Powers of Darkness is an incredible literary discovery: In 1900, Icelandic publisher and writer Valdimar à?smundsson set out to translate Bram Stoker’s world-famous 1897 novel Dracula. Called Makt Myrkranna (literally, “Powers of Darkness†?), this Icelandic edition included an original preface written by Stoker himself. Makt Myrkranna was published in Iceland in 1901 but remained undiscovered outside of the country until 1986, when Dracula scholarship was astonished by the discovery of Stoker’s preface to the book. However, no one looked beyond the preface and deeper into à?smundsson’s story.In 2014, literary researcher Hans de Roos dove into the full text of Makt Myrkranna, only to discover that à?smundsson hadn’t merely translated Dracula but had penned an entirely new version of the story, with all new characters and a totally re-worked plot. The resulting narrative is one that is shorter, punchier, more erotic, and perhaps even more suspenseful than Stoker’s Dracula. Incredibly, Makt Myrkranna has never been translated or even read outside of Iceland until now.Powers of Darkness presents the first ever translation into English of Stoker and à?smundsson’s Makt Myrkranna. With marginal annotations by de Roos providing readers with fascinating historical, cultural, and literary context; a foreword by Dacre Stoker, Bram Stoker’s great-grandnephew and bestselling author; and an afterword by Dracula scholar John Edgar Browning, Powers of Darkness will amaze and entertain legions of fans of Gothic literature, horror, and vampire fiction.

Did you ever want to teach your kids the basics of Icelandic ? Learning Icelandic can be fun with this picture book. In this book you will find the following features: Icelandic Alphabets. Icelandic Words. English Translations.

From the Nobel Prize-winning Icelandic author: a magnificent novel that recalls Iceland's medieval epics and classics, set in the early twentieth century starring an ordinary sheep farmer and his heroic determination to achieve independence. • "A strange story, vibrant and alive…. There is a rare beauty in its telling." —Atlantic Monthly If Bjartur of Summerhouses, the book's protagonist, is an ordinary sheep farmer, his flinty determination to free himself is genuinely heroic and, at the same time, terrifying and bleakly comic. Having spent eighteen years in humiliating servitude, Bjartur wants nothing more than to raise his flocks unbeholden to any man. But Bjartur's spirited daughter wants to live unbeholden to him. What ensues is a battle of wills that is by turns harsh and touching, elemental in its emotional intensity and intimate in its homely detail. Vast in scope and deeply rewarding, Independent People is a masterpiece.

The set contains "the first complete, coordinated English translation of The sagas of Icelanders, forty in all, together with forty-nine of the shorter Tales of Icelanders."--Preface.

Icelandic is one of the oldest and most complex languages in the world. In this book, Alda Sigmundsdóttir looks at the Icelandic language with wit and humor, and how it reflects the heart and soul of the Icelandic people and their culture. Many of the Icelanders' idioms and proverbs, their meaning, and origins are discussed, as is the Icelanders' love for their language and their attempts to keep it pure through the ongoing construction of new words and terminology. There is a section on Icelandic curse words as well as Icelandic slang, which is mostly derived from English. Throughout, this book deconstructs Icelandic vocabulary, and the often-hilarious, almost naive, ways in which words are made. Among the fascinating topics broached in The Little Book of Icelandic: • The Language Committee: how Icelanders struggle to keep their language “pure” • Let's make a word!—How names for new things are constructed • Old letters, strange sounds: wrapping your tongue around the Icelanders’ tongue • $#*!%&!“#$%*, or how Icelanders curse • The missing dialects—why Icelandic has none • Which is the prettiest of all: contests to find the most lovely word in Icelandic (and the ugliest!) • Quintessential Icelandic words and phrases (the ones that describe the Icelanders like no others) • Useful phrases to impress your new Icelandic friends! • Klósett—the unexpected origin of the Icelandic word for toilet ... and so much more! This is a must-read book for anyone interested in the Icelandic people, their culture—and of course their language. Excerpt "Idioms and proverbs provide a unique insight into the soul of a nation. They say so much about a people’s history—the heartfelt, the tragic, the monumental, the proud. Icelandic has a vast number of idioms and proverbs that are a direct throwback to our nation’s past, especially idioms relating to the ocean, which is such a massive force in our nation's history. Many of them we use all the time without ever giving a thought to their origins. What follows is a random sampling—I hope you enjoy reading about them as much as I did. — Idiom: Eins og skrattinn úr sauðaleggnum Translation: Like Satan out of the sheep’s leg bone Meaning: Unexpectedly, out of the blue If someone suddenly appeared, especially someone I didn’t really want to see, I might say hann kom eins og skrattinn úr sauðaleggnum, literally “he appeared like Satan out of the sheep’s leg bone”. Where the affiliation between a sheep’s leg bone and the prince of darkness comes in I could not tell you. However, I can tell you that, in the old days, Icelandic children (being impoverished and everything) had no proper toys. Instead, they played with sheeps’ bones, each of which was assigned a role. The jawbones were the cows, the joints of the legs were the sheep, and the leg bones were the horses. So maybe folks were worried that Satan—being the crafty bugger that he was—would install himself in a sheeps’ leg bone when the kids were playing and then suddenly BOO! pop out and scare the bejeezus out of them. It’s just a theory. Incidentally, the use of this idiom is not confined to people—it is also successfully used to comment on unwanted happenings, as in: “Damn, this huge phone bill comes like Satan out of a sheep’s leg bone!”

This edition constitutes a reprint of Niels Ege’s English translation of Rasmus Rask’s prize essay of 1818, which appeared as volume XXVI in the Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague in 1993. The prize essay was published in Danish in 1818. In contrast to other works by Rask, notably his introduction to the study of Icelandic, it was never reissued until Louis Hjelmslev published a corrected version in Danish as part of his edition of Rask’s selected works. While Rask lived, a substantial part of the book was translated into German. The present work is, however, the only translation of the work into English and indeed into any other language. It is to be hoped that the field of the history of linguistics will hereby receive a new impetus to scrutinize the early beginnings of Indo-European scholarship. But, just as importantly, the translation of this work of genius reveals that even if details in the substantial treatment of the various branches of language have now been superseded, the theoretical parts of the book are still worth reading by all linguists for their own sake.

Morkinskinna ("rotten parchment"), the first full-length chronicle of the kings of medieval Norway (1030-1157), forms the basis of the Icelandic chronicle tradition. Based ultimately on an original from ca. 1220, the single defective manuscript was written in Iceland ca. 1275. The present volume, the first translation of Morkinskinna in any language, makes this literary milestone available to a general readership, with introduction and commentary to clarify its position in the history of medieval Icelandic letters. The book is designed to be used by readers with no knowledge of Icelandic. The translation is keyed to, and may be used in conjunction with, the existing diplomatic editions. Notes on the manuscript problems, as well as introductory and appended matter, augment the text. Above all, Kari Ellen Gade's edition of the skaldic stanzas provides a substantial initial step toward a future edition of the Icelandic text: Morkinskinna is the first large-scale repository of skaldic verse. Morkinskinna also includes many semi-independent tales that recount the adventures of individual Icelanders at the Norwegian court. These tales, with their often humorous or ironic inflections, shift the focus of the chronicle from the deeds of the kings to the Icelandic perception of Norwegian royalty.

“Drawing on historical events, including King Olaf’s reign in Norway and the burning of Chartres Cathedral, Laxness revises and renews the bloody sagas of Icelandic tradition, producing not just a spectacular historical novel but one of coal-dark humor and psychological depth.” – Publishers Weekly First published in 1952, Halldór Laxness’s Wayward Heroes offers an unlikely representation of modern literature. A reworking of medieval Icelandic sagas, the novel is set against the backdrop of the medieval Norse world. Laxness satirizes the spirit of sagas, criticizing the global militarism and belligerent national posturing rampant in the postwar buildup to the Cold War. He does that through the novel’s main characters, the sworn brothers Þormóður Bessason and Þorgeir Hávarsson, warriors who blindly pursue ideals that lead to the imposition of power through violent means. The two see the world around them only through a veil of heroic illusion: kings are fit either to be praised in poetry or toppled from their thrones, other men only to kill or be killed, women only to be mythic fantasies. Replete with irony, absurdity, and pathos, the novel more than anything takes on the character of tragedy, as the sworn brothers’ quest to live out their ideals inevitably leaves them empty-handed and ruined.

Nominated for the Icelandic Literary Prize, Aftershocks is a haunting novel-in-translation about Saga, a woman who comes to after an epileptic seizure on a sidewalk along busy Miklabraut Street. Her three-year-old son is gone. The last thing she remembers is a double-decker bus that no one else can confirm seeing. Over the following days, Saga's mind is beset by memories and doubts. What happened before her seizure? Who can she trust? And how can she make any sense of her emotions when her memory is so fragmented? Hailed as Audur Jonsdottir's "best-written novel so far," Aftershocks is a shocking and revelatory exploration of the blurred lines between fact and fiction, reality and imagination, and where mother ends and child begins.