CC Spin #44: The Poetic Edda

 The Poetic Edda: Stories of the Norse Gods and Heroes, trans. by Jackson Crawford

This was fun!  I read a couple of poems per day.  These are the oldest sources we have for information about the Norse gods, and they're kind of cryptic.  It helps to have a little bit of context and background information, which Crawford provides, but not too much; he doesn't overdo it.

The first poems are mostly about Thor, Odin, and Loki.  In one, Loki shows up and creatively insults everyone, and they just have to put up with it because Odin has sworn to always drink with Loki.  (The swearing of oaths seems to be a popular, and dangerous, pastime while drinking.)  Odin goes in disguise to a giant and they have a contest of wisdom.  One poem is just good advice from Odin.  In another, Odin and Thor insult each other across a ford.  I particularly liked a complicated poem about "the escape of Voland the smith," who ended up as Wayland in Britain.  There's a nice prophesy about Ragnarok too, in which Odin revives a dead witch and forces her to tell him about what will happen.

Heroic poems comprise the second half, and there are several about Helgi, but after that it's all about the adventures of Sigurth (Sigurd) and his extremely complex family relationships.  Even though I've read about the Volsungs and so on several times, I just cannot keep all those folks straight, and these poems do not help.  Guthrun, Sigurth's wife, ends up with three husbands,* several sons, and one daughter, and she watches all of them get killed -- often while killing each other.  Brynhild, who wanted to marry Sigurth but was tricked into marrying Gunnar, has a special poem in which she goes to Hel in her funeral cart.

*Guthrun's second husband is Attila the Hun, Brynhild's brother.  Attila made his way from history into legend!

You'll notice a lot of names that sound familiar from Tolkien, because he mined these stories for names and places.  Pretty much all of his dwarf names come from here.  Mirkwood is a legendary huge forest to the south, with the Huns on the other side.  

The translator, Jackson Crawford, started off as a professor of Scandinavian Studies and taught at a few places (including my own alma mater, and since I was a comp lit major with my minor in Scandi languages, I took classes in that department, but that must have been well before his time; I think he is probably younger than I am).  But these days he's a resident scholar and spends a lot of his time teaching about Norse literature and mythology on YouTube, where he cultivates a cowboy kind of persona.  I've enjoyed several of his videos, although the buffalo, hat, and cigars fail to move me.  He's a perfectly fine scholar though as far as I can tell, doesn't pander to his watchers with nonsense, and YouTube does make you do that sort of thing.

Finally, I was somewhat frustrated to note that he's just come out with a second edition of this book, which adds a few poems from other sources that were previously not available in English.  So I'll have to get hold of that and read those extras.  My copy is the first edition.

I'm happy with my Spin book, though!  A great way to kick off the summer.