The article provides an overview of the contexts in which medieval authors use the “concordia discors” topos dating back to Roman poetry. Six such contexts are identified, in each of which the topos receives a special meaning. In cosmological contexts the topos reflects a situation of harmony between the elements, which are inherently opposite and even hostile to each other. In social contexts it expresses the idea of diversity preserved in a certain social unity (church, state, community of believers). In anthropological contexts the topos can be applied to the structure of the human body, the interaction of body and soul, the mixture of opposite feelings within the soul. In exegetical contexts the topos conveys the paradox of agreement between conflicting statements in the Holy Scriptures; in poetological contexts - the harmony of heterogeneous elements in a poetic work. In musicological contexts the topos describes the real phenomenon of the simultaneous sounding of several voices in polyphonic music (only in these contexts the topos has a literal, not metaphorical, meaning).

The allegorical thinking of a medieval man allowed him to consider the whole world around him as certain message in the form of signs concealing invisible reality. Familiar objects, plants, living things served as signs, letters, and words. In Medieval Latin hymnography, allegorical images of birds form a rather large group. Two words are used to express the most general concept of “bird”. They are avis and volucer. The former denotes a bird that is close in behaviour to man, while the latter denotes a bird as a living creature. The category of bird images is divided into three unequal parts: there are birds that occur only in positive contexts, including pigeon, dove and nightingale; other birds are found in both positive and negative contexts, such as raven, eagle, hunting birds; birds of prey and hawks occur only in negative contexts. The swan stands apart from all other birds, symbolizing a sinful but repentant soul. The image of a pigeon is the most frequent. It denotes spiritual grace, love, peace, meekness and is also a symbol of the soul. A turtledove, symbolizing chastity, often appears together with a dove. Nightingales are always associated with spring, song and Easter. Quite often we encounter a raven who can act both as a helper to the saints and as the embodiment of a demon. An eagle can act as a negative character, but also as a symbol of Christ and of the Evangelist St John. On the contrary, the hawks are always hostile to saints.

The paper is based on the Old Icelandic Knýtlinga saga written in the middle of the 13th century, the translation of which I am currently preparing for publication. “Icelandic literature of this age stands on the boundaries of folk art and individual authorship” [Gurevich 1972, p. 6]. The specific feature of the saga genre is that the saga gives the impression of an extremely objective narrative: its author does not tell anything about what he himself, or eyewitnesses, had not seen, does not describe the feelings and aspirations of his heroes, does not invade the text with his own comments and emotions. However, the objectivity of the sagas and the lack of writer intrusion into them are deliberate literary devices. The author, from his position in time and space, is present in this saga with his explanations, references to sources, and judgments. An indepth study of the saga text made it possible to identify all cases of the author's penetration into the narrative, which are divided into: 1) references to sources; 2) the author's remarks, assessments, comments on events and realities of the past; 3) compositional techniques. The author of Knýtlinga saga (probably the Icelander Olafr Pordarson, nicknamed the White Skald) is, without doubt, creatively active and organizes his narrative quite consciously.

This paper examines several sagas of Icelanders (Íslendingasögur) that are fully or partly based on recurring motif sequences, i.e. their narratives include repetitions of the same sequence of situations in different contexts.
Analysis shows that the function of repetitive structures can depend on their narrative environment, whether the narrative is hypotactic (tense and motivated) or paratactic (loose and episodic). Thus, while in a paratactic narrative the recurring motif sequence can help the narrator to organise his material, in a coherent hypotactic narrative it plays an aesthetic role and functions as a device for stressing the conflict. This approach can be used to differentiate Íslendingasögur in so far as structural repetition is concerned and also to shed light on the narrative art of written sagas.

The main aim of the present paper is to identify and analyse the examples of iconicity in skaldic poetry. In our paper, we understand iconicity to mean a skald's desire to achieve a non-verbal effect by verbal means. The poetic devices that will be considered here do not, by definition, possess universality, do not form any integral group based on their internal structure. It cannot be a trivial task to characterise such phenomena, for they are found on the boundary between what can be formalized and what is beyond it. Across the spectrum of those singular, sometimes unique and often almost occasional, means of shaping the poetic text we shall be looking mostly into those participating in the creation of immediate visual or acoustic images.

The aim of the article is to analyse the prose and poetic annals of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle concerning William the Conqueror. In the annals for 1066 in the Abingdon, Peterborough and Worcester manuscripts, the success of William's invasion of the British Isles is viewed in the context of Harold God-winson's victory over the joint forces of the Norwegian King Haraldr har8ra8i and Tostig Godwinson. The compiler of the Parker Manuscript treats the conquest as a great national disaster by putting it in the context of other tragic events of the year. Only the Peterborough and the Worcester manuscripts for 1066 mention William's coronation, and both refer to it in the context of direst consequences for the conquered nation and the King's broken promises. The analysis of the themes, rhetorical devices and stylistic organisation of the prose annals of the Peterborough manuscript for 1087 enables the author of the article to argue that they must have been composed under the influence of the homiletic tradition, in particular Wulfstan's sermons. The study of the style and meter of the poem about William the Conqueror inserted in the Peterborough manuscript shows that its colloquial vocabulary, simplified syntax, ornamental alliteration and plain rhyme go back to a lower poetic tradition than that of indigenous Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse.

The article discusses the features of the plot structure of the thirteenth-century Bavarian poem “Lohengrin” in connection with various sources, on which its creator relies. On the one hand, the plot of the poem is based on the that of the old French chanson de geste, “The Swan Knight”, known in Germanic lands by the eponymous version of Konrad of Wurzburg, and on the other hand, it goes back to the tradition of Wolfram von Eschen-bach's tale of chivalry, which connects the origin of the hero with the world of the Grail. The attraction of the creator of the Lohengrin poem to the tale of chivalry in the tradition of Wolfram von Eschenbach and to the story frame of the work is gradually replaced by the attraction of epic narrative models. This tendency can be explained by his having retained the function of the hero as a divine messenger, which does not permit the representation of the hero's feats in terms of adventure.

The article analyses the model of narrative prose collections, which took shape in France in the last third of the 16th century, and which is commonly referred to as “sundry stories and speeches” (it includes books by Noël du Fail, Nicolas de Cholières, Guillaume Bouchet). Typically regarded as an abortive branch of novelistics, these works emerged under the influence of the reception in French literature of dialogue in its various hypostases - humanist, and later platonic. Due to the work of translators and interpreters, this genre became the basis of a new form of dialogue, “academic conversation” (or devis). The second model for “sundry stories” was the collection of common places (loci communes): the humanist form, when adopted by city culture, not only served to popularise humanist knowledge, but also to determine a structure within which it was possible to accommodate almost all the short prose forms, from a proverb to a novella.