The Elder or Poetic Edda, Commonly Known as Sæmund's Edda, Vol. 1 (Classic Reprint): The Mythological Poems - Couverture souple

Olive Bray

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1330351991 ISBN 13 : 9781330351994

Editeur : Forgotten Books, 2018

Synopsis

Explore the oldest Norse myths told with clarity and beauty. This edition presents the Mythological Poems as a thoughtful, near-literal translation by Olive Bray, aimed at readers who appreciate myth and old lore. It frames the poems with careful context, tracing their sources, dates, and the way they shape Scandinavian storytelling.

The introduction situates the Edda as a fountain of Germanic myth and poetic craft, and explains how the texts were gathered from medieval manuscripts. It discusses how later editors and scholars interpreted, corrected, and supplemented the verses to reveal their language, imagery, and beauty. The book is designed for metal readers who value the poetry itself as much as the history behind it.

- Read a faithful rendering of mythic lays that preserves their graphic, non-descriptive style.
- Learn how editors approached fragmentary pieces, textual gaps, and historical dating.
- See how Icelandic sagas, Snorri’s prose, and later scholarship illuminate the poems’ world.
- Gain appreciation for the myths’ enduring imagery and its influence on modern art and literature.

Ideal for readers of mythology and classical literature who seek a lucid entry into the old Norse world and its poetic language.

A propos du livre

Présentation de l'éditeur

Excerpt from The Elder or Poetic Edda, Vol. 1: Commonly Known as Sæmund's Edda

Thus, with a few modern additions, Seemund's Edda is an early collection of much older lays, some mythical and some heroic: the mythical lays only are given here, although, as regards style and authorship, no line of distinction can be drawn between them. Brief passages in prose have been added at some later period; the poems themselves belong to somewhat different dates, and show the work of different hands; some are fragmentary, and have suffered from re arrangement and interpolation; all are more or less obscure. They point back to lost traditions, forgotten creeds, and, it is suggested, a wealth of early poetic literature and mythology which are common to the Germanic race they lead us forward also to the more intelligible account of Snorri's prose book, which is the earliest commentary on the subject. This cannot rank with the primitive sources of tradition except in so far as it quotes old fragments from lost poems and strophes of those found in the Edda. Christian and foreign influence, the orderly mind of the scholar, the shaping hand of the artist have left their traces behind. In one or two cases we can even correct his misinterpretations where an earlier and perhaps grander myth, less understood in the narrow light of mediaeval learning than by the broader and more comparative knowledge of today, has become over grown by some later fairy tale. We are obliged, however, to rely on Snorri's version where all other explanation is wanting for gaps and obscurities in the poems; indeed there is little else to throw light upon the subject.

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Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Forgotten Books
• Date d'édition: 2018
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1330351991
• ISBN 13: 9781330351994
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 413
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