and Romances","description":"The Icelandic sagas, composed between the twelfth and the nineteenth centuries, are one of the world's great literary treasures. After an extended and lively introduction to the genre, Ralph O'Connor provides new translations for five of the greatest of these sagas. We encounter a humble Icelandic scholar dreaming of a Viking past, a royal adventurer evading the horrible lusts of troll-women, a demon popping out of a lavatory, the death spasms of the old Northern gods and unnatural acts in Muslim Germany. The sagas are evocatively illustrated by Anne O'Connor.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49568662356241,"sku":"GOR005992838","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":50697232253201,"sku":"NGR9780752428949","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0752428942.jpg?v=1751263477"},{"product_id":"earth-on-show-book-ralph-o-connor-9780226103204","title":"The Earth on Show","description":"At the turn of the nineteenth century, geology - and its claims that the earth had a long and colorful prehuman history - was widely dismissed as dangerous nonsense. But just fifty years later, it was the most celebrated of Victorian sciences. Ralph O'Connor tracks the astonishing growth of geology's prestige in Britain, exploring how a new geohistory far more alluring than the standard six days of Creation was assembled and sold to the wider Bible-reading public. Shrewd science writers, O'Connor shows, marketed spectacular visions of past worlds, piquing the public imagination with glimpses of man-eating mammoths, talking dinosaurs, and sea dragons spawned by Satan himself. These authors - including men of science, women, clergymen, biblical literalists, hack writers, blackmailers, and prophets - borrowed freely from the Bible, modern poetry, and the urban entertainment industry, creating new forms of literature in order to transport their readers into a vanished and alien past. In exploring the use of poetry and spectacle in the promotion of popular science, O'Connor proves that geology's success owed much to the literary techniques of its authors.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51885170655505,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51885170819345,"sku":"GOR014445436","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780226103204.jpg?v=1754562975"},{"product_id":"classical-literature-and-learning-in-medieval-irish-narrative-book-ralph-o-connor-9781843843849","title":"Classical Literature and Learning in Medieval Irish Narrative","description":"This edited volume will make a major contribution to our appreciation of the importance of classical literature and learning in medieval Ireland, and particularly to our understanding of its role in shaping the content, structureand transmission of medieval Irish narrative. Dr Kevin Murray, Department of Early and Medieval Irish, University College Cork. From the tenth century onwards, Irish scholars adapted Latin epics and legendary histories into the Irish language, including the Imtheachta Aeniasa, the earliest known adaptation of Virgil's Aeneid into any European vernacular; Togail Tro , a grand epic reworking of the decidedly prosaic historyof the fall of Troy attributed to Dares Phrygius; and, at the other extreme, the remarkable Merugud Uilixis meic Leirtis, a fable-like retelling of Ulysses's homecoming boiled down to a few hundred lines of lapidary prose.Both the Latin originals and their Irish adaptations had a profound impact on the ways in which Irish authors wrote narratives about their own legendary past, notably the great saga T in B  C ailnge (The Cattle-Raid of Cooley). The essays in this book explore the ways in which these Latin texts and techniques were used. They are unified by a conviction that classical learning and literature were central to the culture of medieval Irish storytelling, but precisely how this relationship played out is a matter of ongoing debate. As a result, they engage in dialogue with each other, using methods drawn from a wide range of disciplines (philology, classical studies, comparative literature, translation studies, and folkloristics). Ralph O'Connor is Professor in the Literature and Culture of Britain, Ireland and Iceland at the University of Aberdeen. Contributors: Abigail Burnyeat, Michael Clarke, Robert Crampton, Helen Fulton, Barbara Hillers, M ire N  Mhaonaigh, Ralph O'Connor, Erich Poppe.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52138662461713,"sku":"NLS9781843843849","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781843843849.jpg?v=1757564296"},{"product_id":"destruction-of-da-derga-s-hostel-book-ralph-o-connor-9780199666133","title":"The Destruction of Da Derga's Hostel","description":"Irish saga literature represents the largest collection of vernacular narrative in existence from the early Middle Ages, using the tools of Christian literacy to retell myths and legends about the pagan past. This unique corpus remains marginal to standard histories of Western literature: its tales are widely read, but their literary artistry remains a puzzle to many even within Celtic studies. This book, the first to offer a systematic literary analysis of any single native Irish tale, aims to show how one particularly celebrated saga 'works' as a story: the Middle Irish tale Togail Bruidne Da Derga (The Destruction of Da Derga's Hostel), which James Carney called 'the finest saga of the early period'. This epic tale tells how the legendary king Conaire was raised by a shadowy Otherworld to the kingship of Tara and, after a fatal error of judgement, was hounded by spectres to an untimely death at Da Derga's Hostel at the hands of his own foster-brothers. By turns lyrical and laconic, and rich in native mythological imagery, the story is told with a dramatic intensity worthy of Greek tragedy, and the intricate symmetry of its narrative procedure recalls the visual patterning of illuminated manuscripts such as The Book of Kells. This book invites the reader to enjoy and understand this literary masterpiece, explaining its narrative artistry within its native, classical and biblical literary contexts. Against a historical backdrop of shifting ideologies of Christian kingship, it interprets the saga's possible significance for contemporary audiences as a questioning exploration of the challenges and paradoxes of kingship.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52145064476945,"sku":"NLS9780199666133","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780199666133.jpg?v=1757591862"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-ie\/collections\/author-books-by-ralph-o-connor.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}