Drawing on decades of research on Alexander literature from all over the world, this book is bound to become a medievalist's best companion. It studies Alexander romances from the East and the West in literary form and content.

This book is the history of an imaginary people — the Red Jews — in vernacular sources from medieval and early modern Germany. From the twelfth to the seventeenth century, German-language texts repeated and embroidered on an antisemitic tale concerning an epochal threat to Christianity, the Red Jews. This term, which expresses a medieval conflation of three separate traditions (the biblical destroyers Gog and Magog, the 'unclean peoples' enclosed by Alexander, and the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel), is a hostile designation of wickedness. The Red Jews played a major role in late medieval popular exegesis and literature, and appeared in a hitherto-unnoticed series of sixteenth-century pamphlets, in which they functioned as the medieval 'spectacles' through which contemporaries viewed such events as Turkish advances in the Near and Middle East. The Red Jews disappear from the sources after 1600, and consequently never found their way into historical scholarship.

Trolls lurk under bridges waiting to eat children, threaten hobbits in Middle-Earth, and invade the dungeons of Hogwarts. Often they are depicted as stupid, slow, and ugly creatures, but they also appear as comforting characters in some children’s stories or as plastic dolls with bright, fuzzy hair. Today, the name of this fantastic being from Scandinavia has found a wider reach: it is the word for the homeless in California and slang for the antagonizing and sometimes cruel people on the Internet. But how did trolls go from folktales to the World Wide Web? To explain why trolls still hold our interest, John Lindow goes back to their first appearances in Scandinavian folklore, where they were beings in nature living beside a preindustrial society of small-scale farming and fishing. He explores reports of actual encounters with trolls—meetings others found plausible in spite of their better judgment—and follows trolls’ natural transition from folktales to other domains in popular culture. Trolls, Lindow argues, would not continue to appeal to our imaginations today if they had not made the jump to illustrations in Nordic books and Scandinavian literature and drama. From the Moomins to Brothers Grimm and Three Billy Goats Gruff to cartoons, fantasy novels, and social media, Lindow considers the panoply of trolls that surround us and their sometimes troubling connotations in the contemporary world. Taking readers into Norwegian music and film and even Yahoo Finance chat rooms, Trolls is a fun and fascinating book about these strange creatures.

"The different cultures from which the middle ages drew its inspiration are represented: Cu Cuchulainn from the Celtic world, Apollonius of Tyre from Greek romance, Attila the Hun and Theodoric the Ostrogoth from the struggle of the Roman empire against the Barbarians. Each entry gives an outline of the story, how it spread through Europe, its modern retelling and appearances in art, and a selective bibliography."--Jacket.

What did Danes and Swedes in the Middle Ages imagine and write about Jews and Judaism? This book draws on over 100 medieval Danish and Swedish manuscripts and incunabula as well as runic inscriptions and religious art (c. 1200-1515) to answer this question. There were no resident Jews in Scandinavia before the modern period, yet as this book shows ideas and fantasies about them appear to have been widespread and an integral part of life and culture in the medieval North. Volume 1 investigates the possibility of encounters between Scandinavians and Jews, the terminology used to write about Jews, Judaism, and Hebrew, and how Christian writers imagined the Jewish body. The (mis)use of Jews in different texts, especially miracle tales, exempla, sermons, and Passion treaties, is examined to show how writers employed the figure of the Jew to address doubts concerning doctrine and heresy, fears of violence and mass death, and questions of emotions and sexuality. Volume 2 contains diplomatic editions of 54 texts in Old Danish and Swedish together with translations into English that make these sources available to an international audience for the first time and demonstrate how the image of the Jew was created in medieval Scandinavia.