Terry Gunnell
Biographic Data
| ID | 343739 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Terry Gunnell |
| GIVEN NAMES | Terry |
| FAMILY NAME | Gunnell |
| SIGNATURE | GUNNELL T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Iceland |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6144-3006 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 7 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
The Revenge of the Rejected: The Rise, Fall and Background Context of Icelandic Beliefs in Supernatural Family Followers
Buildings in Iceland in the past tended to have a limited lifespan resulting in the fact that beliefs in ghosts or spirits associated with buildings also used to be limited. Instead of such beliefs, Iceland has numerous legends about spirits that attach themselves to particular families, causing a wide range of problems over a number of generations. Interestingly enough, such beliefs do not seem to be encountered in neighbouring countries. This a…
Contact with the Dead in Iceland Past and Present: The Findings of a New Survey of Folk Belief and Experiences of the Supernatural in Iceland
This article focuses on the figures concerning experiences of and beliefs in possible contacts with the dead amongst Icelandic people that have come to light from three national surveys that were undertaken in 1974, 2006-2007, and 2023, focusing in particular on the most recent figures. It starts by reviewing the earliest evidence of such beliefs in Iceland (expressed in both Old Icelandic literature and Icelandic folk legends), which evidently l…
Three Women, Three Roots, Three Times, One Tree: Some Thoughts for Potential Gardeners
This article considers the potential connections between the three nornir mentioned in Vǫluspá and the three roots of Yggdrasill mentioned in Grímnismál st. 31 and Gylfaginning which, like the nornir themselves, may have been seen (by some) as being connected with time. This raises the possibility that, at some point and for some people, the jǫtnar were closely connected with the world of death and the underworld (which, for some, may have been a…
Emily Lyle’s Jubilee
On December 19, Dr Emily Lyle, Honorary Fellow at the Department of Celtic and Scottish Studies, in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, University of Edinburgh, celebrated her ninetieth birthday. Emily is a prominent folklorist, a researcher of ritual calendars, myths, astronomy, and cosmology, a semiotician and a typologist, a connoisseur of Scottish folklore and culture, just to mention a few of her fields of interest. To honour …
The Goddesses in the Dark Waters
John Miles Foley's World of Oralities: Text, Tradition, and Contemporary Oral Theory
This collection brings together newly commissioned and cutting-edge essays on oral text and tradition ranging from the ancient and medieval world to the present day by a leading group of European and North American oral theorists. Using a range of materials including the Bible, Greek epic, Beowulf, Old Norse and Old English riddles, and medieval music, the contributors collectively work to refine, challenge, and further advance contemporary Oral …
Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe
This encyclopedia documents the presence and impact of nationalized cultural consciousness in European nationalism. It tracks how intellectuals, historians, philologists, novelists, poets, painters, folklorists, and composers, in an intensely collaborative transnational network, articulated the national identities and aspirations that would go on to determine European history and politics, with effects that are still felt today. Edited by Joep Le…
A Handbook to Eddic Poetry: Myths and Legends of Early Scandinavia
This is the first comprehensive and accessible survey in English of Old Norse eddic poetry: a remarkable body of literature rooted in the Viking Age, which is a critical source for the study of early Scandinavian myths, poetics, culture and society. Dramatically recreating the voices of the legendary past, eddic poems distil moments of high emotion as human heroes and supernatural beings alike grapple with betrayal, loyalty, mortality and love. T…
Eddic performance and eddic audiences
What exactly was an eddic poem? The first thing that can be stated with any certainty is that it was not what it has become – in other words, a poem written in ink on parchment or paper, gathered together in a book with other poems in a format designed essentially for silent, private reading, in which all the stanzas can be quickly viewed side by side and reread at will. Prior to the early thirteenth century (when Grímnismál, Vafþrúðnismál, and V…
Bo Almqvist (1931–2013)
The sad death of Bo Almqvist in Dublin on Saturday, 9 November 2013 marks the quiet end of a unique era in the history of folkloristics in northern Europe, a period in which Scandinavian folklorist
The Carrying Stream Flows On: Celebrating the Diamond Jubilee of the School of Scottish Studies
The School of Scottish Studies came into being at the University of Edinburgh in 1951 as a research unit dedicated to ‘the study and conservation of the folk culture of Scotland’ when Professor Angus McIntosh was enabled to turn a vision which he and others had long held into reality. In that year Calum Iain Maclean was seconded from the Irish Folklore Commission to continue his collecting in Scotland, while other pioneers such as Hamish Henderso…
The Nordic Apocalypse: Approaches to Vǫluspá and Nordic Days of Judgement
This book, with roots in a conference held in Iceland in May 2008, contains a series of articles reflecting modern approaches to the text, context, and performance of the Old Norse poem Vǫluspá, perhaps the best known and most discussed of all the Eddic poems. Rather than attempting to cover Eddic or Skaldic poetry as a genre, the main aim of this book is to present an overview of the ‘state of the art’ with regard to one particular Eddic poem. I…
Nordic Apocalypse: Approaches to Voluspand Nordic Days of Judgement
The Significance of the Work and Collections of the School of Scottish Studies from a Scandinavian Perspective
The School of Scottish Studies came into being at the University of Edinburgh in 1951 as a research unit dedicated to ‘the study and conservation of the folk culture of Scotland’ when Professor Angus McIntosh was enabled to turn a vision which he and others had long held into reality. In that year Calum Iain Maclean was seconded from the Irish Folklore Commission to continue his collecting in Scotland, while other pioneers such as Hamish Henderso…
Daisies Rise to Become Oaks. The Politics of Early Folktale Collection in Northern Europe: Research Article
It is well known that the first collections of folktales played a key role in the “creation” of national identity in many nations in the mid-nineteenth century. This wider political role is often most apparent in the introductions written to accompany these early volumes, which give readers guidance as to how the material contained in the volumes should be understood. This article compares several such introductions from Northern Europe, namely t…
Introduction Performative Stages of the Nordic World
Sagnagrunnur: A New Database of Icelandic Folk Legends in Print
One of the main problems with researching "traditional" Icelandic legends (apart from the fact that only about 3 % of them are available to people who cannot read Icelandic) is that up until very recently there has been no archive of folk legend material in Iceland. This has meant that the only way to find material on legends of a particular type, gender and job-related distribution of storytellers, distribution of legends, local beliefs and so o…
Legends and Landscape in the Nordic Countries
This article aims to show how folk legends can serve as useful source materials for social historians interested in understanding the world-view of individuals in earlier centuries. It underlines how such legends provide access to the minds of storytellers, human geography, and local belief systems, offering, in a sense, maps of the local geographical, mental, social and spiritual surroundings inhabited by the storytellers. In addition to providi…
How Elvish were the Álfar?
This collection of essays examines the ‘Grimmian Revolution’, the paradigm shift in the humanities that came with the publication of Jacob Grimm’s Deutsche Grammatik. In doing so, it honours T. A. Shippey, who has been a leading figure in reconsidering the contributions of the Old Philology and its impact on the humanities, particularly the rediscovery of the ancient languages and literatures of Northern Europe; the role this has played in the cr…
Narratives, Space and Drama: Essential Spatial Aspects Involved in the Performance and Reception of Oral Narrative
In the past, oral narrative tended to be regarded as a two-dimensional phenomenon largely confined to the form of the spoken or (later) printed word. Over the last twenty years, however, oral narratives have gradually gained "thickness" in the eyes of folklore scholars who have increasingly demanded that more attention be paid to the social and personal contexts that gave rise to these narratives. This present article reviews the ways in which th…
Islanders and Water-Dwellers
Legends and Landscape in the Nordic Countries
This article aims to show how folk legends can serve as useful source materials for social historians interested in understanding the world-view of individuals in earlier centuries. It underlines how such legends provide access to the minds of storytellers, human geography, and local belief systems, offering, in a sense, maps of the local geographical, mental, social and spiritual surroundings inhabited by the storytellers. In addition to providi…
Daisies Rise to Become Oaks. The Politics of Early Folktale Collection in Northern Europe: Research Article
It is well known that the first collections of folktales played a key role in the “creation” of national identity in many nations in the mid-nineteenth century. This wider political role is often most apparent in the introductions written to accompany these early volumes, which give readers guidance as to how the material contained in the volumes should be understood. This article compares several such introductions from Northern Europe, namely t…
Sagnagrunnur: A New Database of Icelandic Folk Legends in Print
One of the main problems with researching "traditional" Icelandic legends (apart from the fact that only about 3 % of them are available to people who cannot read Icelandic) is that up until very recently there has been no archive of folk legend material in Iceland. This has meant that the only way to find material on legends of a particular type, gender and job-related distribution of storytellers, distribution of legends, local beliefs and so o…
Islanders and Water-Dwellers
Narratives, Space and Drama: Essential Spatial Aspects Involved in the Performance and Reception of Oral Narrative
In the past, oral narrative tended to be regarded as a two-dimensional phenomenon largely confined to the form of the spoken or (later) printed word. Over the last twenty years, however, oral narratives have gradually gained "thickness" in the eyes of folklore scholars who have increasingly demanded that more attention be paid to the social and personal contexts that gave rise to these narratives. This present article reviews the ways in which th…
How Elvish were the Álfar?
This collection of essays examines the ‘Grimmian Revolution’, the paradigm shift in the humanities that came with the publication of Jacob Grimm’s Deutsche Grammatik. In doing so, it honours T. A. Shippey, who has been a leading figure in reconsidering the contributions of the Old Philology and its impact on the humanities, particularly the rediscovery of the ancient languages and literatures of Northern Europe; the role this has played in the cr…
Legends and Landscape in the Nordic Countries
This article aims to show how folk legends can serve as useful source materials for social historians interested in understanding the world-view of individuals in earlier centuries. It underlines how such legends provide access to the minds of storytellers, human geography, and local belief systems, offering, in a sense, maps of the local geographical, mental, social and spiritual surroundings inhabited by the storytellers. In addition to providi…
Daisies Rise to Become Oaks. The Politics of Early Folktale Collection in Northern Europe: Research Article
It is well known that the first collections of folktales played a key role in the “creation” of national identity in many nations in the mid-nineteenth century. This wider political role is often most apparent in the introductions written to accompany these early volumes, which give readers guidance as to how the material contained in the volumes should be understood. This article compares several such introductions from Northern Europe, namely t…
Introduction Performative Stages of the Nordic World
Sagnagrunnur: A New Database of Icelandic Folk Legends in Print
One of the main problems with researching "traditional" Icelandic legends (apart from the fact that only about 3 % of them are available to people who cannot read Icelandic) is that up until very recently there has been no archive of folk legend material in Iceland. This has meant that the only way to find material on legends of a particular type, gender and job-related distribution of storytellers, distribution of legends, local beliefs and so o…
The Carrying Stream Flows On: Celebrating the Diamond Jubilee of the School of Scottish Studies
The School of Scottish Studies came into being at the University of Edinburgh in 1951 as a research unit dedicated to ‘the study and conservation of the folk culture of Scotland’ when Professor Angus McIntosh was enabled to turn a vision which he and others had long held into reality. In that year Calum Iain Maclean was seconded from the Irish Folklore Commission to continue his collecting in Scotland, while other pioneers such as Hamish Henderso…
The Nordic Apocalypse: Approaches to Vǫluspá and Nordic Days of Judgement
This book, with roots in a conference held in Iceland in May 2008, contains a series of articles reflecting modern approaches to the text, context, and performance of the Old Norse poem Vǫluspá, perhaps the best known and most discussed of all the Eddic poems. Rather than attempting to cover Eddic or Skaldic poetry as a genre, the main aim of this book is to present an overview of the ‘state of the art’ with regard to one particular Eddic poem. I…
Nordic Apocalypse: Approaches to Voluspand Nordic Days of Judgement
The Significance of the Work and Collections of the School of Scottish Studies from a Scandinavian Perspective
The School of Scottish Studies came into being at the University of Edinburgh in 1951 as a research unit dedicated to ‘the study and conservation of the folk culture of Scotland’ when Professor Angus McIntosh was enabled to turn a vision which he and others had long held into reality. In that year Calum Iain Maclean was seconded from the Irish Folklore Commission to continue his collecting in Scotland, while other pioneers such as Hamish Henderso…
Bo Almqvist (1931–2013)
The sad death of Bo Almqvist in Dublin on Saturday, 9 November 2013 marks the quiet end of a unique era in the history of folkloristics in northern Europe, a period in which Scandinavian folklorist
A Handbook to Eddic Poetry: Myths and Legends of Early Scandinavia
This is the first comprehensive and accessible survey in English of Old Norse eddic poetry: a remarkable body of literature rooted in the Viking Age, which is a critical source for the study of early Scandinavian myths, poetics, culture and society. Dramatically recreating the voices of the legendary past, eddic poems distil moments of high emotion as human heroes and supernatural beings alike grapple with betrayal, loyalty, mortality and love. T…
Eddic performance and eddic audiences
What exactly was an eddic poem? The first thing that can be stated with any certainty is that it was not what it has become – in other words, a poem written in ink on parchment or paper, gathered together in a book with other poems in a format designed essentially for silent, private reading, in which all the stanzas can be quickly viewed side by side and reread at will. Prior to the early thirteenth century (when Grímnismál, Vafþrúðnismál, and V…
Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe
This encyclopedia documents the presence and impact of nationalized cultural consciousness in European nationalism. It tracks how intellectuals, historians, philologists, novelists, poets, painters, folklorists, and composers, in an intensely collaborative transnational network, articulated the national identities and aspirations that would go on to determine European history and politics, with effects that are still felt today. Edited by Joep Le…
The Goddesses in the Dark Waters
John Miles Foley's World of Oralities: Text, Tradition, and Contemporary Oral Theory
This collection brings together newly commissioned and cutting-edge essays on oral text and tradition ranging from the ancient and medieval world to the present day by a leading group of European and North American oral theorists. Using a range of materials including the Bible, Greek epic, Beowulf, Old Norse and Old English riddles, and medieval music, the contributors collectively work to refine, challenge, and further advance contemporary Oral …
Three Women, Three Roots, Three Times, One Tree: Some Thoughts for Potential Gardeners
This article considers the potential connections between the three nornir mentioned in Vǫluspá and the three roots of Yggdrasill mentioned in Grímnismál st. 31 and Gylfaginning which, like the nornir themselves, may have been seen (by some) as being connected with time. This raises the possibility that, at some point and for some people, the jǫtnar were closely connected with the world of death and the underworld (which, for some, may have been a…
Emily Lyle’s Jubilee
On December 19, Dr Emily Lyle, Honorary Fellow at the Department of Celtic and Scottish Studies, in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, University of Edinburgh, celebrated her ninetieth birthday. Emily is a prominent folklorist, a researcher of ritual calendars, myths, astronomy, and cosmology, a semiotician and a typologist, a connoisseur of Scottish folklore and culture, just to mention a few of her fields of interest. To honour …
Contact with the Dead in Iceland Past and Present: The Findings of a New Survey of Folk Belief and Experiences of the Supernatural in Iceland
This article focuses on the figures concerning experiences of and beliefs in possible contacts with the dead amongst Icelandic people that have come to light from three national surveys that were undertaken in 1974, 2006-2007, and 2023, focusing in particular on the most recent figures. It starts by reviewing the earliest evidence of such beliefs in Iceland (expressed in both Old Icelandic literature and Icelandic folk legends), which evidently l…
The Revenge of the Rejected: The Rise, Fall and Background Context of Icelandic Beliefs in Supernatural Family Followers
Buildings in Iceland in the past tended to have a limited lifespan resulting in the fact that beliefs in ghosts or spirits associated with buildings also used to be limited. Instead of such beliefs, Iceland has numerous legends about spirits that attach themselves to particular families, causing a wide range of problems over a number of generations. Interestingly enough, such beliefs do not seem to be encountered in neighbouring countries. This a…
History (15 works) · Art (12 works) · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies (9 works) · Literature (8 works) · Archaeology (7 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Aesthetics (6 works) · Folklore (5 works) · Geography (5 works)