Search results for ""Author Patricia Terry""

The great poetic tradition of pre-Christian Scandinavia is known to us almost exclusively though the Poetic Edda. The poems originated in Iceland, Norway, and Greenland between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, when they were compiled in a unique manuscript known as the Codex Regius. The poems are primarily lyrical rather than narrative. Terry's readable translation includes the magnificent cosmological poem Völuspá ("The Sibyl's Prophecy"), didactic poems concerned with mythology and the everyday conduct of life, and heroic poems, of which an important group is concerned with the story of Sigurd and Brynhild. Poems of the Elder Edda will appeal to students of Old Norse, Icelandic, and Medieval literature, as well as to general readers of poetry.

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This story of the passionate, adulterous, tragic love of Lancelot and Guinevere is at once the perfect expression of 'courtly love' and its inversion. Lancelot, the heroic stranger in King Arthur's court, sacrifices all in service of his king, and yet also falls in love with Arthur's queen, the most beautiful woman in Britain.That this spotless knight, who repeatedly saves Arthur and his world from destruction, should be the fateful underminer of the king's self-confidence and, ultimately, a terrible weapon in the hands of Arthur's great adversary Galehaut, is a contradiction that has fascinated the Western mind for hundreds of years.The Arthurian legend that most of us know comes from Malory and "The Once and Future King". But there are also several books, including the thirteenth-century "Book of Galehaut", which gives a surprising and unfamiliar version. It is a double love story - the tale not only of Lancelot's love for Guinevere, but also the love of Galehaut, the Lord of the Distant Isles, for Lancelot.

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The author of at least two noteworthy romances of the early thirteenth century, Le Roman de la Rose or Guillaume de Dole and L'Escoufle (The Kite), as well as Le Lai de l'Ombre, Jean Renart is today recognized as the most accomplished practitioner of the "realistic romance" in Old French literature.

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