And though it's the latter we imagine when we think of words like 'epic,' 'Viking,' and 'fantasy,' the former is every bit as interesting in its own right. Brown's book places Snorri's own tales in the historical context in which they were written, rather than the historical context in which they were meant to take place. However, it's in a contemporary work - Nancy Marie Brown's 'Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths' - that we find our next great, untold tale of the northmen.

Sturla had little admiration for his uncle, and it shows, but that perspective makes our understanding of the artist himself - a man who was nothing like the heroic warriors whose deeds he both recorded and reimagined - even more compelling.

The work includes 'Íslendingasaga' (or 'Saga of the Icelanders'), which, along with 'Hákonarsaga Hákonarsonar' ('King Hakon's Saga') give us much of what we know about Snorri's life as a chieftain, both composed by Snorri's nephew Sturla Þórðarson. In Europe, the status and mobility of women and non-Christians was further marginalized and inhibited by the Christian church. And in Iceland, a handful of powerful chieftains vied for greater influence over an island that would lose its independence before the century's end.Īs the Saga-savvy reader well-knows, this is the very task achieved by the 'Sturlunga saga' (or, the 'Sturlunga'). While the era saw great advancements in the sciences and humanities thanks to Muslim scholars and polymaths, it was also a period of religious violence and Crusading fervor. In England, a group of wealthy nobles forced a (wealthier) monarch to sign Magna Carta, a document whose full impact was still centuries away. In Africa, the Mali and Ethiopian empires and the Kingdom of Zimbabwe rose to prominence, while across the ocean, the Pueblo culture flourished as the nomadic tribes who would build the Aztec empire moved into Mesoamerica. In Rome, the Fourth Lateran Council discussed and made doctrine what constituted heresy, what was and wasn't a sacrament, and who could and should be persecuted, put to death, or warred with under these definitions. The Mongol Empire kicked its seemingly unstoppable expansion into a whole new gear.

The Poetic Edda by Anonymous