Publisher's Synopsis
Despite the prominence of conflicts in all mythological and heroic literature, perceptions of these conflicts and their participants are shaped by different cultural influences. Socio-economic, political, and religious factors all influence how conflict is perceived and depicted in literary form. This volume provides the first comparative analysis to explore conceptions of conflict and otherness in the literary and cultural contexts of the early North Sea world by investigating the use of metaphor in Old English, Old Norse, and Early Irish poetry.
