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Cargando... Monstrous Fishes and the Mead-Dark Sea : Whaling in the Medieval North Atlantic (2008)por Vicki Ellen Szabo
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Medieval people viewed whales in complex and contradictory ways, from marvelous to monstrous to mundane, heaven-sent or hell-bent. Despite this, whales are conspicuous in their absence from most historical and archaeological dialogues on the Middle Ages. Drawing upon a wealth of legal, literary and material evidence, this work details the ways in which whales were sought out and scavenged at sea and shore, fought over in legal and physical battles, and prized for meat, bone and fuel. Using Old Norse sagas, laws and material culture, alongside comparative historical and ethnographic evidence, Monstrous Fishes and the Mead-Dark Sea reexamines the value of whales in the medieval North Atlantic world. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)639.2Technology Agriculture & related technologies Hunting, fishing, conservation Commercial fishing, whaling, sealingClasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio:
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Unfortunately (or usefully?) Szabo's writing tends towards the studiously accurate. Her writing picks up only in her acknowledgements (sadly typical for academic writing: would that acknowledgements style became more general, and I accuse myself here too) and in her epilogue, which imagines a typical medieval Nordic farm and what follows when a whale is discovered dead on the shore. This careful accuracy is most evident in her use of literary evidence. For her, it's just one more set of data, and her belief in the facts of her data leads her, generally, to measure the sagas or the Physiologus or Albert the Great &c against what we know of cetology. This has its uses, but perhaps we ought to distinguish between interdisciplinary sources and interdisciplinary interpretations: for her interpretations are all of the same sort.
To look into further: the whale steeds of the legendary sagas, ridden into battle by troll women; the Franks casket, one of whose inscriptions has the whale bone speak of its own death [cf. the oyster and parchment Anglo-Saxon riddles, or the Carmina Burana Lament of the Roast Swan:]; the post whale hunt dance of the Feroese to stave off 'pilot whale psychosis'; and the geographic writings of Al-Sharīf al-Idrīs, who traveled to Britain in the twelfth century and was horrified by what he saw.
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