In Prayer and Laughter. Essays on Medieval Scandinavian and Germanic Mythology, Literature, and Culture.

n Prayer and Laughter. Essays on Medieval Scandinavian and Germanic Mythology, Literature, and Culture is the culmination of a lifelong study of the Middle Ages by Anatoly Liberman, an internationally acclaimed medievalist and linguist. It contains an introduction, 21 chapters of different length, a bibliography, and indexes. The book opens with a bird’s-eye view of the state of comparative mythology and proceeds with an analysis of the most important questions confronting a student of Germanic and Scandinavian religion. In his exposition, be it the characters of the Scandinavian gods, the creatures of lower mythology (such as dwarfs, trolls, and all kinds of devils), the nature of ancient rituals (such as initiation), shamanism, the origin of the runic alphabet, or the function of mythic animals, Liberman combines attention to detail with a broad view of the medieval world. His keen interest in the large picture is noticeable at every step, and he never loses sight of the methodological aspects the humanities pose (the use of structuralism beyond linguistics, among others), the idiosyncrasies of “the medieval mind,” and the limits of reconstruction