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Rory McTurk's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Rory McTurk recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Rory McTurk's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1

The Legend of Sigurd & Gudrún

Many years ago, J.R.R. Tolkien composed his own version, now published for the first time, of the great legend of Northern antiquity, in two closely related poems to which he gave the titles The New Lay of the Völsungs and The New Lay of Gudrún.

In the "Lay of the Völsungs" is told the ancestry of the great hero Sigurd, the slayer of Fáfnir most celebrated of dragons, whose treasure he took for his own; of his awakening of the Valkyrie Brynhild, who slept surrounded by a wall of fire, and of their betrothal; and of his coming to the court of the great princes who were...
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Recommended by Rory McTurk, and 1 others.

Rory McTurkTolkien is mainly known for The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and so on, but he was a Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford and wrote a fair number of scholarly works and articles. The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún is a creative work, consisting of two long poems written in Modern English but mainly in epic metre. Now, the main manuscript in which the eddic poems are preserved is called the Codex... (Source)

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2
This book takes a new approach to the question of whether some form of drama existed in early Scandinavia. Dr Gunnell examines the dialogic poems of the Poetic Edda, preserved in manuscripts from the late thirteenth century, from the viewpoints of both performer and audience. He argues that in order to be fully understood by the audience, the poems must have been presented in some dramatic fashion, and not merely chanted. He substantiates his claims by exploring characteristics found only in the manuscripts of these dialogic poems and in contemporary manuscripts of dramatic works from England... more
Recommended by Rory McTurk, and 1 others.

Rory McTurkHe was a pupil of mine, and I’m very proud of him, although I wouldn’t presume to take any credit for his work. His book, The Origins of Drama in Scandinavia (an ambiguous title that might give the impression that all drama originated in Scandinavia!) is based on his PhD thesis. He’s now a Professor in Folkloristics at the University of Iceland. (Source)

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3
Recommended by Rory McTurk, and 1 others.

Rory McTurkThis is a much more balanced book. It was first published in 1977, and most of the ideas in the book are still pretty reliable and fairly generally accepted by scholars of the subject. It summarises the history of Iceland in the medieval period, not least the history of the church. Initially the church was quite congenial to the chieftains in sharing the balance of power, but its attitude changed... (Source)

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4
Iceland, Greenland, Northern Norway, and the Faroe Islands lie on the edges of Western Europe, in an area long portrayed by travelers as remote and exotic - its nature harsh, its people reclusive. Since the middle of the eighteenth century, however, this marginalized region has gradually become part of modern Europe, a transformation that is narrated in Karen Oslund's Iceland Imagined.

This cultural and environmental history sweeps across the dramatic North Atlantic landscape, exploring its unusual geography, saga narratives, language, culture, and politics, and analyzing...
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Recommended by Rory McTurk, and 1 others.

Rory McTurkAgain, this is someone whose work needs to be revised in the light of recent scholarship.  He treats the characters in the sagas as historical; he would maintain that much of the poetry attributed to the characters in these narratives was actually composed by those characters. That is not necessarily always the case. His point of view is very specifically Icelandic, and the book was published in... (Source)

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5

The Culture of the Teutons

Volumes 1 and 2

The Culture of the Teutons by Vilhelm Gronbech is out-of-print and in the public domain. It is widely available in various digital formats from a number of sources on the internet. The contents of this book are of great interest to Heathens, and yet it has been nearly impossible to obtain a printed copy of The Culture of the Teutons. Our goal was to make both volumes of Gronbech's book about our ancestors available in one printed book, at an affordable price. Any profits made from this book, will go directly to our fund to build a Hof and Hall in the Heartland of the United States. less
Recommended by Rory McTurk, and 1 others.

Rory McTurkThis is a book I first came across as an undergraduate. It was published in Danish, but, of course, I read it in the translation which appeared in 1931. It’s a kind of introduction, on a massive scale, to early Germanic and old Norse culture – not specifically Icelandic culture, though many of its examples are taken from the Icelandic sagas. It’s an immensely stimulating book, even though quite a... (Source)

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