Comic Sagas and Tales from Iceland
Summary
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Comic Sagas and Tales from Iceland by Vidar Hreinsson
Icelandic literary culture was one of the richest and most important in the medieval world. This title brings together the finest comic stories from medieval Iceland. It examines how the stories satirised old-style sagas while exploiting their classic themes of quests and revenge.
This collection of strange and difficult-to-categorize pieces is comic not in the usual sense, but rather, as Viðar explains in his excellent introduction, in the sense of reading counter to the Icelandic family sagas, whose narratives he terms tragicThe stories here are edgy, subversive and often grim little narratives, in striking contrast to the humane, wise and sometimes uplifting family sagas * The Times Literary Supplement *
Viðar Hreinsson grew up on a farm in Northern Iceland and studied Icelandic and literary theory in Iceland and Copenhagen. He is an independent literary scholar at the Reykjavik Academy and has taught and lectured on various aspects of Icelandic literary and cultural history both in Iceland and abroad, in Canada, USA and Scandinavia. General Editor of The Complete Sagas of Icelanders I-V (1997), he has also authored an award-winning two-volume biography of Icelandic Canadian poet Stephan G. Stephansson (2002-3). More recently, he has been an environmental activist, written two additional biographies and served as director of the Reykjavík Academy.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780140447743 |
| ISBN 10 | 0140447741 |
| Title | Comic Sagas and Tales from Iceland |
| Author | Vidar Hreinsson |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Penguin Books Ltd |
| Year published | 2013-03-07 |
| Number of pages | 368 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |