Cold Counsel: Women in Old Norse Literature and Mythology by sarah m. anderson

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 16,2025

This collection of scholarly essays on women in Old Norse literature contains a number of valuable contributiions to the field. I found Helga Kress' feminist reading of the courtship of Frey and Gerd, "Taming the Shrew: The Rise of Patriarchy and the Subordination of the Feminine in Old Norse Literature" to be particularly illuminating.

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Franck_Nicolas

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 16,2025

It's always difficult to review anthologies, moreso when they're a collection of difference authors, even moreso when the essays' formats aren't standardized. The latter was the greatest impediment for me--I don't know Icelandic, so I pretty much had to gloss over essays without a translation, which was especially frustrating when they were interesting: the opening essay, for instance, which went into the significance of the verb "to mix" and tied it to the eddic poem where Loki rages against the Aesir and is thrown out was really interesting, but since the author didn't translate the lines that she hung her argument on, I could only half-grasp it.

Some of the essays seemed to conform more tightly to the central theme than others (the essay on the saga of Perceval, for instance, almost seemed only tangentially to discuss women's roles in the work), and one essay near the end needed better editing--there were several misspellings in it that were all the more glaring for the fact that it was a revision of a previous work (leading one to wonder whether the errors were introduced in the revision or if they were missed twice-over).

Overall a very interesting work, with intriguing essays by the majority of the contributors.

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Cold Counsel: Women in Old Norse Literature and Mythology

sarah m. anderson karen swenson

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