In the grand narrative arc of Norse mythology, as it is presented in Gylfaginning of the Prose Edda, time moves relentlessly towards Ragnarøkr, or the “Twilight of the Powers” as the term can be translated. Ragnarøkr is described as “endi veraldar” (the end of the world), and Hár, one of the aspects of the Óðinn-trinity that Gylfi encounters in Gylfaginning, describes in highly dramatic terms the great battle at Ragnarøkr in which, it seems, most of the prominent gods succumb along with their enemies. The battle is followed by a great conflagration in which earth and heaven burn and everything is destroyed. However, the end of everything also constitutes a new beginning. The earth rises green and beautiful from the sea. Some of the younger gods – Þórr's sons Móði and Magni and Óðinn's sons Baldr and Hǫðr – return. These godlings settle down at the plain Iðavǫllr where Ásgarðr once stood and pass time by discussing the events of the previous age. In the grass, they find the golden gaming pieces with which the previous generation of gods enjoyed themselves in the days of yore. Two humans have also survived the cataclysm by hiding in Hoddmímir's grove and living off the morning dew: “En af þessum mǫnnum kemr svá mikil kynslóð at byggvisk heimr allr” (Such great progenies come from these people that the entire world is populated). The old sun has also given birth to a daughter who traces the path of her mother.

During the first half of the twentieth century, crime fiction in Latin America was read largely in translation, and readers were exposed primarily to European classic detective novels, by Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle, for example, and hard-boiled US crime fiction by authors such as Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler. The Latin American crime novel emerges in the 1970s, with the exceptions of Mexico and Argentina where examples of native crime fiction date back to the 1940s. Most critics agree that Antonio Helu, Pepe Martinez de la Vega and Maria Elvira Bermudez, all of whom began publishing crime stories in the 1920s, were the founding authors of the Mexican crime genre. Some of the Mexican seminal crime novels that pushed the ever more transgressive genre towards new directions were Rodolfo Usigli's Ensayo de un crimen (Rehearsal for a Crime) (1944), Vicente Lenero's Los albañiles (The Builders) (1964) and Rafael Bernal's El complot mongol (The Mongolian Conspiracy) (1969). Despite their positive reception, the Mexican literary and social critic Carlos Monsivais could not fathom the relevance of crime novels in his native country. He famously asked ‘.A quien le importa quien mato a Roger Ackroyd […] si nadie sabe (oficialmente) quien fue responsable de la matanza de Tlatelolco? (Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd […] if nobody knows (officially) who was responsible for the killings at Tlatelolco?)’.

Hispanic Lyrics in the Late 1400s

The late fifteenth century is considered the beginning of the Modern period due to various events that changed the course of history: the invention of the movabletype printing press by Gutenberg in 1440, the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, and the discovery of America in 1492. In what is now Spanish territory, the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon were united in 1469 through the marriage of Isabel i and Fernando ii, the respective monarchs of each kingdom. During those final decades of the century, the literary landscape also experienced closures, transitions, and innovations, with poetry being no exception.

At that time, the population of the Iberian Peninsula could mainly be divided into two classes: on one hand, the upper class, led by the aristocracy and nobility, who were literate and were the only ones who had libraries with valuable manuscript books in their palaces. The religious guild also belonged to this class; they were avid readers, and one of their tasks was precisely to make manuscript copies of primarily devotional books. During that period, urban centres were few and mainly comprised the capitals of the kingdoms, with no significant population.

The other part of the population was the rural majority, consisting of peasants, farmers, shepherds, artisans, blacksmiths, and so on. They lacked formal education and were unable to read or write, resulting in their limited access to written culture. Nonetheless, they maintained a rich oral tradition encompassing legends, ballads, tales, songs, and riddles, which they would perform through singing and dancing during festivities or leisurely occasions. Within this repertoire, narrative ballads found widespread favor, in part because of their timely and relevant theme.

Introduction

Cuban crime fiction has often been considered a derivative subproduct that replicates foreign models. According to that traditional view, the history of the genre started with Edgar Allan Poe, continued with the English classics, and then arrived in the United States, where the hard-boiled developed; at some point, the genre reached Cuba, where the English or the American model were duplicated. As Allan et al argue, this approach is highly problematic as it ‘privileges and reproduces an Anglo-American perspective’ and fixes ‘crime fiction as one thing’, instead of perceiving it as ‘mutable, fluid, and transgressive’.

In the following chapter I aim to demonstrate that Cuban crime fiction has always strived to find a personal voice, that it cannot be considered a mere by-product, and that it has reinvented itself through various reincarnations in which tradition and innovation constantly interplay. I first discuss an embryonic phase in which the collective novel Fantoches (Puppets) and Lino Novas Calvo’s short stories are briefly considered. The chapter focuses then on the policial revolucionario (pro-revolutionary crime fiction), which in the 1970s and 1980S received extraordinarily generous support from cultural officials and the MININT (Ministerio del Interior, or Home Office) and the neopolicial, which flourished in the 1990s in line with similar genre developments in other parts of Latin America. The chapter concludes with a review of the recent tendency towards hybridisation.

The previous chapters have each, in various ways, explored attitudes, expectations, and concepts related to legates, insignia, and the adventus. What is uncovered therein is a complicated, contradictory, and everchanging picture. On the one hand, papal legates a latere were not merely among the most powerful lords within Latin Christendom; they were extensions of papal authority. Even kings sometimes felt that curial legates were meddling in their affairs. On the other hand, cardinal-legates were usually far away from their primary bases and central networks. They were dependent on their subjects to a greater degree than most other rulers, not being part of the local structures of power. The reception of a papal legate held both opportunities and dangers.

In the ensuing four chapters, I will explore how different authors viewed and represented the adventus of cardinal-legates a latere. This exploration necessitates a comprehensive study of each author, encompassing their life, experiences, and viewpoints. It is also essential to study the specific circumstances surrounding each legate and his mission, as these influenced the opinions of the commentators. Such an analysis will illustrate the remarkable diversity with which the commentators interpreted and presented the legatine adventus. While none of the commentators were immune to the authority radiating out from papal Rome, they reinterpreted the curial image within their own unique frameworks. The result is four different perspectives.

Readers of skaldic poetry will frequently have encountered kennings such as sverð-Freyr ‘sword-Freyr’ and Baldr skjaldar ‘Baldr of the shield’. Both of these kennings have the referent warrior or, more generally, man, and they reflect the general kenning type ‘god of weapon’. A comparable kenning model is used to refer to women in skaldic poetry, but here the determinant typically refers to some kind of valuable object, such as jewelry or gold, a piece of clothing worn by women, or something offered by women, usually drink. The underlying kenning models are thus ‘goddess of valuables’, ‘goddess of flax’ etc. As examples, one may mention steina Gná ‘the Gná of [precious] stones’ and lín-Gefn ‘flax-Gefn [Freyja]’, both woman. This remarkable usage of theonyms as basewords in kennings with the referent human, which will be referred to as theophoric kennings, may be seen as elevating humans and their activities out of the ordinary sphere and placing them within a grand cosmological framework. One particularly striking example of this is found in st. 14 of Einarr skálaglamm's Vellekla:

Before the live-action Transformers films that began in 2007, The Transformers: The Movie (1986) was the brand's only foray to the box office, and it featured star-studded voice work by Leonard Nimoy, Judd Nelson, Eric Idle, Robert Stack, and Orson Welles. Explorations of medievalism in the Transformers have been few and brief, and none has yet explored Transformers: The Movie.

To say that Adalbert Stifter was born on October 23, 1805, and died on January 28, 1868, may be technically true, but as with so many aspects of his life and work, details of this sort are both murky and misleading. The Ordnung—whether ethical order or petty orderliness—that ruled his existence and dominate his oeuvre is often but a front concealing deeper unrest, including chronic melancholy, self-destructive passion, and existential despair. Thus, to rectify the ignominy of his premarital conception and restore some semblance of order to his very origins, Stifter often tweaked his professional résumés and autobiographical accounts by shifting his birth year to 1806. (His parents, Magdalena Friepes and Johann Stifter, were wedded on August 13, 1805, hence just over two months before his birth.) The circumstances surrounding his death were likewise disorderly, if not messy. Around 1:00 am during the night of January 25–26, 1868, Stifter slit his throat with a razorblade yet did not expire from this self-inflicted wound until two days later. This act of (attempted) suicide might be interpreted as the culmination of Stifter's tumultuous life as lived between the lines of his self-corrective fiction and well over a century's worth of largely reverent literary-historical scholarship. It is, at any rate, an eerie enactment of a lamentation expressed through his analogue Augustinus in the fourth version of Die Mappe meines Urgroßvaters (My Great-Grandfather's Notebook) which was written during the final years of his life and published posthumously in 1939.

With the difficulties caused by Hinck settled satisfactorily, Henry's business recovered and went from strength to strength. We are able to follow the family's fortunes through Eliza's diary, which she continued for the rest of her long life.

In June 1848 their last child, a daughter, Anna, was born and the older children began their schooling at Mrs Smallwood's Academy in North End.

Henry's reading rooms flourished, moving in 1849 to new and presumably larger premises in Heath Street, which they shared with the library. He kept on the old rooms at New End for the younger boys, many of whom came to him in the evenings at home, and he continued with the Latin classes. Their annual parties for the reading room members were a regular fixture.

Their social life was as lively as ever. Eliza records an amusing encounter at one of their dinner parties in October 1849: ‘Harriett Martineau with the Gibsons, Sam and Dan, dined here, a very pleasant dinner till HM got to clairvoyance, when finding we none of us agreed with her she got rather hot. Is not it incredible how clever people can believe such nonsense.’

THE 1850s – YEARS OF LOSS

The 1850s were years of bereavement. When the duke of Wellington died in 1852, Cockerell gave them tickets for the lying in state and Eliza went to see his funeral. On the domestic front, Samuel Rogers had a terrible accident in 1850, aged eighty-seven, being knocked down by a coach in Berkeley Square and breaking his hip.