Wayland: smith of the gods

This paper considers the origins of the legend of Wayland, the Anglo-Saxon mythological smith. The origins of the Wayland legend come from Scandinavia but have roots in classic literature. Almost all literary references to Wayland have been lost and it is believed that a feast day dedicated to Wayland has been Christianised; however, it is possible to trace his legend through some lines of poetry and through objects such as the Franks Casket. A Neolithic burial site in Berkshire was appropriated as the place where travellers would leave their horses to be shod by the supernatural smit

Gods, Heroes, & Kings: The Battle for Mythic Britain

The islands of Britain have been a crossroads of gods, heroes, and kings-those of flesh as well as those of myth-for thousands of years. Successive waves of invasion brought distinctive legends, rites, and beliefs. The ancient Celts displaced earlier indigenous peoples, only to find themselves displaced in turn by the Romans, who then abandoned the islands to Germanic tribes, a people themselves nearly overcome in time by an influx of Scandinavians. With each wave of invaders came a battle for the mythic mind of the Isles as the newcomer\u27s belief system met with the existing systems of gods, legends, and myths.In Gods, Heroes, and Kings, medievalist Christopher Fee and veteran myth scholar David Leeming unearth the layers of the British Isles\u27 unique folkloric tradition to discover how this body of seemingly disparate tales developed. The authors find a virtual battlefield of myths in which pagan and Judeo-Christian beliefs fought for dominance, and classical, Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, and Celtic narrative threads became tangled together. The resulting body of legends became a strange but coherent hybrid, so that by the time Chaucer wrote The Wife of Bath\u27s Tale in the fourteenth century, a Christian theme of redemption fought for prominence with a tripartite Celtic goddess and the Arthurian legends of Sir Gawain-itself a hybrid mythology.Without a guide, the corpus of British mythology can seem impenetrable. Taking advantage of the latest research, Fee and Leeming employ a unique comparative approach to map the origins and development of one of the richest folkloric traditions. Copiously illustrated with excerpts in translation from the original sources,Gods, Heroes, and Kings provides a fascinating and accessible new perspective on the history of British mythology. [From the publisher]https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/books/1066/thumbnail.jp

The Beowulf Poet\u27s Accommodation Of Pre-Christian Germanic Culture

This thesis argues for the Beowulf poet\u27s more accommodating perspective on pre-Christian Germanic culture, when examined in comparison to other, later Germanic authors of works such as Icelandic sagas and Danish pseudo-history. The primary components of Beowulf I address to argue for this point are the poet\u27s incorporation of pagan Germanic cosmology, and his rendering of Beowulf according to two different heroic types in Germanic literature, those being the model thane and the model king

Goddess, King, and Grail: Aspects of Sovereignty within the Early Medieval Heroic Tradition of the British Isles

When studying the heroic tales and epics of medieval cultures, more questions about their origins and influences remain than answers. The search for sources for a single work, Beowulf, for example, can and has been examined within Germanic, Brittanic, Norse, and even Irish traditions. Scores of sources, parallels, and analogues have been found and analyzed, but so many possibilities may only serve to obfuscate the actual origins of the Beowulf poet\u27s myriad influences. However, the search for analogous works can build a stronger sense of context for certain motifs and greater themes within a large number of similar texts. Thus, repetitive elements, especially of the mythological sort, can provide scholars with a glimpse of shared mythologies between otherwise very different cultures. The problem is that so many of these memes are hidden by centuries of redactions and revisions by scribes who had no firsthand knowledge of the original composer\u27s cultural identity. The few shared elements that survive the transition from oral to written literacy are among the strongest arguments for a shared Celtic mythology that existed before the Christians or Anglo-Saxons. The surprising frequency in which these memes appear in Irish, Anglo, Germanic, and Welsh texts would seem to indicate that some motifs more accurately reflect the earlier Celtic mythology than the more whitewashed elements found in later manuscripts. Two particular motifs appear regularly within the context of the great heroic tales of medieval Britain, Ireland, and Wales: the goddess of sovereignty and fertility, and the magical properties of a certain cauldron, sometimes known as the Grail

The Last Kingdom: a Historical and Philological Study of the Netflix Series

This paper considers the resources behind the adaptation of “The Saxon Stories”, written by Sir Bernard Cornwell, into a Netflix TV series. The purpose of the paper is to analyse historical data and compare them to the imaginary world of the books, using a medievalist approach. At the heart of the research lie the figure of the main character, Uhtred of Bebbanburg, and the sources behind his creation. The thesis goes on examining his belonging to the archetypal hero. The methodology then switches to a philological study of the texts, thus investigating the accuracy of the Old English words and expressions used by the author, and identifying the documents written in Old English that he may have read and used in his writing process. The paper concludes by explaining the implications related to the creation of a modern product loaded with historical and cultural references to the Germanic world, as well as indicating possible directions for future studies within Germanic philology

In Search of a National Epic: The use of Old Norse myths in Tolkien's vision of Middle-earth

In this article some aspects of Tolkien’s work with regard to his relationship to folklore and nationalism are presented. It is also argued, contrary to Lauri Honko’s view of literary epics, that pre-literary sources constitute a problem for the creators of literary epics and that their elements can direct the choice of plot and form. Tolkien felt that there was a British – but no English – mythology comparable to the Greek, Finnish or Norse ones. He tried to reconstruct the ‘lost mythology’ with building blocks from existing mythologies, and dedicated his work to the English people. In this, he saw himself as a compiler of old source material. This article considers his use of Old Norse sources. With Honko’s notion of the second life of folklore it is argued that Tolkien managed to popularise folklore material while his efforts to make his work exclusively English failed; for a contemporary audience it is rather cross-cultural