Matthias Egeler - Böcker

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.All societies fill the geographical space in which they are living with the holy, the sacred, and the supernatural. A lively academic debate has developed in the last few decades about how human beings make the landscapes that they live in and how these landscapes work. This discussion has repeatedly referenced religion and the supernatural, but it has never engaged either in significant depth. Landscape, Religion, and the Supernatural: Nordic Perspectives on Landscape Theory presents a summa of current and classic theorizing on religion and the supernatural in relationship to the land and develops these theories further by bringing them into dialogue with a rich set of folkloristic and historical data.Focusing on many different themes, including time and memory, repeating patterns, identity formation, power and subversion, sound, home and unhomeliness, and nature and environment, author Matthias Egeler engages with a broad range of theoretical concepts and approaches from the interdisciplinary fields of landscape theory and the study of religions. He brings this theorizing into dialogue with the rich culture of local storytelling and landscape-related traditional beliefs of the Strandir district of the Icelandic Westfjords. In this rural region, landscape-related traditions have been documented since the early nineteenth century and continue to be important to this day. Confronting this vibrant heritage with the insights of landscape theory--both in and beyond the study of religions--allows important new contributions to both fields, especially through the inclusion of perspectives held by rural populations rather than the urban upper classes that have been the focus of research to date. The example of the Icelandic Westfjords shows the extreme richness of religious and supernatural approaches to the landscape that can be developed in rural communities and how they are significantly and characteristically different from the perspectives found in literature and the arts.

An enchanting history of the otherworld of elves and fairies, from the nature spirits of Iceland and Ireland to Avalon and Middle Earth  Originating in Norse and Celtic mythologies, elves and fairies are a firmly established part of Western popular culture. Since the days of the Vikings and Arthurian legend, these sprites have undergone huge transformations. From J. R. R. Tolkien’s warlike elves, based on medieval legend, to little flower fairies whose charms even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle succumbed to, they permeate European art and culture.  In this engaging cultural history, Matthias Egeler explores these mythical creatures of Iceland, Ireland, Scotland, and England, and their continental European cousins. Egeler goes on a journey through enchanted landscapes and literary worlds. He describes both their friendly and their dangerous, even deadly, sides. We encounter them in the legends of King Arthur’s round table and in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in the terrible era of the witch trials, in magic’s peaceful conquest of Victorian bourgeois salons, in the child-friendly form of Peter Pan, and even as helpers in the contemporary fight against environmental destruction.

Germanische Altertumskunde Online (Germanic Antiquity Studies Online) – just like the Reallexikon that has merged with it – is accompanied by supplementary volumes. This series comprises both monographs and edited volumes on specific topics from the fields of archaeology, history, and literary studies. It thus expands the database with the inclusion of aspects that require comprehensive analysis. More than 100 volumes have now appeared, from Germanenproblemen in heutiger Sicht (The Problems of Germanic Peoples from a Contemporary Perspective) to Germanische Altertumskunde im Wandel (Germanic Antiquity Studies in Flux).

The rich corpus of literary otherworld journeys that has survived from the Scandinavian - and especially the Icelandic - Middle Ages is in many respects tied to a space 'Between the Worlds'. Every otherworld journey quite literally engages with a space 'between the worlds' in the sense that it plays itself out between this world and a world beyond, an otherworld. Yet this is not all. Also in terms of its cultural context this branch of the literature of the medieval North takes up a position situated midway between a broad range of poles. Texts from the Christian period treat pre-Christian mythology; allegedly pre-Christian material is studded with Christian motifs; Scandinavian texts adapt the learning and literature of the European continent, Ireland, and the classical Mediterranean; and Finnish narratives in turn appear to adapt Scandinavian narrative patterns. The volume presents a rich panorama of a broad range of very different - Scandinavian, Finno-Ugric, Greek, Latin, Celtic, Ancient Near Eastern, and archaeological - perspectives on the topic of the 'otherworld journey', which contextualises the motif of the otherworld journey in Old Norse-Icelandic literature in an unprecedented breadth.