In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews a new translation of Scandinavia’s founding literary works
What connects the Jim Carrey film The Mask, the work of J. R. R. Tolkien, and the Thor movie franchise? The answer is that they all owe a debt to an anonymous collection of poems, known as the Poetic Edda, written around a thousand years ago in Scandinavia and now available in a gloriously new translation by Carolyne Larrington, complete with an introduction also by Larrington: The Poetic Edda (Oxford World’s Classics Hardback Collection)
The word edda is thought to mean ‘poetics’, and first appeared in the work of the thirteenth-century Icelandic author Snorri Sturluson, although the Poetic Edda is a separate group of tales from the prose works authored by Snorri. Indeed, like the numerous Anglo-Saxon poems, from ‘The Wanderer’ to Beowulf to ‘The Battle of Maldon’,