(20)Five hundred years before Columbus, a Viking woman named Gudrid sailed off the edge of the known world. She landed in the New World and lived there for three years, giving birth to a baby before sailing home. Or so the Icelandic sagas say. Even after archaeologists found a Viking longhouse in Newfoundland, no one believed that the details of Gudrid’s story were true. Then, in 2001, a team of scientists discovered what may have been this pioneering woman’s last house, buried under a hay field in Iceland, just where the sagas suggested it could be.
(3)Illustrated with 10 unique illustrations.
This translation of the Poetic Eddas is highly readable. They are also a primary source for our knowledge of ancient Norse paganism.
The poems are great tragic literature, with vivid descriptions of the emotional states of the protagonists, Gods and heroes alike. Women play a prominent role in the Eddic age, and many of them are delineated as skilled warriors.
The impact of these sagas from a sparsely inhabited rocky island in the middle of the Atlantic on world culture is wide-ranging. Wagners' operas are largely based on incidents from the Edda, via the Niebelungenlied. J.R.R. Tolkien also plundered the Eddas for atmosphere, plot material and the names of many characters in the Hobbit, and the Lord of the Rings.
329 pages.
(2)Icelandic Spiritualism is an engaging social anthropological study of the place of spiritualism in Icelandic church and society during the first half of the twentieth century. Challenging standard theoretical approaches to the study of religion, the book contributes a wealth of data on the history of religion and psychical research, presenting it in a vivid descriptive narrative.
The authors trace the role of the spirit world in Icelandic culture, giving particular attention to the distinctive history of Iceland's "conversion" to Christianity. They focus on the appearance of "modern" spiritualism as a distinct phenomenon in Icelandic life. The book studies the interaction between various groups in fin-de-siecle Icelandic society, not least in the state church, as mediumistic phenomena became widely reported through the newspapers.
To some, Icelandic spiritualism may be considered a deviant case of Protestantism. What makes this book interesting, however, is that the spiritualism is seen as integral to Iceland's transition to modernity. While Icelandic Spiritualism concentrates mainly on the first half of the twentieth century, it also provides a summary of the continuation of spiritualist phenomena up to the current period. This intriguing study will be of interest to theologians, philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists.
(1)This dazzlingly illustrated volcano guide documents the 20 hottest volcanoes of the 1,900 that pockmark Earth's surface, including recent eruptions that seared landscapes and lives. It is a relevant reference for the 500+ million people who live in active volcano zones and others who are intrigued by our planet's primal pageantry.
(6)An island with a rich and ancient literature. A land of hot springs and volcanoes. A country with an extraordinary history, a challenging geography, and a vibrant contemporary culture. Terry G. Lacy brings both the perspective of an outsider end the familiar eye of a long-term resident to this delightful exploration of all facets of Iceland, past and present. She conveys her story with a skillful interlacing of history, religion, politics, and culture to paint a vivid picture of the way Icelanders live today.
(1)Are you online and ready for global smart card and database genealogy for virtual travelers? Here’s how to search family history for nations bordering the Baltic Sea, the Balkans countries, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East.
The nations listed in this guide (all faiths) include Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Armenia, Assyria, Greece, Lebanon, Syria, and many other lands in the Middle East, the Balkans—Croatia, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Eastern Europe—Hungary, and more.
Collecting details about people is moving toward smart card technology and its offspring. The new wave in genealogy is authentication technology. Authentication begins with new-wave technology used to gather population registers.
Compare the new technology to the old method of door-to-door census taking, tombstone tracings, and city directory publishing. No, genealogists are not using smart cards this year, but smart card technology is being used to compile population registers in Europe.
The future holds a new wave of technology used for authentication for banking transactions being applied to other areas. Currently this technology is used for collecting details for population registrars such as census taking.
The application for research is of interest to family historians, librarians, and governments. It’s already in use by private industry for electronic authentication.
Family history is now about intelligent connections, whether it’s a population registrar, census detail, or electronic identity for banking. Smart card genealogy began in 1998 in Finland with governments seeking to put census and population registers in an electronic form that would be available to researchers, and these applications are going global.
(73)In the summer of 1972, with a presidential crisis stirring in the United States and the cold war at a pivotal point, two men -- the Soviet world chess champion Boris Spassky and his American challenger Bobby Fischer -- met in the most notorious chess match of all time. Their showdown in Reykjavik, Iceland, held the world spellbound for two months with reports of psychological warfare, ultimatums, political intrigue, cliffhangers, and farce to rival a Marx Brothers film.
Thirty years later, David Edmonds and John Eidinow, authors of the national bestseller Wittgenstein's Poker, have set out to reexamine the story we recollect as the quintessential cold war clash between a lone American star and the Soviet chess machine -- a machine that had delivered the world title to the Kremlin for decades. Drawing upon unpublished Soviet and U.S. records, the authors reconstruct the full and incredible saga, one far more poignant and layered than hitherto believed.
Against the backdrop of superpower politics, the authors recount the careers and personalities of Boris Spassky, the product of Stalin's imperium, and Bobby Fischer, a child of post-World War II America, an era of economic boom at home and communist containment abroad. The two men had nothing in common but their gift for chess, and the disparity of their outlook and values conditioned the struggle over the board.
Then there was the match itself, which produced both creative masterpieces and some of the most improbable gaffes in chess history. And finally, there was the dramatic and protracted off-the-board battle -- in corridors and foyers, in back rooms and hotel suites, in Moscow offices and in the White House.
The authors chronicle how Fischer, a manipulative, dysfunctional genius, risked all to seize control of the contest as the organizers maneuvered frantically to save it -- under the eyes of the world's press. They can now tell the inside story of Moscow's response, and the bitter tensions within the Soviet camp as the anxious and frustrated apparatchiks strove to prop up Boris Spassky, the most un-Soviet of their champions -- fun-loving, sensitive, and a free spirit. Edmonds and Eidinow follow this careering, behind-the-scenes confrontation to its climax: a clash that displayed the cultural differences between the dynamic, media-savvy representatives of the West and the baffled, impotent Soviets. Try as they might, even the KGB couldn't help.
A mesmerizing narrative of brilliance and triumph, hubris and despair, Bobby Fischer Goes to War is a biting deconstruction of the Bobby Fischer myth, a nuanced study on the art of brinkmanship, and a revelatory cold war tragicomedy.
(6)A remote island with a rich and ancient literature. A land of hot springs and volcanoes. A country with an extraordinary history, a challenging geography and a vibrant contemporary culture. A land of ice.
Why Iceland?: How One of the World's Smallest Countries Became the Meltdown's Biggest Casualty (6)As late as the mid 1980s, Iceland’s economy revolved around little else than a semi-robust cod-fishing industry. By the end of the century, however, it had transformed itself into a major player in world finance, building an international banking empire worth twelve times its GDP. The tiny island nation of 300,000 was one of the global economy’s great success stories.
And then everything came crashing down.
Why Iceland? is the inside account of one of the economic meltdown’s most fascinating and far-reaching tragedies. As Chief Economist of Kaupthing Bank, the country’s largest bank before the collapse, Ásgeir Jónsson is perfectly suited to examine Iceland’s collapse in painstaking detail. He witnessed behind-the-scenes events firsthand, such as an intriguing meeting in January 2008 when a group of international hedge fund managers gathered in a bar in Reykjavik to discuss Iceland’s economy—an informal affair that eventually became the center of a criminal investigation by the country’s Financial Supervisory Authority.
This inside account examines the pressing issues behind history’s biggest banking collapse:
Iceland remains the biggest casualty of the economic downturn, and the ramifications of its catastrophic failure reach deeply into the economies of Europe, the United States, and other global markets. Ásgeir Jónsson offers a unique perspective and an expert’s insight into the rise and fall of this once-proud banking giant.
Why Iceland? provides the who, what, where, and when of Iceland’s demise, serving as a fascinating read and providing the understanding necessary for forecasting when and where the aftershocks will shake up markets in other parts of the world.
"Fearsome Vikings discovered Iceland. Hedge funds knocked it down. It was a humiliating tumble for the former financial powerhouse, which was proud of its status in Europe. A late bloomer, Iceland had been the last country in Europe to be settled, the Nordic nation rapidly caught up with its wealthier relations. It was all fine until October 2008, when country's banking system collapsed in a week. Written by an Icelandic economist, Why Iceland? chronicles the meltdown, in the context of the nation's history."--New York Post (A "Required Reading" Selection)
Iceland, Greenland, Northern Norway, and the Faroe Islands lie on the edges of Western Europe, in an area long portrayed by travelers as remote and exotic--its nature harsh, its people reclusive. Since the middle of the eighteenth century, however, this marginalized region has gradually become part of modern Europe, a transformation that is narrated in Karen Oslund's Iceland Imagined.
This cultural and environmental history sweeps across the dramatic North Atlantic landscape, exploring its unusual geography, saga narratives, language, culture, and politics, and analyzing its emergence as a distinctive and symbolic part of Europe. The earliest visions of a wild frontier, filled with dangerous and unpredictable inhabitants, eventually gave way to images of beautiful, well-managed lands, inhabited by simple but virtuous people living close to nature. This transformation was accomplished by state-sponsored natural histories of Iceland which explained that the monsters described in medieval and Renaissance travel accounts did not really exist, and by artists who painted the Icelandic landscapes to reflect their fertile and regulated qualities. Literary scholars and linguists who came to Iceland and Greenland in the nineteenth century related the stories and the languages of the "wild North" to those of their home countries.
Karen Oslund is assistant professor of world history at Towson University in Maryland.
Deep Freeze (Large Print Edition): Iceland?s Economic Collapse 
(2)LARGE PRINT EDITION! More at LargePrintLiberty.com
It was a modern thriving economy one day, and then, suddenly, the food disappeared from the shelves, the banks closed, and the ships stopped arriving. Iceland in 2008 experienced an unprecedented economic meltdown that struck fear in the hearts of people all over the world. If it could happen here, it could happen anywhere. The economic crisis led to a political crisis, with resignations galore. The whining and wailing about the disaster continues to this day, with most commentators blaming deregulation and the free market. In Deep Freeze, economists Philipp Bagus and David Howden demonstrate that the real cause of the calamity was bad central bank policy. Rates were way too low, banks were too big to fail, housing was implicitly guaranteed, and banks were borrowing short term from abroad to finance long term bonds. The authors discuss the implications of this maturity mismatching and zero in on the central bank policies that encouraged unsound practices. They demonstrate the cause and effect without a shadow of a doubt, using vast amounts of data and a detailed sector-by-sector look at the economy of Iceland. What they find is another instance of the Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle, working itself out in a way that is customized for a time and place. Toby Baxendale writes the introducton to this story that reads like a great novel. It serves as a reminder that central banking policies aren't just about monetary arcana. They affect our lives in profound and sometimes catastrophic ways. The Iceland Freeze is one of the great historical cases that makes Mises’s point. Let it always serve as a reminder of what happens when the laws of the market are papered over by politicians and central bankers. This account is likely to remain the definitive one for many years.
(6)The Sagas of Icelanders are enduring stories from Viking-Age Iceland filled with love and romance, battles and feuds, tragedy and comedy. Yet these tales are little read today, even by lovers of literature. The culture and history of the people depicted in the Sagas are often unfamiliar to the modern reader, though the audience for whom the tales were intended would have had an intimate understanding of the material. This text introduces the modern reader to the daily lives and material culture of the Vikings. Topics covered include religion, housing, social customs, the settlement of disputes, and the early history of Iceland. Issues of dispute among scholars, such as the nature of settlement and the division of land, are addressed in the text.
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(1)This book of 85 stories from medieval Iceland illustrates a variety of supernatural beliefs concerning elves, gigantic trolls, water monsters, ghosts, wizards and black magic rites, buried treasure and religious tales. The stories are intimately linked to the landscape and reflect the hopes, fears, hardships and preoccupations of everyday life. The translation of each tale is accompanied by an explanatory introduction and notes.
(15)The popular image of the Viking Age is of warlords and marauding bands pillaging their way along the shores of Northern Europe. In this fascinating history, Jesse Byock shows that Norse society in Iceland was actually an independent one-almost a republican Free State, without warlords or kings. Combining history with anthropology and archaeology, this remarkable study serves as a valuable companion to the Icelandic sagas, exploring all aspects of Viking Age life: feasting, farming, the power of chieftains and the church, marriage, and the role of women. With masterful interpretations of the blood feuds and the sagas, Byock reveals how the law courts favored compromise over violence, and how the society grappled with proto-democratic tendencies. A work with broad social and historical implications for our modern institutions, Byock's history will alter long-held perceptions of the Viking Age.
