The Poetic Edda is a collection of Old Norse anonymous poems that Carolyne Larrington has translated. Includes Völuspá (Creation of the Norse world) and Þrymskviða (A tale of when Thor lost his hammer)

Commonly accepted by scholars as the best translation of The Poetic Edda

'She sees, coming up a second time,
Earth from the ocean, eternally green;
the waterfalls plunge, an eagle soars above them,
over the mountain hunting fish.'

After the terrible conflagration of Ragnarok, the earth rises serenely again from the ocean, and life is renewed. The Poetic Edda begins with The Seeress's Prophecy, which recounts the creation of the world and looks forward to its destruction and rebirth. In this great collection of Norse-Icelandic mythological and heroic poetry, the exploits of gods and humans are related. The one-eyed Odin, red-bearded Thor, Loki the trickster, the lovely goddesses and the giants who are their enemies walk beside the heroic Helgi, Sigurd the Dragon-Slayer, Brynhild the shield-maiden, and the implacable Gudrun. New in this revised translation is the quest poem The Lay of Svipdag and The Waking of Angantyr, in which a girl faces down her dead father to retrieve his sword.

Comic, tragic, instructive, grandiose, witty and profound, the poems of the Edda have influenced artists from Wagner to Tolkien and a new generation of video-game and film-makers.

384 pages
Paperback

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The Poetic Edda - Carolyne Larrington