Jennie Hall
Viking Tales (1902), her retelling of fifteen Norse saga stories for elementary readers, which AmblesideOnline assigns in Years 1 and 2 of its Charlotte Mason curriculum.
Biography
Jennie Hall (1875 to 1921) taught English and history at the Francis W. Parker School in Chicago, the school named for the educator Francis Wayland Parker. She wrote for elementary classrooms rather than for scholars, and her books retell ancient and medieval material as narrative, with dialogue and household detail carrying the history.
Rand McNally of Chicago published her first book, Four Old Greeks: Achilles, Herakles, Dionysos, Alkestis, in 1901, then Viking Tales in 1902, The Story of Chicago in 1911, and Weavers and Other Workers in 1917. Little, Brown issued Men of Old Greece in 1907, George G. Harrap published Life in Ancient Greece in 1913, and Silver, Burdett brought out Our Ancestors in Europe: An Introduction to American History in 1916.
Viking Tales gathers fifteen stories from the Norse sagas, illustrated by Victor R. Lambdin, and closes with two sections addressed to the adult reader: About Norse Life, a set of notes on feast halls, drinking horns, and Norse naming customs, and Suggestions to Teachers, which prints the year's history course then used by the fourth grade of the Chicago Normal School. Buried Cities: Pompeii, Olympia, Mycenae appeared from Macmillan in 1922, the year after her death.
