Matthias Egeler
This paper discusses the relationship between a folk tale about the Dvergasteinn [‘Dwarf-Stone’] on the fjord of Seyðisfjörður in eastern Iceland and the details of the tale’s landscape setting. It argues that storytelling for storytelling’s sake might have been neglected in current theorising on the conceptualisation and narrative use of landscape. This, as well as the intensity with which landscape is used in Iceland for the construction of narratives, might also affect the use of place-lore for retrospective approaches.
Vykintas Vaitkevičius
This paper is devoted to the Lithuanian apidėmė, attested since the 16th century as the name of a goddess in the Baltic religion, as a term for the site of a former farmstead relocated to a new settlement during the land reform launched in 1547–1557, and later as a widespread toponym. Apidėmė has been researched by linguists, historians, and mythologists. An archaeological perspective is applied here for the first time.
Karen Bek-Pedersen
This article reviews the sources behind the alleged tradition that the plant galium verum, commonly known as ‘bedstraw’, was associated with Freyja in pre-Christian times. All references to this link ultimately go back to the same Latin document from ca. 800. Unfortunately, the relevant section of this document is unintelligible without textual emendation and, of the three commonly suggested emendations, ‘bedstraw’ is the least likely.
Joseph S. Hopkins
Like previous entries in the Goddesses Unknown series, the present article focuses on heretofore little-studied goddesses in the Germanic corpus, in this case the obscure Old Norse goddess Hlín and her association with the widely attested Germanic goddess Frigg.
Frog
Any historical study of Sámi religions links religion to the history of the language. Here, Proto-Sámi language spread is reviewed and the fundamental (and often implicit) assumption that religion spread with Proto-Sámi language is challenged. An alternative model that language spread as a medium of communication adopted by different cultures is proposed and tested against the Common Proto-Sámi lexicon.
Ilya V. Sverdlov and Sofie Vanherpen
The paper discusses the metre and the diction of a previously unpublished short poem composed in the 18th century about characters of Laxdæla saga. The stanzas are ostensibly in skaldic dróttkvætt. Analysis shows them to be a remarkably successful imitation of the classical metre, implying an extraordinarily good grasp of dróttkvætt poetics on the part of a poet who was composing several centuries after the end of the classical dróttkvætt period.
Julien d’Huy and Yuri E. Berezkin
This study applies phylogenetic software to motifs connected with the Pleiades as identified in Yuri Berezkin’s database, The Analytical Catalogue of World Mythology and Folklore. The aim of analysis is to determine which, if any, of the analysed motifs are likely to have spread in conjunction with the earliest migrations out of Africa and to the Americas. The Pleiades analysis is compared to an analysis of Orion motifs.
Helen F. Leslie-Jacobsen
Scholars have traditionally reflected on the Old Norse cultural area’s poetic output on the basis of a binary classification of the poetry into two types: the categories are labelled as ‘eddic’ and ‘skaldic’. This paper explores the formation of the dichotomy and how the application of these categories in scholarship may obscure rather than clarify the nature of Old Norse poetry
Kati Kallio and Frog with Mari Sarv
Clive Tolley
Jūratė Šlekonytė
Oliver Hughes, Maria Mitiuriev and Katelyn St. Onge
Erika Laamanen
Elisabeth Maria Magin
Filip Missuno
Jiří Dynda
James J. Fox
Leszek Gardeła
Grzegorz Bartusik
Roderick Thomas Duncan Dale
Elisabeth Maria Magin
Luke John Murphy
Mirella De Sisto
Ross Downing
Ross Downing
Klaudia Karpińska