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)