The Story of Shelagh, Olaf Cuaran's Daughter

Angebote / Angebote:

Excerpt from The Story of Shelagh, Olaf Cuaran's Daughter: A Saga of the Northmen in Cumberland in the Tenth Century On the stone monuments, weapons, ornaments, and other articles belonging to our Norse ancestors, inscriptions in Runic characters have frequently been found, which prove that the art of writing was not unknown. Runes, derived from some earlier alphabet, which is still a subject of controversy, were formerly a puzzle, but are now day by day forced to reveal their hidden secrets, often very human and pathetic, and sometimes obviously believed by the writer to have magical virtues. These characters were not, however, used for books or correspondence. The history of the Norse was handed down by word of mouth, in songs and tales called sagas, sung and told first by professional skalds, who were often no mean poets, and afterwards no doubt by any who could remember them, it being a point of honour not to vary the tale. When the Latin alphabet came in with Christianity, (Latin being the ecclesiastical language), some sagas were happily reduced to writing, and survive for our benefit, giving us vivid word pictures of the daily life of Norsemen in Iceland and Norway at the very period when others of their kin were settling in Cumberland. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.