Sagas and Space - Thinking Space in Viking Age and Medieval Scandinavia (Coursera)

Sagas and Space - Thinking Space in Viking Age and Medieval Scandinavia (Coursera)
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Sagas and Space - Thinking Space in Viking Age and Medieval Scandinavia (Coursera)
Explore with us the fascinating ways of thinking about space in Viking Age and Old Norse culture. Together we will discuss how space is conceptualised and depicted in diverse Old Norse genres and traditions.

Space is a basic category of human thought. Over the last decades it became a very productive scientific category, too. Thinking about spaces, places, locations, or landscapes covers a spectrum of meanings from the concrete and material through to the abstract and metaphorical.

In this course we explore various categories of space in the field of Old Norse culture. Together with international guest scholars from different fields we want to find out how mythological, heroic, historical, geographical spaces or landscapes look like in written and oral narratives, but also on picture-stones, runic inscriptions, paintings, woodcarvings and manuscripts. Another promising question could be to ask about the relationship between texts, images and maps and the process of mapping itself.