CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE SOCIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE brings to students, researchers and practitioners in all of the social and language-related sciences carefully selected book-length publications dealing with sociolinguistic theory, methods, findings and applications. It approaches the study of language in society in its broadest sense, as a truly international and interdisciplinary field in which various approaches, theoretical and empirical, supplement and complement each other. The series invites the attention of linguists, language teachers of all interests, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, historians etc. to the development of the sociology of language.

Norway's Ole Bull led one of the most remarkable and celebrated lives of the nineteenth century. Colorful and charismatic, he was a composer and virtuoso violinist who won acclaim from Moscow to Cairo and from Canada to Cuba, associated with the cultural elite of his day, and promoted himself and the culture of Norway with a flair that rivaled P.T. Barnum's. A child prodigy, Bull was admitted to the Bergen orchestra as first violin at the age of eight. He soon was playing to admiring audiences across Europe and in North America, idolized on both sides of the Atlantic for his superb technical skill in improvisation and his ability to play the violin polyphonically. His success was marked by controversy, however. Though he was hailed as "the Paganini of the North", some critics labeled him a charlatan for his seemingly magic tricks on the violin. Ole Bull counted among his friends and admirers many of the great names of his era: Schumann and Liszt, Emerson and Wagner. Longfellow found in Bull a model for the musician in his Tales of a Wayside Inn. Hans Christian Andersen portrayed Bull as a veritable fairy prince in his "Episode of Ole Bull's Life", a characterization that in part inspired Ibsen's Peer Gynt. Although he spent most of his adult life abroad, Bull's love for and pride in his native land were always manifest. He was a staunch Norwegian nationalist, a tireless promoter of its native art and culture. Some of the concert improvisations for which he was celebrated were rooted in his native slatter (folkdance tunes). He modified his own instrument, flattening the bridge and making the bow longer and heavier, using the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle as a model. By mid-century, Bull wasable to realize his dream of establishing a national theater in Bergen. He gave Henrik Ibsen a start in theater management, employed the poet Bjornstjerne Bjornson, and promoted the music of Edvard Grieg. His attempt to establish a Norwegian colony in the United States, however, was unsuccessful. "Oleana", for which Bull purchased a land grant in Pennsylvania, failed in little more than a year because of his ineptitude in selecting land and managing financial enterprises. He made his home base, finally, in Norway, buying an island south of Bergen where he built for himself a fantastic palace of music. He never retired from the concert stage. Indeed, he performed in Chicago just three months before his death in 1880. The words of the poet Aasmund Vinje, "That surely would be a man to write a book about", have been taken to heart by authors Einar Haugen and his daughter Camilla Cai. In addition to giving life once again to a fascinating and flamboyant figure, this biography provides the first comprehensive listing of Bull's works (with full descriptions of all known sources), analyses of his compositions and their influences, and reviews of his performances.

Mit dem Ziel, den Leser an die Quellen heranzufuhren, gibt das Handbuch einen breiten UEberblick uber altnorwegische und altislandische Sprache und Literatur mit den Bereichen Handschriftenkunde, Textkritik, Runologie, Palaographie, Namen, Saga, Edda und Skaldik. Die Sprachgeschichte vom Altwestnordischen bis zum Mittelnorwegischen dokumentiert mit zahlreichen Beispielen auch das vernachlassigte Gebiet der Syntax. Das 2004 in Norwegen erschienene Buch wurde mit Blick auf ein deutsches Zielpublikum uberarbeitet und um weiterfuhrende Literatur erganzt. Fur Studienanfanger konzipiert, ist das Buch bewusst in einem leicht verstandlichen Stil gehalten, der dennoch nicht auf wissenschaftliche Terminologie verzichtet. Eine Fulle von Illustrationen und Faksimiles erleichtert zudem den Einstieg in die einzelnen Themenbereiche. Jedes der 10 Kapitel schliesst mit weiteren Lesevorschlagen und einer Auflistung der wichtigsten Primar- und Sekundarliteratur. Ein umfangreicher, mehrfach gegliederter Index tragt zur Benutzerfreundlichkeit bei.

Scattered in the North Atlantic, 300 miles off Iceland and 400 miles off Norway, lies the Faroe Islands archipelago. Despite centuries of foreign control, the Faroese have preserved their own distinctive identity. At present an internally self-governing dependency of Denmark, the Faroese have kept their culture alive in part by elaborating certain elements of that culture as badges of self-consciousness. The Ring of Dancers is composed a series of studies of aspects of Faroese life, language, and folk ways. A recurrent theme is the continuing reformulation of Faroese culture since the islands' Viking settlement in the ninth century. The Faroes are introduced as the Faroese themselves conceive them-as islands both joined and separated by the waterways around about them. The archipelago visualized in terms of such waterways as fjords, the points of the compass, "home" villages, and natural and political districts. The authors also discuss Faroese society as the Faroese conceived it around 1890, by an analysis of a folktale popular at the time about the Ashlad. Placed in its social context, the tale appears as a kind of folk editorial on changing values and changing times. Perhaps the most important symbol of Faroese identity is the Faroese language. Although it was not made a written language until the 1840s, and was not widely written or read until the 1890s, Faroese has replaced Danish as the islands' official language. In gaining its formal register, it has come to express a modern sense of what it means to be Faroese. The most spectacular Faroese custom, the grindadrap-the slaughter of schools of pilot whales and the celebration that follows the catch-typifies the continuity of the Faroes' anciently rooted identity. The image of the dansiringur, the "ring" of dancers singing ballads of wars and loves of heroic times-lingers throughout the book. The dansiringur, the authors contend, represents the Faroese adaptation of large forms to a land of closely known neighbors and landscapes, the complex inward turnings of Faroese culture, its tortuous sense of wholeness. The book ends by recounting interviews in Torshavn, the Faroese capital, with an artist, a journalist, a politician, and others. The Ring of Dancers vividly portrays the Faroese and makes clear why they are actively involved in preserving their culture as well as shaping it for the future.

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

VOYAGES TO VINLAND The first American saga VOYAGTTS TO VINLAND The first American saga newly translated and interpreted by EINAR HAUGEN Thompson Professor of Scandinavian Languages University of Wisconsin Illustrated by FREDERICK TRENCH CHAPMAN ALFRED A. KNOPF 1942 NEW YORK TO THE BRAVE NORSEMEN OF OUR DAY WHO SAIL THE COURSE OF LEIF AND ERIC FOR THE FREEDOM OF THEIR NATIVE SOIL FOREWORD The American public has too long been led to believe, in the words of one obscure writer, that the Norse claim to American discovery and exploration rests entirely upon tradition, poetic legends, and some slight circumstantial evidence This view has been encouraged by the fact that most of the books which have been available to the general public on this subject are uncritical and wildly specu lative. They use the known facts as springboards for imaginative flights and produce a justified reaction of skepticism in many of their readers. Those tomes, on the other hand, which present the facts solidly and without exaggeration are usually too learned or inaccessible for general reading. Through the agitation of various writ ers and Scandinavian groups in this country, a consider able interest has been awakened in the subject. But one is hard put to it when the request comes for further infor mation. There is genuine need for a book that will pre sent in readable form the text of the sagas dealing with the Norse discoveries, and sift out from the enormous schol arship of the subject those facts that seem well-established and give them a proper setting. It is hoped that this need may in some degree be met by the present book, which was made possible by a group of book-lovers and book makers in Chicago bandedtogether under the name of Holiday Press. The reader should be triply warned before entering upon the Saga of Finland. vi Foreword First of all this translation is a new one, made directly from the original manuscripts of the thirteenth and four teenth centuries as reproduced by A. M. Reeves. It was made for the members of the Holiday Press with the inten tion of rendering the old sagas as vividly and understand ably as possible to modern readers. Samuel Laings trans lation of a century ago, which appears in the Everymans Library, is antiquated Reeves translation of 1890 is stiff and unreadable G. Gathorne-Hardys of 1924 is readable, but distinctly British in idiom, besides being the property of the Oxford Press. A new translation could be justified only by the need for bringing before the American public a clear, concise, readable version in the modern American idiom. This saga is the earliest document of American history, and if for no other reason, it deserves an Ameri can version. But if it is done into modern American, one may ask, are we not violating the spirit of the medieval documents This might be true, if they had been a part of the romantic tradition of the Middle Ages. But the family sagas of Ice land are deeply rooted in the realism of everyday life. They are plain, unadorned tales told by simple folk con cerning authentic events in the lives of their own ances tors. Their style is straightforward and unvarnished, for they were spoken before they were written. Many trans lators have outrageously violated their spirit by turning them into romantic, medieval English, as if they were tales of King Arthur and his noble knights. The sagas come from another and humbler spherethey are the stories of sailors and adventurers, merchants and farmers, shepherds and fishermen, told with the humor and the simplicity of the common man. We who live today can best enter into their world if they are allowed to speak to us in the simple, direct accents of our own day. The trans Foreword vii later has not sought to vulgarize them by making them slangy or jocular, but has used modern and colloquial idioms wherever these seemed to render the spirit of the original...

Peder Victorious, the sequel to Rölvaag's massive Giants in the Earth, continues the saga of the Norwegian settlers in the Dakotas. Here again, years later, are all the sturdy pioneers of the earlier novel, Rölvaag's "vikings of the prairie"—Per Hansa's Beret and their children, Syvert Tönseten and Kjersti, and Sörine. The great struggle against the land itself has been won. Now there is to be a second struggle, a struggle to adapt, to become Americans.The development of the Spring Creek settlement in these years is manifested in the rebellious growing up of Peder Victorious. Peder is a beautiful and moving novel of youth and youth's self-discovery. It is the story, too, of Beret's pain and dismay at the Americanization of her children, what Rölvaag described as the true tragedy of the immigrants, who made their children part of a world to which they themselves could never belong.Out of the inevitable conflict between the first-generation American and his still Norwegian mother, Rölvaag built a powerful novel of personal growth, guilt, and victory.

For more than forty years, the Haugen Norwegian - English Dictionary has been regarded as the foremost resource for both learners and professionals using English and Norwegian. With more than 60,000 entries, it is esteemed for its breadth, its copious grammatical detail, and its rich idiomatic examples. In his introduction, Einar Haugen, a revered scholar and teacher of Norwegian to English speakers, provides a concise overview of the history of the language, presents the pronunciation of contemporary Norwegian, and introduces basic grammatical structures, including the inflection of nouns and adjectives and the declension of verbs. This title features more than 60,000 Norwegian words and their English equivalents. It includes more grammatical information than any other Norwegian - English dictionary. Both Bokmal and Nynorsk are included. It covers phonemic transcriptions. It provides extensive coverage and explanation of Norwegian idioms and word usage, including examples from standard and archaic speech, dialects, proverbs, literature, and professional texts. It contains common abbreviations, place names, proper names, and cultural references. It presents extensive coverage of verb phrases.