Description
Yale University Press, 1964. Hardcover, vi, 190 pp.; 24 cm; Yale Germanic Studies, 1 (Konstantin Reichardt, editor); genealogical charts in text.
Rare, out-of-print & unusual books · Since 1997
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Condition & notes
In Very Good condition with a Very Good dust jacket. Turquoise cloth boards; spine with gilt lettering and rules between black ornamented panels. Mild shelf and edge wear, some bumping to bottom edges of boards, mild toning to edges. Binding tight. Endpapers very lightly toned. Previous owner's name in ink on front free endpaper; otherwise pages clean and unmarked. Yale University Press review slip laid in, giving publication date as November 18, 1964 and price as $6.00. Illustrated dust jacket in turquoise and white with an engraved view of a mountain gorge, black blackletter title on front; a few nicks and short tears of a quarter inch or less, mild creasing, a hint of color loss along edges and spine, light toning to rear panel. Now in an archival quality (removable) Brodart cover. A history of scholarship on how the Icelandic family sagas came to be written, from the seventeenth-century antiquarians through the Romantic era to the twentieth-century dispute between the "freeprose" school, which saw the sagas as oral tradition set down in writing, and the "bookprose" school, which saw them as the work of literary authors. The book began as Andersson's 1960 Yale doctoral dissertation, directed by Konstantin Reichardt, and was the first volume of the Yale Germanic Studies series. Andersson, then an assistant professor at Harvard, later taught at Stanford and Indiana and became a leading scholar of the sagas; later saga scholarship still cites this survey for the freeprose-bookprose debate. The appendices examine the genealogies in Gunnlaugs saga and episodes that survive in variant versions across several sagas. Scandinavian quotations are translated in the text for the non-specialist. Contents: Preface; From Humanism to the Enlightenment; The Romantic Era; Modern Trends (Historicity, Literary Analysis, The Irish Hypothesis, The Thattr Theory); Freeprose versus Bookprose; Critical Considerations (Genealogical Sources, Literary Sources, Oral Sources, Conclusion); Appendix I: The Genealogies in Gunnlaugs saga; Appendix II: Variants; Select Bibliography; Index.