TY - JOUR
AU - Larrington, Carolyne
AB -  Myth in Early Northwest Europe, ed. Stephen O. Glosecki (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, in association with Brepols, 2007; pp. xlii + 338. £33). This volume takes its origins from the Fifth Brook Symposium on `Language and Myth', held at Manchester University in 2001. Among its dedicatees is Phill Pulsiano, a scholar in early Germanic literature, who died young, some years ago, and it is sobering to note the publishers' back-cover tribute to Stephen Glosecki, the editor of this volume, who did not live to see its publication. The book starts with Glosecki's lively and, in places, poetic introduction both to the history of mythological theory over the last two hundred years and to the individual contributions here. Thickly qualified by long footnotes, this is an exemplary introduction, emphasising that, while myth and ritual are `elementally intertwined' (p. xv), one is not the source of the other. Glosecki suggests that myths are essentially `shifting micro-stories' (p. xxvii), a chain of motifs rather than narratives, always refracting an unreconstructable, and perhaps never existent, prior version. John Niles's chapter argues that myths tell truth through lies, linking the individual and the social. Craig Davis continues the 
TI - Myth in Early Northwest Europe
JF - The English Historical Review
DO - 10.1093/ehr/cen376
DA - 2009-02-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/myth-in-early-northwest-europe-jI5DbH6YLm
SP - 114
EP - 116
VL - CXXIV
IS - 506
DP - DeepDyve
ER -