An absorbing collection of essays on religious textures in Knausgaard’s writings and our time.

Min kamp, or My Struggle, is a six-volume novel by Karl Ove Knausgaard and one of the most significant literary works of the young twenty-first century. Published in Norwegian between 2009 and 2011, the novel presents an absorbing first-person narrative of the life of a writer with the same name as the author, in a world at once fully disillusioned and thoroughly enchanted.

In 2015, a group of scholars began meeting to discuss the peculiarly religious qualities of My Struggle. Some were interested in Knausgaard’s attention to explicitly religious subjects and artworks, others to what they saw as more diffuse attention to the religiousness of contemporary life. The group wondered what reading these textures of religion in these volumes might say about our times, about writing, and about themselves. The Abyss or Life Is Simple is the culmination of this collective endeavor—a collection of interlocking essays on ritual, beauty, and the end of the world.

This volume introduces an international readership to the role books have played in the lives and upbringing of young people in the Nordic countries from the 1750s until today. Charlotte Appel and Nina Christensen look beyond an overview of noteworthy texts and characters to address the region’s distinctive reading cultures and the interactions between literature and changing views of childhood, with a special focus on Denmark.

The emergence of a dedicated market for children’s books in the Global North coincided with national school reforms, when Luther’s Small Catechism started to be supplemented—or replaced—by new books published for and about young readers, learners, and citizens. Children’s use of books and media is closely related to adults’ wishes to influence the present and future of a child through instruction, entertainment, or play. Chapters point to strong continuities as well as remarkable changes in the relationships between child readers and adult authors, artists, publishers, teachers, librarians, and parents through the centuries.

Focusing on children as the central users and producers of texts, this interdisciplinary and transnational history shows how children’s exposure to and use of media impacted the Nordic welfare state, and vice versa. As narratives for young audiences are continuously rewritten, republished, and adapted into new forms, this pithy synthesis brings forward new knowledge about the material and social history of books, literature, and childhood.

Based on the material of the Old Norse Icelandic sources written down in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, this book demonstrates how medieval Scandinavians imagined Eastern Europe. It reconstructs the system of medieval Scandinavian perception of space in general, and the eastern part of the <i>oecumene</i> in particular. It also examines the unique information of these sources, of which the Russian chronicles were unaware.

Echoes: A Dramatic Bagatelle (Genklang. Dramatisk Bagatel) premiered at Folketeatret (the People’s Theater) in Copenhagen on September 15, 1888, and was the third play by the Danish writer and playwright Emma Gad (1852–1921) to be performed at theaters in Copenhagen.

Although it was labeled a “bagatelle,” Echoes, like most of Gad’s other plays, is quite funny. The play brings together three individuals in the out-of-the-way cottage of an old servant. Countess Clara takes refuge with Maren, her former nursemaid, during a sudden downpour and is soon joined by Niels, her former tutor, who claims to be passing by on his way to a church, where he hopes to find important historical documents. During Clara’s conversations with the two, it comes out that she is considering marriage to a count who lives nearby, even though she finds him and his way of life unattractive, and that she and Niels had been in love years before.

Gad’s graceful dialogue manages to touch on questions hotly debated in the last decades of the nineteenth century, such as the ability of individuals to break with the past or with outmoded or repressive conventions, while also making audiences laugh. Despite the play’s lighthearted wittiness, Echoes is an inventive example of turn-of-the-century avant-garde theater.

When poet/critic Lars Gustafsson was the editor of Bonniers Litterära Magasin, he was bombarded with the question, “What makes a good poem?” Forays into Swedish Poetry is his answer.

The fifteen poems in this volume range across the history of Swedish poetry from the 1640s, at the beginning of the Period of Great Power, to the late twentieth century. Poets as diverse as Skogekär Bergbo, Erik Johan Stagnelius, August Strindberg, and Vilhelm Ekelund are discussed from historical, psychological, and sociopolitical viewpoints. However, Gustafsson includes only those poems he considers excellent.

Each essay begins with a presentation of the poem both in Swedish and in English translation. Gustafsson’s analyses are built upon his subjective experiences with poems and poets and upon a more objective structural approach that investigates the actual machinery of the poems. Thus, Gustafsson enlightens us with his always imaginative, sometimes daring analyses, and we learn a great deal about the critic himself in the process. One of his main concerns is what he calls, in his discussion of Edith Södergran, the very mysteriousness of human existence. Time and again, Gustafsson emphasizes the enigmatic, arcane aspects of life in his analyses. In contrast, his vocabulary and approach also bespeak a constant interest in science and technology.

In his introduction, Robert T. Rovinsky, the volume’s translator, presents examples of Gustafsson’s various thematic interests as voiced in his poems, several of which are translated here for the first time. While “The Machines” explores his theory of people as automatons and “Conversation between Philosophers” his linguistic pessimism, Gustafsson’s work as a whole shows his enchantment with its major theme: the intrinsic mystery of life.

Beginning with the dim prehistory of the mythical gods and their descendants, Heimskringla recounts the history of the kings of Norway through the reign of Olaf Haraldsson, who became Norway's patron saint. Once found in most homes and schools and still regarded as a national treasure, Heimskringla influenced the thinking and literary style of Scandinavia over several centuries.

Georg Brandes was known as the "Father of the Modern Breakthrough" for his influence on Scandinavian writers in the late nineteenth century. A prominent writer, thinker, and speaker, he often examined intellectual topics beyond the literary criticism he was best known for. In this collection, William Banks has translated a number of Brandes's pieces that engage in the concerns of oppressed peoples. By collecting, annotating, and contextualizing these works, Banks reintroduces Brandes as a major progenitor of thinking about the rights of national minorities and the colonized.
Human Rights and Oppressed Peoples includes thirty-five essays and published speeches from the early twenty-first century on subjects as diverse as the Boxer Rebellion, displaced peoples from World War I, Finland's Jewish population, and imperialism. This collection will interest interdisciplinary scholars of human rights as well as those who study Scandinavian intellectual and literary history.

The national folk epic of Finland is here presented in an English translation that is both scholarly and eminently readable. To avoid the imprecision and metrical monotony of earlier verse translations, Francis Magoun has used prose, printed line for line as in the original so that repetitions, parallelisms, and variations are readily apparent. The lyrical passages and poetic images, the wry humor, the tall-tale extravagance, and the homely realism of the Kalevala come through with extraordinary effectiveness.

Emma Gad (1852–1921) was a prolific Danish playwright at the turn of the twentieth century. With sparkling prose and witty dialogue, Gad’s ambitious and sophisticated theatrical productions raised important and still pressing questions about sexuality and morality—including the status of women in marriage, divorce, same‐sex desire, and marital infidelity. Through her plays she engaged with contemporaries like Henrik Ibsen, Oscar Wilde, and George Bernard Shaw, yet she is primarily remembered for her etiquette book, Takt og Tone.

Laughter and Civility, the first biographical and scholarly volume to examine and contextualize her dramas, deeply explores how and why influential women are so often excluded from the canon. Lynn R. Wilkinson provides insightful readings into all twenty-five of Gad’s plays and demonstrates how writers and intellectuals of the time, including Georg and Edvard Brandes, took her critically acclaimed work seriously. This volume rightfully reinstates Emma Gad’s work into the repertory of European drama and is crucial for scholars interested in turn‐of‐the‐century Scandinavian drama, literature, culture, and politics.

A young imperialist adventurer turned hero of the anti-Nazi resistance, Norwegian journalist, poet, and playwright Nordahl Grieg has become more of a national legend than a real person since his death as a war reporter in Berlin in 1943. A look into Grieg’s intellectual development during the dynamic interwar period sheds light on the political and cultural ideologies that competed in a turbulent Europe. Often portrayed with an emphasis on his humanist and pacifist positions, this antifascist figure becomes more complex in his writings, which reveal shifting allegiances, including an unsavory period as a rigid Stalinist.
 
In this comprehensive and accessible book, Dean Krouk examines a significant public figure in Scandinavian literature and a critical period in modern European history through original readings of the political, ethical, and gender issues in Grieg’s works. This volume offers a first-rate analysis of the interwar period’s political and cultural agendas in Scandinavia and Europe leading to the Second World War by examining the rise of fascism, communism, and antifascism. Grieg’s poetry found renewed resonance in Norway following the 2011 far-right domestic terrorist attacks, making insight into his contradictory ideas more crucial than ever. Krouk’s presentation of Grieg’s unexpected ideological tensions will be thought-provoking for many readers in the United States and elsewhere.

An examination of representations of human migration in three centuries of Northern European literature.
 
Migration is a frequent topic of many debates nowadays, whether it concerns refugees from war-torn areas or the economic pros and cons of the mobility of multinational corporations and their employees. Yet such migration has always been a part of the human experience, and its dimensions—with its shifting nature, manifestations, and consequences—were often greater than we can imagine today.

In this book, ten scholars from Czechia, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, and Sweden focus on how migration has manifested itself in literature and culture through the nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland. Examining the theme of migration as it relates to questions of identity, both national and individual, the authors argue that migration almost always leads to a disturbance of identity and creates a potential for conflicts between individuals and larger groups. The book digs deep into such cases of disturbance, disruption, and hybridization of identity as they are represented in three centuries of literary works from the European North.

Scandinavian societies have historically, and problematically, been understood as homogeneous, when in fact they have a long history of ethnic and cultural pluralism due to colonialism and territorial conquest. After World War II, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway all became destinations for an increasingly diverse stream of migrants and asylum seekers from war-torn countries around the globe, culminating in the 2015–16 “refugee crisis.” This multidisciplinary volume opens with an overview of how the three countries’ current immigration policies developed and evolved, then expands to address how we might understand the current contexts and the social realities of immigration and diversity on the ground.

Drawing from personal experiences and theoretical perspectives in such varied fields as sociology, political science, literature, and media studies, nineteen scholars assess recent shifts in Scandinavian societies and how they intertwine with broader transformations in Europe and beyond. Chapters explore a variety of topics, including themes of belonging and identity in Norway, the experiences and activism of the Nordic countries’ Indigenous populations, and parallels between the racist far-right resurgence in Sweden and the United States.

Contributors: Ellen A. Ahlness, Julie K. Allen, Grete Brochmann, Eric Einhorn, Sherrill Harbison, Anne Heith, Markus Huss, Peter Leonard, Barbara Mattsson, Kelly McKowen, Andreas Önnerfors, Elisabeth Oxfeldt, Tony Sandset, Carly Elizabeth Schall, Ryan Thomas Skinner, Admir Skodo, Benjamin R. Teitelbaum, Sayaka Osanami Törngren, Ethelene Whitmire

Old Norse mythology is elusive: it is the label used to describe the religious stories of the pre-Christian North, featuring such well-known gods as Odin and Thor, yet most of the narratives have come down to us in manuscripts from the Middle Ages mainly written by Christians. Our view of the stories as they were transmitted in oral form in the pre-Christian era is obscured.

To overcome these limitations, this book assembles comparisons from a range of theoretical and analytical perspectives—across media, cultures, and disciplines. Fifteen scholars from a wide range of fields examine the similarities of and differences of the Old Norse mythologies with the myths of other cultures. The differences and similarities within the Old Norse corpus itself are examined to tease out the hidden clues to the original stories.

The Poetic Edda comprises a treasure trove of mythic and spiritual verse holding an important place in Nordic culture, literature, and heritage. Its tales of strife and death form a repository, in poetic form, of Norse mythology and heroic lore, embodying both the ethical views and the cultural life of the North during the late heathen and early Christian times.

Collected by an unidentified Icelander, probably during the twelfth or thirteenth century, The Poetic Edda was rediscovered in Iceland in the seventeenth century by Danish scholars. Even then its value as poetry, as a source of historical information, and as a collection of entertaining stories was recognized. This meticulous translation succeeds in reproducing the verse patterns, the rhythm, the mood, and the dignity of the original in a revision that Scandinavian Studies says "may well grace anyone's bookshelf."

A late medieval Icelandic romance about the ‘maiden-king’ of France, Nítí¿a saga generated interest in its day and grew in popularity in post-Reformation Iceland, yet until now it has not received the comprehensive scholarly analysis that it much deserves. Analysing this saga from a variety of perspectives, this book sheds light on the manner in which Nítí¿a saga explores and negotiates the romance genre from an Icelandic perspective, showcasing this exciting saga’s strong female characters, worldviews, and long manuscript tradition. Beginning with Nítí¿a saga’s manuscript context, including its reception and transformation in early modern Iceland, this study also discusses how Nítí¿a saga was influenced by, and also later influenced, other Icelandic romances. Considering the text as literature, discussion of its unusual depiction of world geography, as well as the various characters and their relationships, provides insights into medieval Icelanders’ ideas about themselves and the world they lived in, including questions about Icelandic identity, gender, female solidarity, and the literary genre of romance itself. The book also includes a newly revised reading edition and translation of Nítí¿a saga.

In A.D. 986, Earl Hákon, ruler of most of Norway, won a triumphant victory over an invading fleet of Danes in the great naval battle of Hjórunga Bay. Sailing under his banner were no fewer than five Icelandic skalds, the poet-historians of the Old Norse world. Two centuries later their accounts of the battle became the basis for one of the liveliest of the Icelandic sagas, with special emphasis on the doings of the Jómsvikings, the famed members of a warrior community that feared no one and dared all. In Lee M. Hollander's faithful translation, all of the unknown twelfth-century author's narrative genius and flair for dramatic situation and pungent characterization is preserved.

<div>The prevailing image of a Viking is frequently that of a fierce male, associated with military expansion and a distinctive material culture, and the Vikings have maintained a resonance in the popular imagination to the present day. This book presents a fresh overview of the Vikings from both conceptual and material perspectives. In an engaging survey, Sæbjørg Walaker Nordeide and Kevin J. Edwards analyse Viking religion, economic life, and material culture in and beyond the Scandic homelands.</div>

Volcanoes in Old Norse Mythology details how Viking Age Icelanders, migrating from Scandinavia to a new and volcanically active environment, used Old Norse mythology to understand and negotiate the hazards of the island. These pre-Christian myths recorded in medieval Iceland expound an indigenous Icelandic theory on volcanism that revolves around the activities of supernatural beings, such as the fire-demon Surtr and the gods Odin and Thor. Before the Icelanders were introduced to Christianity and its teachings, they formulated an indigenous theory of volcanism on basis of their traditional mythology much like other indigenous peoples across the world.