Profound and intriguing, Grettir's Saga is the last of the great Icelandic sagas. It tells of the life and death of Grettir, a great rebel, individualist, and romantic hero viewed unromantically. Grettir spends his childhood violently defying authority: as a youth of sixteen he kills a man and is outlawed; all the rest of his life he devotes, with remarkable composure, to fighting more and more formidable enemies. He pits himself against bears, berserks, wraiths, trolls, and final...

In Iceland, the age of the Vikings is also known as the Saga Age. A unique body of medieval literature, the Sagas rank with the world’s great literary treasures – as epic as Homer, as deep in tragedy as Sophocles, as engagingly human as Shakespeare. Set around the turn of the last millennium, these stories depict with an astonishingly modern realism the lives and deeds of the Norse men and women who first settled in Iceland and of their descendants, who ventured farther west to Greenland a...

The legendary tale of Ernest Shackleton's grueling Antarctic expedition, recounted in riveting first-person detail by the captain of HMS Endurance.You seriously mean to tell me that the ship is doomed?" asked Frank Worsley, commander of the Endurance, stuck impassably in Antarctic ice packs. "What the ice gets," replied Sir Ernest Shackleton, the expedition's unflappable leader, "the ice keeps." It did not, however, get the ship's twenty-five crew members, all of whom surv...

How Sir Tristram jousted, and smote down King Arthur, because he told him not the cause why he bare that shield.

This classic book contains Ponting's well-written and witty account of Captain Scott's final Antarctic expedition of 1910-12. Fully detailed and with many of Ponting's own photographs, this moving account will make an excellent addition to the bookshelf of any admirer of Captain Scott, or anyone with an interest in travel and adventure. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishin...

The Iliad and the Odyssey are attributed to the poet Homer and are the earliest surviving works of Western literature. Composed sometime around the eighth century BC, the ancient Greek poems has since been translated into many languages and serves as an important source of information on ancient Greek culture and mythology.In the Iliad it is the tenth year of the Trojan War. The Greek allies have laid siege to the city of Troy, but the leaders of the Gree...

We are going to see Nan and Grandpa for Christmas! We are flying outside, I can hardly believe it! I have not seen my grandparents for three years. These are my paternal grandparents they live in Lethbridge Alberta, Canada; we live in Fort Good Hope N.W.T., also in Canada. It is 1,500 miles to travel to Lethbridge for the holidays. Our trip will take us from Good Hope by Otter (plane) to Yellowknife, N.W.T; we will overnight in Yellowknife and then fly by DC6 to Edmonton. In Edmont...

Prime Arctic predator and nomad of the sea ice and tundra, the polar bear endures as a source of wonder, terror, and fascination. Humans have seen it as spirit guide and fanged enemy, as trade good and moral metaphor, as food source and symbol of ecological crisis. Eight thousand years of artifacts attest to its charisma, and to the fraught relationships between our two species. In the White Bear, we acknowledge the magic of wildness: it is both genuinely itself and a screen for our imagin...

Biblical poetry, written between the fourth and eleventh centuries, is an eclectic body of literature that disseminated popular knowledge of the Bible across Europe. Composed mainly in Latin and subsequently in Old English, biblical versification has much to tell us about the interpretations, genre preferences, reading habits, and pedagogical aims of medieval Christian readers.Biblical Epics in Late Antiquity and Anglo-Saxon England provides an accessible introduction to b...

From the twelfth century onwards, medieval English writers adapted the conventions of high literary culture to establish themselves as recognized authors and claim a significant place for works of imagination beside those of doctrine and instruction. Their efforts extended over three languages—Latin, French, and English—and across a discontinuous literary history. Their strategy was to approach authorship as a field of rhetorical invention rather than a fixed institution. Consequently, the...

Technology was very limited during the Middle Ages. Everything had to be done manually and, of course, it wasn’t easy. Hop into a time machine and go back to the times of cobbled steps, peasants, knights and royalty. Experience how daily living was like in the Middle Ages. Go ahead and grab a copy of this book today

This collection of essays analyzes global depictions of the devil from theological, Biblical, and literary perspectives, spanning the late Middle Ages to the 21st century. The chapters explore demonic representations in the literary works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Dante Alighieri, Charles Baudelaire, John Milton, H.P. Lovecraft, and Cormac McCarthy, among others. The text examines other media such as the operas Orfeo and Erminia sul Giordano and the television show...