2006-09-13 Required Reading

The only other review featured is misleadingly lukewarm. To be sure this is, regarded critically and rather reductively, a 'late', post-Christian book, a conspectus of the old mythology (and prosody) by a single (very important and talented) mediaeval 'antiquarian'; nonetheless this remains, as everybody knows, one of THE essential, basic, texts (indeed was originally written as a 'text-book'; and I should add that the book in fact is constituted of three works, not one) for any study of Germanic and Scandinavian tradition(s) (and that includes English!). It is absolutely and uneluctably required, fundamental, reading for anybody interested in any way in Old Norse (and, at that, comparative, especially comparative Indo-European) mythology and poetics (including technical prosody; I am tempted to hazard that Snorri's remain the best manuals on skaldic verse). If you are, you cannot do without 'The Prose Edda'.

The reader or student seriously interested in the Scandinavian mythological/legendary poetic (as distinguished from Icelandic quasi-novelistic family-historical) material should also run to earth 'The Poetic Edda' (a.k.a. 'Elder Edda'), probably in Hollander's translation (Univeristy of Texas; poetically better than Larrington's from Oxford), 'The Saga of the Volsungs' (probably Byock, Penguin Classcis), and 'The Saga of Hrolf Kraki' (ditto). (Ideally these should be read with the 'Ynglinga-Saga', also by Snorri [it forms the mythological prelude to his enormous chronicle-history 'Heimskringla', and unhappily does not seem available separately], Saxo Grammaticus' 'Gesta Danorum' [unwieldy and prolix, demands a lot of winnowing and sifting, but the alternative account to balance and compensate for Snorri's], perhaps the sagas of Gautrek, Heidrek, and that of Grettir; and our Old English/'Anglo-Saxon' 'Beowulf' and the other surviving Old English heroic poems [e.g. in accessible bibliographical terms, in Alexander's 'Earliest English Poems'] which share many family ties with the Old Norse material.)

The mythological section of Snorri's work happens also to be, merely 'aesthetically', a hauntingly beautiful and deeply impressive piece of mythopoeia, which I cannot but think will be read with delight and awe by anybody at all who likes that kind of thing, from, say, the Grimms, to the 'Kalevala', to Tolkien (i.e. anybody who has an imagination and likes a good story).

This rendering is satisfactory, but my 'rating' here is not made against any other Englishings on offer, which I have not yet seen.