Thanks man! I'm glad you found some of it useful. I'd be interested to hear more of your thoughts on medieval lit!

Thank you so much, Wendy! I'm really glad I could bring back some memories.

Thank you! Norse mythology is great - there are so many interesting studies of those stories.

I'm glad someone might find it interesting!

Thanks for watching! It's such a shame that so much of this literature is gate-kept due to monetary expenses. If you don't have access to a university library or a good public library (it sounds like you did, luckily - Toronto has some amazing medieval collections!), it's nearly impossible to engage with a lot of this material, unfortunately. As you note, I think this is getting better, as more and more academics see the value in making this stuff publicly available online. The TEAMS series for middle English and the Viking Society for Northern Research for old Norse are both wonderful projects. I hope this trend continues!

I can't argue with that!

Thanks, Johanna! The Saga of the Volsungs is a great saga, especially if you're interested in the more fantastical elements of medieval literature!

@@travelthroughstories I am also interested in watching Wagner’s Ring Cycle at some point. I’m a huge fan of his opera, Tristan und Isolde, though I do acknowledge how problematic his philosophies and views on Judaism and women were. So in addition to fantasy literature, music is actually a great inspiration for me wanting to explore these stories more!

@@Johanna_reads Interesting! I've watched bits and pieces of Wagner's Ring Cycle, but I've never sat through the whole thing (yet!). It is really interesting to think about Wagner and other composer's medievalism and how they translate these stories to a musical composition. I always wish I was more musically-inclined - it sounds like a fascinating way to approach these stories!

Thanks for watching! I hope you find some books you like.

Agreed! He's an incredible scholar and a very kind man. Not a dig, unfortunately, as I'm not really an archaeologist at all. It was just a week-long workshop for a couple of grad students hosted by him and two other scholars. Thanks for watching - I'm glad some of it was useful!

Thanks - I'm glad you enjoyed! I haven't had a chance to read his new translations, but I have read both Hrólfs saga kraka and Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks (the former in ON - I may have skipped over my copy of the edition by Slay in this video -, the latter in Christopher Tolkien's translation). They're both great sagas, and I'm sure Crawford does them justice! The appropriation of early Germanic lit/mythology is appalling. It's something I get very angry at just about every day because, as you said, many people *only* associate this material with neo-Nazis now. It's such a shame and it's a constant battle. So, thank you for fighting the good fight! JRR Tolkien wrote of this appropriation: "I have in this War a burning private grudge-which would probably make me a better soldier at 49 than I was at 22: against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler (for the odd thing about demonic inspiration and impetus is that it in no way enhances the purely intellectual stature: it chiefly affects the mere will). Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light." I feel much the same.

Thanks for watching! Haha - yeah, doing graduate work inevitably means buying more bookshelves... Religious Studies sounds wonderfully interesting!

Hah! Yeah, that scene kind of comes out of nowhere... Fascinating Romance though!

Wow, how neat. There are so few universities outside of Iceland that even offer a single course on anything Icelandic. Consider yourself lucky! I'm assuming it's in Manitoba as I think every other "Icelandic" department in the Anglo-phone world is subsumed by either Scandinavian Studies or Germanic Studies. Very cool though - I hope you get the opportunity to take a class or two there! The Sagas of the Icelanders are a treasure-trove.

@@travelthroughstories Yes it is in Manitoba! I guess youtube didn't allow my links to be posted here. Oh well.

@@ThatReadingGuy28 Ah man - yeah, KZfaq usually just auto-deletes links. I'm sure their reading list is fantastic. In fact, I *may* have seen it one time as I used a bunch of university reading lists to develop my comprehensive exams reading list... Thanks for trying though!

Thank you! I'm definitely not fluent in any other language, unfortunately. I grew up very monolingual and didn't begin studying languages seriously until my 20s. I'd say I have a solid "reading knowledge" of Icelandic and a few other languages, but my ability to speak them leaves much to be desired. I hope to amend this at some point though!

Gaiman's retelling is quite good, I think. It moves a bit far from the source material at times, but he does a good job of translating the myths to the 21st century, if that makes sense. I'd recommend reading it, then reading the original Eddas.

I'm just a graduate student, though I also teach at the university where I'm doing my degree. Thank you!!

@@travelthroughstories waaah it shows!! I also teach and also pursuing grad studies. Good luck and all the best!

@@maeiscompletelyfine That's kind of you to say! And very cool!! Good luck to you in your studies as well.

I, unfortunately and embarrassingly, haven't finished it yet. I read the first ~200 pages and it was incredible, then the semester began and I fell off. I find it difficult to read long books during the semester - it's a book that requires a bit more attention then I can give it right now, but I really want to get back to it. I think over winter break I'm going to try to tackle the rest of it!

Good question! It's occasionally difficult to tell easily without just researching the author. I should note too that there are plenty of fantastic "popular" history books and plenty of terrible "academic" ones, so even if you can tell if it's popular or academic, this doesn't necessarily indicate the book's quality. Two easy ways to tell if you're dealing with an "academic" one (and by "academic" I mean that it had to go through some kind of peer-editing process by leading scholars in the field rather than the less-rigorous peer-editing done by non-specialists like copyeditors) is: 1, simply look to see if they have proper footnotes/endnotes (a lot of popular history books don't because it scares the general populous away. A good academic history book should really have anywhere between like 30-200 footnotes per chapter and these should be citing other scholars and not just the primary sources) and 2, look up the publisher (if it's published by a university press, then it's certainly academic). Neither of these methods are perfect though as some very good scholars chose to publish under non-academic publishers as academic publishers really don't pay anything. Another thing to do is to go on scholar.google.com and search the book and try to find a review or two that is published in a peer-reviewed journal. These are almost always by active academics who will be quite quick to point out if a book lacks the rigor and formalities of an academic-style history book. I hope that helps a bit!