Notes are provided at the foot of each page, providing vital elucidation of the poems’ meaning without impinging on the main text, and an index of names provides a helpful digest of the Edda’s huge cast of characters.
With meticulous attention to type size and line length, the Norse and English texts are displayed side by side, the first line of each stanza aligned to facilitate comparison of original and translation. The Folio Society limited edition of the Poetic Edda presents the poems in a manner which is at once elegant, accessible and discreetly scholarly.
The Codex Regius was duly dubbed the Poetic Edda or Elder Edda, to distinguish it from Snorri’s ‘younger’ prose work. Bishop Brynjolf was convinced that this unassuming manuscript contained the hitherto lost source material for the great treatise on Norse poetry by the Icelandic historian Snorri Sturluson (1179– 1241), which its author had referred to as an edda or poetics. We do not know who composed them, or when, but ever since their rediscovery in the 17th and 18th centuries they have inspired intellectuals and artists in all media, for whom these poems held the tantalizing key to a shared Northern identity.Īll but a few of the poems in the Poetic Edda were preserved in a single manuscript known as the Codex Regius, copied by an unknown Icelandic scribe in the 1270s and presented by the Lutheran Bishop of Skálholt, Brynjolf Sveinsson, to the Danish court nearly four centuries later. Subtle, complex and suggestive, yet disarmingly direct in style, these tales of gods, heroes and monsters, of love, war, folly and deceit, inhabit a world more primal in character than any other corpus of European mythology.
It is a fascinating collection of poems that has stirred the imagination of artists such as Richard Wagner and Thomas Gray, and it will continue to inspire as it stands as a valuable and informative historical document and an entertaining set of stories of Norse mythology.The poems of the Old Norse collection known as the Poetic Edda respond to one of humankind’s greatest urges – the search for origins. Rediscovered in the seventeenth century and immediately celebrated for its broad portrait of northern pagan beliefs, "The Poetic Edda" is the most important source of Norse mythology and Germanic heroic legends in existence today. This body of poetry contains narratives on creation, the Doom of the Gods, the adventures of Thor and hostile giants, and many tales of love, family, heroes, and tragedy. It was preserved for hundreds of years in the medieval Codex Regius of Iceland. First passed down orally through innumerable generations of minstrels before the presence of Christianity in Scandinavia, and written down eventually by unknown poets, "The Poetic Edda" is a collection of mythological and heroic Old Norse poems.
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