Heather O'Donoghue is a British academic. She is Professor of Old Norse and Vigfusson Rausing Reader in Ancient Icelandic Literature and Antiquities at the University of Oxford. [1] She is a Fellow of Linacre College, Oxford.
O'Donoghue's books include: [2]
The Poetic Edda is the modern name for an untitled collection of Old Norse anonymous narrative poems, which is distinct from the Prose Edda written by Snorri Sturluson. Several versions exist, all primarily of text from the Icelandic medieval manuscript known as the Codex Regius, which contains 31 poems. The Codex Regius is arguably the most important extant source on Norse mythology and Germanic heroic legends. From the early-19th century onwards, it has had a powerful influence on later Scandinavian literatures – not only through its stories, but also through the visionary force and the dramatic quality of many of the poems. It has also become an inspiring model for many later innovations in poetic meter, particularly in Nordic languages, offering many varied examples of terse, stress-based metrical schemes that lack any final rhyme but instead use alliterative devices and strongly-concentrated imagery. Poets who have acknowledged their debt to the Codex Regius include Vilhelm Ekelund, August Strindberg, J. R. R. Tolkien, Ezra Pound, Jorge Luis Borges, and Karin Boye.
Sagas are prose stories and histories, composed in Iceland and to a lesser extent elsewhere in Scandinavia.
Old Norse Religion, also known as Norse Paganism, is the most common name for a branch of Germanic religion which developed during the Proto-Norse period, when the North Germanic peoples separated into a distinct branch of the Germanic peoples. It was replaced by Christianity and forgotten during the Christianization of Scandinavia. Scholars reconstruct aspects of North Germanic Religion by historical linguistics, archaeology, toponymy, and records left by North Germanic peoples, such as runic inscriptions in the Younger Futhark, a distinctly North Germanic extension of the runic alphabet. Numerous Old Norse works dated to the 13th century record Norse mythology, a component of North Germanic religion.
Sigvatr Þórðarson or Sighvatr Þórðarson or Sigvat the Skald (995–1045) was an Icelandic skald. He was a court poet to King Olaf II of Norway, as well as Canute the Great, Magnus the Good and Anund Jacob, by whose reigns his floruit can be dated to the earlier eleventh century. Sigvatr was the best known of the court skalds of King Olaf and also served as his marshal (stallare).
The þættir are short stories written mostly in Iceland during the 13th and 14th centuries.
Víga-Glúms saga is one of the Sagas of Icelanders. It takes place mostly in and around Eyjafjörður in North Iceland, and recounts the life and fall of Glúmr Eyjólfsson, a powerful man whose nickname, Víga, refers to his propensity for killing people. It is believed to have been written in the first half of the 13th century and one passage may allude to a political scandal of that time.
Sonatorrek is a skaldic poem in 25 stanzas, that appears in Egil's Saga, an Icelandic saga focusing on the life of skald and viking, Egill Skallagrímsson. The work laments the death of two of the poet's sons, Gunnar, who died of a fever, and Böðvarr, who drowned during a storm. According to the saga, after Egill placed Böðvarr in the family burial mound, he locked himself in his bed-chamber, determined to starve himself to death. Egill’s daughter, Thorgerdur, diverted him from this plan in part by convincing him to compose a memorial poem for Böðvarr, to be carved on a rune-staff.
A prosimetrum is a poetic composition which exploits a combination of prose (prosa) and verse (metrum); in particular, it is a text composed in alternating segments of prose and verse. It is widely found in Western and Eastern literature. While narrative prosimetrum may encompass at one extreme a prose story with occasional verse interspersed, and at the other, verse with occasional prose explanations, in true prosimetrum the two forms are represented in more equal measure. A distinction is sometimes drawn between texts in which verse is the dominant form and those in which prose dominates; there the terms prosimetrum and versiprose are applied respectively.
Edward Oswald Gabriel Turville-Petre was an English philologist who specialized in Old Norse studies.
John Frederick Lindow is an American philologist who is Professor Emeritus of Old Norse and Folklore at University of California, Berkeley. He is a well known authority on Old Norse religion and literature.
Norse or Scandinavian mythology is the body of myths of the North Germanic peoples, stemming from Norse paganism and continuing after the Christianization of Scandinavia, and into the Scandinavian folklore of the modern period. The northernmost extension of Germanic mythology and stemming from Proto-Germanic folklore, Norse mythology consists of tales of various deities, beings, and heroes derived from numerous sources from both before and after the pagan period, including medieval manuscripts, archaeological representations, and folk tradition.
In Old Norse, seiðr was a type of magic which was practised in Norse society during the Late Scandinavian Iron Age. The practice of seiðr is believed to be a form of magic which is related to both the telling and the shaping of the future. Connected to the Old Norse religion, its origins are largely unknown, and the practice of it gradually declined after the Christianization of Scandinavia. Accounts of seiðr later made it into sagas and other literary sources, while further evidence of it has been unearthed by archaeologists. Various scholars have debated the nature of seiðr, some of them have argued that it was shamanic in context, involving visionary journeys by its practitioners.
Margaret Beryl Clunies Ross is a medievalist who was until her retirement in 2009 the McCaughey Professor of English Language and Early English Literature and Director of the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Sydney. Her main research areas are Old Norse-Icelandic Studies and the history of their study. Since 1997 she has led the project of editing a new edition of the corpus of skaldic poetry. She has also written articles on Australian Aboriginal rituals and contributed to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Ursula Miriam Dronke was a medievalist and former Vigfússon Reader in Old Norse at the University of Oxford and an Emeritus Fellow of Linacre College. She also taught at the University of Munich and in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages at Cambridge University.
Mohammed Mustafa Badawi was a scholar of English and Arabic literature. He was a Research Fellow of St. Antony's College at the University of Oxford from 1967 to 1969, and was then elected to the College's Governing Body. Upon retirement in 1992, he became an Emeritus Fellow
Ida Lilian Gordon was a British academic, specialising in Medieval English and Old Norse.
Heather Katharine McRobie, also known professionally as Heather Allansdottir, is a British-Australian writer and academic.
Crymogæa is a book in Latin written by the Icelandic scholar Arngrímur Jónsson and published in Hamburg in 1609 and again in 1610. It was the first historical description of Iceland since Íslendingabók and the first comprehensive book about the history of Iceland.
Sandra Ballif Straubhaar is a Germanic studies scholar known for her work on women's poetry in Old Norse, and for her contributions to scholarship on J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth legendarium, in particular his use of the Nordic medieval.