NEW! Scandinavian Discovery

Beyond the Northlands: Viking Voyages and the Old Norse Sagas

by Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough

In the dying days of the eighth century, the Vikings erupted onto the international stage with brutal raids and slaughter. The medieval Norsemen may be best remembered as monk murderers and village pillagers, but this is far from the whole story. Throughout the Middle Ages, long-ships transported hairy northern voyagers far and wide, where they not only raided but also traded, explored and settled new lands, encountered unfamiliar races, and embarked on pilgrimages and crusades.
The Norsemen travelled to all corners of the medieval world and beyond; north to the wastelands of arctic Scandinavia, south to the politically turbulent heartlands of medieval Christendom, west across the wild seas to Greenland and the fringes of the North American continent, and east down the Russian waterways trading silver, skins, and slaves. Beyond the Northlands explores this world through the stories that the Vikings told about themselves in their sagas.
But the depiction of the Viking world in the Old Norse-Icelandic sagas goes far beyond historical facts. What emerges from these tales is a mixture of realism and fantasy, quasi-historical adventures and exotic wonder-tales that rocket far beyond the horizon of reality. On the crackling brown pages of saga manuscripts, trolls, dragons and outlandish tribes jostle for position with explorers, traders, and kings.
To explore the sagas and the world that produced them, Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough now takes her own trip through the dramatic landscapes that they describe. Along the way, she illuminates the rich but often confusing saga accounts with a range of other evidence: archaeological finds, rune-stones, medieval world maps, encyclopaedic manuscripts, and texts from as far away as Byzantium and Baghdad. As her journey across the Old Norse world shows, by situating the sagas against the revealing background of this other evidence, we can begin at least to understand just how the world was experienced, remembered, and imagined by this unique culture from the outermost edge of Europe so many centuries ago.

Cross and Scepter: The Rise of the Scandinavian Kingdoms from the Vikings to the Reformation

by Sverre Bagge

"Cross and Scepter" is an essential introduction to Scandinavian medieval history, from the age of the Vikings to the Reformation. Christianity and European-style monarchy--the cross and the scepter--were introduced to Scandinavia in the tenth century, a development that was to have profound implications for all of Europe. Scandinavia's leading medieval historian Sverre Bagge shows how the rise of the three kingdoms not only changed the face of Scandinavia, but also helped make the territorial state the standard political unit in Western Europe. He describes Scandinavia's momentous conversion to Christianity and the creation of church and monarchy in the region, and traces how these events transformed Scandinavian institutions--offering vital new insights into state formation and cultural change in Europe.

Embers of the Hands: An Intimate History of the Viking Age

by Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough

Imagine a Viking, and a certain image springs to mind: a nameless, faceless warrior, leaping ashore from a longboat, and ready to terrorise the hapless local population of a northern European country.

Yet while such characters define the Viking Age today, they were in the minority. This is the history of the other people who inhabited the medieval Nordic world-not only Norway, Denmark and Sweden, but also Iceland, Greenland, parts of the British Isles, Continental Europe and Russia- a history of a Viking Age filled with real people of different ages, genders and ethnicities, as told through the traces that they left behind, from hairstyles to place names, love-notes to gravestones.

It's also a history of humans on an extraordinarily global stage, spanning the centuries from the edge of the North American continent to the Russian steppes, from the Arctic wastelands to the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic Caliphate.

History of Norway

by John A. Yilek

The Baltic: A New History of the Region and its People

by Alan Warwick Palmer

In this long-needed history of the peoples and nations surrounding the Baltic Sea, we pass through the legendary castles of Elsinore and Halsingborg to enter a unique landscape and culture. Alan Palmer traces the history of the Baltic region from its early Viking days and its time under the Byzantine Empire through its medieval prime when the Baltic Sea served as one of Europe's central trading grounds. Palmer addresses both the strong nationalist sentiments that have driven Baltic culture and the early attempts at Baltic unification by Sweden and Russia. The Baltic also dissects the politics and culture of the region in the twentieth century, when it played multiple historic roles: it was the Eastern Front in the First World War; the setting of early uprisings in the Russian Revolution; a land occupied by the Nazis during the Second World War; and, until very recently, a region dominated by the Soviets.

In the twenty-first century, increasing attention has been focused on the Baltic states as they grow into their own in spite of growing neo-imperialist pressure from post-Soviet Russia. In The Baltic, Alan Palmer provides readers with a detailed history of the nations and peoples that are now poised to emerge as some of Europe's most vital democracies.

The Edge of the World: A Cultural History of the North Sea and the Transformation of Europe

by Michael Pye

Saints and spies, pirates and philosophers, artists and intellectuals: they all criss-crossed the grey North Sea in the so-called "dark ages," the years between the fall of the Roman Empire and the beginning of Europe's mastery over the oceans. Now the critically acclaimed Michael Pye reveals the cultural transformation sparked by those men and women: the ideas, technology, science, law, and moral codes that helped create our modern world. 
This is the magnificent lost history of a thousand years. It was on the shores of the North Sea where experimental science was born, where women first had the right to choose whom they married; there was the beginning of contemporary business transactions and the advent of the printed book. In The Edge of the World, Michael Pye draws on an astounding breadth of original source material to illuminate this fascinating region during a pivotal era in world history.

The Hanseatic League

by Helen Zimmern

There is scarcely a more remarkable chapter in history than that which deals with the trading alliance or association known as the Hanseatic League. The League has long since passed away, having served its time and fulfilled its purpose. The needs and circumstances of mankind have changed, and new methods and new instruments have been devised for carrying on the commerce of the world. Yet, if the League has disappeared, the beneficial results of its action survive to Europe, though they have become so completely a part of our daily life that we accept them as matters of course, and do not stop to inquire into their origin. To us moderns it seems but natural that there should be security of intercourse between civilized nations, that highways should be free from robbers, and the ocean from pirates. The mere notion of a different state of things appears strange to us, and yet things were very different not so many hundred years ago.

Vikings

by Neil Oliver

The Vikings famously took no prisoners, relished cruel retribution, and prided themselves on their bloody-thirsty skills as warriors. But their prowess in battle is only a small part of their story, which stretches from their Scandinavian origins to America in the west and as far as Baghdad in the east. As the Vikings did not write their history, we have to discover it for ourselves, and that discovery, as Neil Oliver reveals, tells an extraordinary story of a people who, from the brink of destruction, reached a quarter of the way around the globe and built an empire that lasted nearly two hundred years. Drawing on the latest discoveries that have only recently come to light, Neil Oliver goes on the trail of the real Vikings. Where did they emerge from? How did they really live? And just what drove them to embark on such extraordinary voyages of discovery over 1000 years ago? VIKINGS will explore many of these questions for the first time in an epic story of one of the world's great empires of conquest.

Vikings: Life and Legend

by Gareth Williams, Queen Margrethe of Denmark, Peter Pentz, Matthias Wemhoff

The Complete Fairy Tales

by Hans Christian Andersen, Lily Owens

This book contains the complete Andersen's fairy tales and stories hardcopy format.

Hans Christian Andersen was a Danish author and poet. Although a prolific writer of plays, travelogues, novels, and poems, Andersen is best remembered for his fairy tales, a literary genre he so mastered that he himself has become as mythical as the tales he wrote. Andersen's popularity is not limited to children; his stories - called eventyrs, or "fantastic tales" - express themes that transcend age and nationality.

During his lifetime he was acclaimed for having delighted children worldwide and was feted by royalty. Andersen's fairy tales, which have been translated into more than 125 languages, have become culturally embedded in the West's collective consciousness, readily accessible to children, but presenting lessons of virtue and resilience in the face of adversity for mature listeners/readers as well. They have inspired motion pictures, plays, ballets, and animated films.

The Nordic Cookbook

by Magnus Nilsson

The Nordic Cookbook offers an unprecedented look at the rich culinary offerings of the Nordic region with 700 recipes collected by the acclaimed Swedish chef Magnus Nilsson.

The Nordic Cookbook, richly illustrated with the personal photography of internationally acclaimed chef Magnus Nilsson, unravels the mysteries of Nordic ingredients and introduces the region's culinary history and cooking techniques.

Included in this beautiful book are more than 700 authentic recipes Magnus collected while travelling extensively throughout the Nordic countries – Denmark, the Faroe Islands, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden – enhanced by atmospheric photographs of its landscapes and people. His beautiful photographs feature in the book alongside images of the finished dishes by Erik Olsson, the photographer behind Fäviken.

With Magnus as a guide, everyone can prepare classic Nordic dishes and also explore new ones. The Nordic Cookbook introduces readers to the familiar (gravlax, meatballs and lingonberry jam) and the lesser-known aspects of Nordic cuisine (rose-hip soup, pork roasted with prunes, and juniper beer).

Organized by food type, The Nordic Cookbook covers every type of Nordic dish including meat, fish, vegetables, breads, pastries and desserts. These recipes are achievable for home cooks of all abilities and are accompanied by narrative texts on Nordic culinary history, ingredients and techniques including smoking and home preserving. Additional essays explore classic dishes made for special occasions and key seasonal events, such as the Midsummer feast.

The Nordic Cookbook joins Phaidon's national cuisine series, which includes Mexico, India, Thailand, Peru and others, and is the most comprehensive source on home cooking from the Nordic countries.

Henrik Ibsen: A New Biography

by Robert Ferguson

Osebol: Voices from a Swedish Village

by Marit Kapla

Winner of the 2019 August Prize

Near the river Klarälven, snug in the dense forest landscape of northern Värmland, lies the Swedish village of Osebol. It is a quiet place, one where relationships take root over decades, and where the bustle of city life is replaced by the sound of wind in the trees.

In the last half-century, the automation of the lumber industry and the steady drip of relocations to the cities for work have seen Osebol's adult population dwindle to only 40-odd residents. But still, life goes on. Those who have inherited their farms for generations live alongside recent arrivals from near and far. People age; children grow up. Heirlooms are passed from hand to hand, and memories from mouth to mouth.

In this extraordinary book, Marit Kapla has gathered the voices of the villagers themselves, interviewing almost all of those remaining between the ages of 18 and 92. Arranged with only a handful of lines on each page, they tell of their griefs and joys, resentments and pleasures, enmities and loves, and memories that span a century of progress and upheaval.

To read Osebol is to lose oneself in its gentle rhythms of simple language and open space, and to emerge feeling like one has really grown to know the inhabitants of this varied community, nestled among the trees in a changing world.

Out of Africa

by Isak Dinesen, Karen Blixen

Out of Africa is Isak Dinesen's memoir of her years in Africa, from 1914 to 1931, on a four-thousand-acre coffee plantation in the hills near Nairobi. She had come to Kenya from Denmark with her husband, and when they separated she stayed on to manage the farm by herself, visited frequently by her lover, the big-game hunter Denys Finch-Hatton, for whom she would make up stories "like Scheherazade." In Africa, "I learned how to tell tales," she recalled many years later. "The natives have an ear still. I told stories constantly to them, all kinds." Her account of her African adventures, written after she had lost her beloved farm and returned to Denmark, is that of a master storyteller, a woman whom John Updike called "one of the most picturesque and flamboyant literary personalities of the century."

Isak Dinesen (1885–1962) was born Karen Christence Dinesen in Rungsted, Denmark. She wrote poems, plays, and stories from an early age, including Seven Gothic Tales, Winter's Tales, Last Tales, Anecdotes of Destiny, Shadows on the Grass and Ehrengard. Out of Africa is considered her masterpiece.

The Northern Lights: The True Story of the Man Who Unlocked the Secrets of the Aurora Borealis

by Lucy Jago

A previously untold story--a brilliant examination of the life of the visionary 20th-century Norwegian scientist Kristian Birkeland.

Through the ages, the lights of the aurora borealis were believed to be the messengers of gods or signs of apocalypse or souls of the dead. Even at the turn of the century, the most sophisticated scientists misapprehended their cause. Now Lucy Jago tells the story of the science--and the romance--behind the northern lights as she traces the grand adventure of Birkeland's life.

In 1899, Birkeland set out on his lifelong, arduous, increasingly compulsive quest for an explanation of the aurora borealis. He traveled across some of the most forbidding landscapes on earth--from the ice mountains of Norway to the deserts of Africa--defying the dangers of war and political upheaval, dedicating himself to the unraveling of this mystery. And yet when he died in 1917--in Japan, under suspicious circumstances--his work was unheralded. Now his theories are considered to have been prophetic, and they have furthered our understanding not only of the aurora borealis, but also of electromagnetism, comets, and the sun.

A galvanizing, enlightening saga.

The Story of Edvard Munch

by Ketil Bjørnstad

City of My Dreams (Stockholm Series, #1)

by Per Anders Fogelström, Jennifer Brown Bäverstam

A summer evening in 1860 a young man named Henning walks into the city he has dreamed of. Times are changing, industries are forming and new possibilites are opening up.

The narrative follows a group of working-class people on Södermalm in Stockholm between 1860 and 1880.


This is the first book in Fogelstrom's five-volume Stockholm Series, which broke the record for bestsellers in his native Sweden. After reading the series in Swedish, Jennifer Brown Baverstam, an accomplished translator of Swedish and French, and married to a Swede, vowed to make these books available in English to share with her American family and friends. Per Anders Fogelstrom was delighted with this effort and worked with Jennifer until his death in 1998.

Four Major Plays: A Doll's House / Ghosts / Hedda Gabler / The Master Builder

by Henrik Ibsen, James McFarlane, Jens Arup

Taken from the highly acclaimed Oxford Ibsen, this collection of Ibsen's plays includes A Doll's House, Ghosts, Hedda Gabler and The Master Builder.

Gösta Berling's Saga

by Selma Lagerlöf, Lillie Tudeer, Pauline Klaiber-Gottschau

The first woman to receive the Nobel Prize for literature, Lagerlöf assured her place in Swedish letters with this 1891 novel. The eponymous hero, a country pastor whose appetite for alcohol and indiscretions ends his career, falls in with a dozen vagrant Swedish cavaliers and enters into a power struggle with the richest woman in the province.

The book has a Faustian theme revolving around a possible deal with the Devil. It also deals with social issues such as poverty and depression, as well as mixing in elements of myths and humorous love stories.

Kristin Lavransdatter

by Sigrid Undset, Brad Leithauser, Tiina Nunnally

In her great historical epic Kristin Lavransdatter, set in fourteenth-century Norway, Nobel laureate Sigrid Undset tells the life story of one passionate and headstrong woman. Painting a richly detailed backdrop, Undset immerses readers in the day-to-day life, social conventions, and political and religious undercurrents of the period. Now in one volume, Tiina Nunnally's award-winning definitive translation brings this remarkable work to life with clarity and lyrical beauty. As a young girl, Kristin is deeply devoted to her father, a kind and courageous man. But when as a student in a convent school she meets the charming and impetuous Erlend Nikulaussøn, she defies her parents in pursuit of her own desires. Her saga continues through her marriage to Erlend, their tumultuous life together raising seven sons as Erlend seeks to strengthen his political influence, and finally their estrangement as the world around them tumbles into uncertainty. With its captivating heroine and emotional potency, Kristin Lavransdatter is the masterwork of Norway's most beloved author, one of the twentieth century's most prodigious and engaged literary minds and, in Nunnally's exquisite translation, a story that continues to enthrall.

Nordic Tales: Folktales from Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, and Denmark

by Ulla Thynell, Peter Christen Asbjørnsen, Parker Fillmore, Jón Árnason

Trolls haunt the snowy forests, and terrifying monsters roam the open sea.

A young woman journeys to the end of the world, and a boy proves he knows no fear.

This collection of 16 traditional tales transports readers to the enchanting world of Nordic folklore. Translated and transcribed by folklorists in the 19th century, and presented here unabridged, the stories are by turns magical, hilarious, cozy, and chilling. They offer a fascinating view into Nordic culture and a comforting wintertime read. Ulla Thynell's glowing contemporary illustrations accompany each tale, conjuring dragons, princesses, and the northern lights. This special gift edition features an embossed, textured case and a ribbon marker.

Norse Mythology

by Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman has long been inspired by ancient mythology in creating the fantastical realms of his fiction. Now he turns his attention back to the source, presenting a bravura rendition of the great northern tales.

In Norse Mythology, Gaiman stays true to the myths in envisioning the major Norse pantheon: Odin, the highest of the high, wise, daring, and cunning; Thor, Odin’s son, incredibly strong yet not the wisest of gods; and Loki—son of a giant—blood brother to Odin and a trickster and unsurpassable manipulator.

Gaiman fashions these primeval stories into a novelistic arc that begins with the genesis of the legendary nine worlds and delves into the exploits of deities, dwarfs, and giants. Once, when Thor's hammer is stolen, Thor must disguise himself as a woman—difficult with his beard and huge appetite—to steal it back. More poignant is the tale in which the blood of Kvasir—the most sagacious of gods—is turned into a mead that infuses drinkers with poetry. The work culminates in Ragnarok, the twilight of the gods and rebirth of a new time and people.

Through Gaiman’s deft and witty prose emerge these gods with their fiercely competitive natures, their susceptibility to being duped and to duping others, and their tendency to let passion ignite their actions, making these long-ago myths breathe pungent life again.

Searching for Nora: After the Doll's House

by Wendy Swallow

The Essential Kierkegaard

by Søren Kierkegaard, Howard Vincent Hong, Edna Hatlestad Hong

This is the most comprehensive anthology of Soren Kierkegaard's works ever assembled in English. Drawn from the volumes of Princeton's authoritative Kierkegaard's Writings series by editors Howard and Edna Hong, the selections represent every major aspect of Kierkegaard's extraordinary career. They reveal the powerful mix of philosophy, psychology, theology, and literary criticism that made Kierkegaard one of the most compelling writers of the nineteenth century and a shaping force in the twentieth. With an introduction to Kierkegaard's writings as a whole and explanatory notes for each selection, this is the essential one-volume guide to a thinker who changed the course of modern intellectual history.


The anthology begins with Kierkegaard's early journal entries and traces the development of his work chronologically to the final The Changelessness of God. The book presents generous selections from all of Kierkegaard's landmark works, including Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, Works of Love, and The Sickness unto Death, and draws new attention to a host of such lesser-known writings as Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions and The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air. The selections are carefully chosen to reflect the unique character of Kierkegaard's work, with its shifting pseudonyms, its complex dialogues, and its potent combination of irony, satire, sermon, polemic, humor, and fiction. We see the esthetic, ethical, and ethical-religious ways of life initially presented as dialogue in two parallel series of pseudonymous and signed works and later in the "second authorship" as direct address. And we see the themes that bind the whole together, in particular Kierkegaard's overarching concern with, in his own words, "What it means to exist; . . . what it means to be a human being.?


Together, the selections provide the best available introduction to Kierkegaard's writings and show more completely than any other book why his work, in all its creativity, variety, and power, continues to speak so directly today to so many readers around the world.