Myth and History in Celtic and Scandinavian Traditions

2021 ◽  

Myth and History in Celtic and Scandinavian Traditions explores the traditions of two fascinating and contiguous cultures in north-western Europe. History regularly brought these two peoples into contact, most prominently with the viking invasion of Ireland. In the famous Second Battle of Mag Tuired, gods such as Lug, Balor, and the Dagda participated in the conflict that distinguished this invasion. Pseudohistory, which consists of both secular and ecclesiastical fictions, arose in this nexus of peoples and myth and spilled over into other contexts such as chronological annals. Scandinavian gods such as Odin, Balder, Thor, and Loki feature in the Edda of Snorri Sturluson and the history of the Danes by Saxo Grammaticus. This volume explores such written works alongside archaeological evidence from earlier periods through fresh approaches that challenge entrenched views.

2022 ◽  
Vol 78 (02) ◽  
pp. 6619-2022
Author(s):  
WIESŁAW NIEDBALSKI

The article reviews the history of BT occurrence in Europe and its present status. It describes the distribution of BT in Europe before 1998, the emergence of BTV in southern and eastern Europe in 1998-2006 and the epidemiology of BT in north-western Europe after 2006. Up to 1998, sporadic cases of BT were noted in Cyprus, on the Iberian Peninsula and on several Greek islands. However, since 1998, probably due to climatic changes, BTV has spread northwards into the Mediterranean Basin, where five BTV serotypes (1, 2, 4, 9 and 16) have been identified. In August 2006, BTV passed for the first time latitude 50°N, and BT outbreaks caused by BTV serotype 8 occurred in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France and Luxembourg. Mass vaccination campaigns implemented in Europe in the spring of 2008 quickly limited the spread of disease caused by BTV-8, and it was eradicated by 2011. However, after a 3-year break, in September 2015, BTV-8 re-emerged in Europe, in central France, and subsequently spread throughout the entire country. In the following years, BTV-8 outbreaks were found in Switzerland, Germany, Belgium and Spain. In addition to BTV-8 outbreaks, BTV serotypes 1, 2, 4, 9 and 16 have recently circulated in Europe. As revealed by phylogeographic inference, the recent spread of BTV in Europe is a consequence of climatic, landscape and vertebrate host factors


Author(s):  
Anne Haour

This chapter examines the similarities in the means by which new monotheistic religions, Christianity and Islam, came to override previous religious beliefs in the central Sahel and north-west Europe. It explains the concept of animism and describes the initial stages of the implantation of Christianity and Islam, or the time of the most sustained missionary activity rather than that of established belief. It provides an overview of the religious history of the central Sahel and north-western Europe and considers religious conversion from the point of view of the converted.


1916 ◽  
Vol 3 (9) ◽  
pp. 385-395 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonard Hawkes

It is many years ago since Sir Archibald Geikie pointed out that the Tertiary basalts of the Western Isles of Scotland and North-East Ireland were remnants of plateaux built up of lavas extruded from fissures after the manner described by von Richthofen. In historic times fissure eruptions have taken place in Iceland, and in The Ancient Volcanoes of Great Britain a chapter is included on “The Modern Volcanoes of Iceland as illustrative of the Tertiary Volcanic History of North-Western Europe” (1, p. 260). Whilst little remains to be added in support of the very definite analogy exhibited in the nature of the lava streams themselves, the equivalent of the thin bands of red rock so typically intercalated in the Tertiary series has not been particularly examined, and I have visited Iceland in order to study the red beds themselves and search for their counterparts in the modern lava deserts.


Antiquity ◽  
1951 ◽  
Vol 25 (99) ◽  
pp. 127-130
Author(s):  
Thorleif Sjøvold

The Viking raids on Western Europe are well-known from written, historical records. It has been suggested, however, that if those sources had not existed, we should have been obliged to reconstruct the history of the Vikings on a foundation of purely archaeological evidence. Typically Scandinavian graves on Western European territory bear witness to visits by Scandinavian people; and numerous finds of Scandinavian weapons also give some indication of the purpose of the visits.


1936 ◽  
Vol 2 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 169-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Ullyott

Sometime after the last retreat of the ice in the Quaternary ice age, the Scandinavian peninsula was separated on the south from the north German plain and Denmark. Later, England was cut off by the Channel from the continental land mass. An estimation of the times at which these two events happened is interesting to archaeologists, botanists and zoologists alike, because the communities with which they are concerned are affected by the barrier of an intervening arm of the sea.So far most of the evidence about the times of separation comes from botanical and archaeological sources, from pollen analysis and the investigation of cultural sites. In this paper the distribution and physiology of certain freshwater animals are used to provide argument that the separation of Scandinavia and of England could only have taken place at times of particular climatic conditions. The climatic definition of the times of separation makes it possible to fit them in to the absolute geochronological scale which has been established by Scandinavian workers.


1997 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 583-601 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. I. Moore

Although they still differ considerably in their willingness to acknowledge it, specialists in the history of north-western Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries CE are increasingly treating it as that of the emergence of a new civilization in what had previously been a peripheral region of the Mediterranean-based civilization of the classical west, rather than as a continuation or revival of that civilization itself. In this light Europe, or Latin Christendom as it saw itself, offers a number of striking resemblances to the developments which Lieberman discusses. The most dynamic regions of the new Europe—north-western France, Flanders and lowland England, north-eastern Spain, northern Italy, southern Italy and Sicily—were all peripheral, though in various senses, both to the long-defunct classical civilization and its direct successors, the Byzantine and Abbasid Empires, and to the transitional and much more loosely based ninth-and tenth-century empires of the Franks and Saxons (Ottonians). To this one might add that by the end of the twelfth century the remaining rimlands of the Eurasian continent in a purely geographical sense—Scandinavia, including Iceland, and still more the southern coast of the Baltic and the areas dominated by the rivers which drained into it—were developing very rapidly indeed.


2007 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alicja Zemanek ◽  
Andrea Ubrizsy Savoia ◽  
Bogdan Zemanek

During the Renaissance ecological thinking emerged both in printed scientific works and in pictures showing plants against the background of their natural environment. A unique source for the history of plant ecology is the Libri picturati A. 18–30 collection of water-colours kept at the Jagiellonian Library in Cracow (Poland). This collection consists of 13 volumes of plant pictures, and contains about 1,800 images illustrating more than 1,000 taxa mainly from north-western Europe and the Mediterranean region, but also from Asia and America. Some of these pictures match with woodcuts in various works by famous Flemish botanists, mainly Charles de l'Écluse (Carolus Clusius) (1526–1609). Both the illustrations and their short annotations provide a synthetic review of the ecology of the Renaissance period. The paper deals with ecological issues which are found in the collection such as information on the climatic and edaphic requirements of some species, on plants occurring in various habitats and plant communities, plants representing principal growth forms, descriptions of particular adaptations to specific living conditions, for example the halophyte community of sea coasts or the parasitic flowering plants, and phenological observations. These trends can also be seen in printed publications of that time, and this collection mirrors them especially closely.


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