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    The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún
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    The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún
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    The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún
    Ebook341 pages3 hours

    The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún

    By J. R. R. Tolkien and Christopher Tolkien

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateMay 5, 2009
    ISBN9780007323074
    Unavailable
    The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún
    Author

    J. R. R. Tolkien

    J.R.R.Tolkien (1892-1973) was a distinguished academic, though he is best known for writing The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, plus other stories and essays. His books have been translated into over 80 languages and have sold many millions of copies worldwide.

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    Reviews for The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún

    4/5

    225 ratings13 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Mostly Christopher Tolkien's background and context to his father's versions of these two lays. Fine, but fairly forgettable.
    • 4/5
      I admit I liked the Fall of Arthur best.
    • 4/5
      Tolkien's scholarship is always pretty impressive, even if it's out of date, now. Reading the bits of his lectures pieced together by his son is very interesting, and I rather wish I could attend them. (If I could be a member of Connie Willis' time travelling department of historians, I'd go visit Tolkien if I could.)

      It's also amazing how much work he did on keeping the metre and language of Old Norse in a modern English version of the stories. The verse itself is probably the main attraction for readers. The story can be difficult to follow, but I think once you get into the swing of it -- or if you know the basic ideas already -- it's no harder to follow than a translation of The Saga of the Volsungs, though it is obviously in verse whereas that is mostly prose.
    • 3/5
      When The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún first came out, I was in two minds whether to buy it or not — after all I have the Eddas and the Sagas in Danish as well as other books on Norse Mythology that recounts the same saga both in prose and poetic forms (one of them with comments), so I thought I was fairly well covered. In the end I decided that, being on a limited Tolkien budget, my money was better spent elsewhere. Then I was so incredibly lucky that I won a copy of the Houghton Mifflin paperback edition from the Tolkien Collector's Guide, for which I am immensely grateful. Though the book arrived fairly quickly, I did not have time to start reading it until well into this year, and so I finished it on the train when I was going to camp the day before Palm Sunday. (I don't know why I haven't published this earlier — but for a few corrections, it's been done for a while.)First let me say that I certainly did enjoy the book very much, and the well-informed commentary by Christopher Tolkien taught me much, that had previously been unknown to me about both the fornyrðislag and the complex tradition of this whole cycle of legends. I recently saw the Danish edition in a bookshop and leafed through it — but I was horrified to see that the Danish verses did not even follow the strict rules of the fornyrðislag even when the English original did (the one redeeming feature was that they had printed the English and the Danish versions of the lays side by side) — knowing myself, I hurried to replace the book on the shelf before I got upset by such … I don't know what is worst, but it must be either sheer stupidity or gross incompetence. I do not feel competent enough to comment on the wisdom of J.R.R. Tolkien's choices when composing these poems; Christopher Tolkien's comments offer a valuable insight into these choices along with educated guesses about his father's reasoning, but I was confirmed in my opinion that J.R. R. Tolkien was a true master of the old alliterative verse-forms, and I was confirmed in my own pleasure in that type of poetic form.If it has seemed a little difficult to fully appreciate what Tom Shippey is speaking of when he describes Tolkien's sub-creative work as the creation of asterisk-legends, I think it will be easier now that we have an example where the relation between the preserved material and the asterisk-legend is much closer. For that is essentially what this book is all about: it is the two asterisk-lays that tell the whole story of the Völsungs and the Niflungs such as Tolkien thought they might have been. But this is not all that he does — in his long review-come-commentary in Tolkien Studies vol. 7, Prof. Shippey comments on the task that Tolkien set himself, saying thatfinding a clear and satisfying line through all these contradictions and narrative inadequacies cannot have been easy. Yet his training as a comparative philologist assured him that, in narrative as in linguistics or mythology, there must have been a sensible explanation in the beginning, and this must furthermore be recoverable.In this we see hints both of the philologist's desire to recover or recreate the lost forms, the lost work, but there is also something else: a desire to organise, to create a coherent whole of the disparate and diverging (and re-merging) forms that is so intimately familiar to any Tolkien enthusiast who has tried to dig into the treasure trove of Unfinished Tales and in particular the History of Middle-earth material. It is of course both interesting and amusing to see Tolkien himself engage in this almost ‘fannish’ activity of ‘ret-conning’ the Völsunga and Niflunga sagas, though one should of course not forget that there was also a far more serious side to his interest, which Christopher Tolkien does something to uncover in the excellent notes and commentary that follows Tolkien senior's lays. Tolkien never lost sight of the underlying reality of varying forms and thought of the whole Völsunga-Niflung cycle as it stands as the result of the merging of two or more, originally unrelated, historical and mythical traditions. Tolkien, I believe, was never in doubt as to which approach was the more serious attempt to understand the story of the Völsungs, the Niflungs and the Burgundians.
    • 4/5
      These are two related Slavic poems that give fans of LOTR an insight into its author and the stories that inspired his magnum opus. The poems feature rings, evil kings, and magic that immediately evoke memories of Middle Earth. The poems are dense and brim with allussions explained in the notes but hard to understand for the uninitiated, but making your way through the quick and punchy poems is rewarding for their own merits as tales and as artifacts.One of the greatest opportunities that this collection presents is to see Tolkein at his actual work and hobby: philology. These are the stories that he lectured and tutored on in Oxford and which inpired the poetry and narrative style in his novels. Tolkein's translation is riveting and his notes are wonderful, which is precisely what you would expect from a man working on a labor of love.
    • 5/5
      Christopher Tolkien uses both his knowledge of Norse and Icelandic epic poems and his father's lecture notes to provide insightful commentary on the poetic tradition on which J.R.R. Tolkien's work is grounded. The history and literary analysis are fascinating and well worth reading. The poetry itself provides a better understanding of the legends Wagner's Ring Cycle is based upon. Tolkien's work merges many of the ancient poems into a cohesive whole with great emphasis placed upon both form and content.
    • 3/5
      Tolkien is most famous for the Lord of the Rings and, my particular favourite, The Hobbit. I think every other book he's written pales in to insignificance when you think of him as a writer. He was, in fact, first and foremost, an academic. The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún denotes something that Tolkien was obsessed and ultimately influenced by, and that is Norse mythology. Norwegian and Icelandic poetry was his forté and here Tolkien has devised his own version of ancient poems regarding the legend of Sigurd and the fall of the Niflungs.

      Written in narrative poetry form with short stanzas, The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún is quite difficult to get in to if your heart is not in it. If you love Tolkien and enjoy his often epic narrative style, then I'd recommend this book purely because his son (Christopher) has used Tolkien's own notes to add accompanying notes that explain what is happened during each section, which is invaluable. At first read the text is difficult to digest because of the archaic English that is used, but after you have grasped what is happening you can retrace your steps and revel in the story.

      Like most things, I'd prefer this to have been written in novel format and I'm sure someone somewhere has done such a thing.
    • 4/5
      The book, “The Legend of Sigurd & Gudrun” by J. R. R. Tolkien, is a valuable contribution to any collection of Tolkien's academic works. A collection which seeks to understand the sources of his fantasy works would also benefit. In dealing with a Norse literature collection, one must realize that Tolkien has several deficiencies. First is its age. This translation was written in the early middle of the 20th century and a lot more research has passed since that time, changing both the meaning and context of the works. Second, J. R. R. Tolkien was a language expert, not a historian nor a culture specialist. This shows in all of his translations, none more than in this work. He goes for what he sees as the sense, and for words that will fit the alliteration, not a literal translation and some of his corrections in this manner are of questionable substantiation. The addition of notations along the side delineating who was talking may be helpful, but are also guesses. The Commentary on the poems sometimes corrects the errors in the translations themselves, but not those that later research has discovered.The book is edited by Christopher Tolkien. For someone familiar with Tolkien's academic work, the interpolations by Christopher are obvious. They are not, however, made typographically distinct. J. R. R. Tolkien is responsible for translating the Old Norse poems into Modern English. The poetry form he uses is more in the Anglo-Saxon / Old English elegiac form of alliterative half-line than the immediate form common in Old Norse.The books appendices are new to me, and very interesting. I wish there had been an index, so I could find pieces I remembered or follow names and Gods mentioned. It was very frustrating.
    • 4/5
      This posthumous publication ought to appeal to a wide range of readers, from Tolkien fans to Wagnerites, from poets to psychologists, and from medieval literature specialists to mythologists, but I suspect it will end up satisfying only those whose interests overlap a number of these categories. Many readers may well come with expectations of more Middle Earth or a tale compatible with the Ring cycle; or they may expect more than just a pastiche of medieval poetry, however erudite, or a deeper psychological study of the motivations of the main characters; and Christopher Tolkien's notes and editing may not tell knowledgeable scholars anything they didn't already know. However, for those who just have a fascination with that certain mix of medieval legend, fantasy, character motivation and mythic resonance 'The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun', complete with introductions and notes, supplies a extra dimension; all that is lacking is a selection of annotated colour plates of the medieval wooden carvings hinted at on the book's cover and inside line illustrations.
    • 3/5
      Probably only of great to Tolkien fanatics, but still a more detailed story that originated in the Silmarillion.
    • 5/5
      Amazing! The language is a bit hard to understand because it doesn't always form a well structured sentence. The imagery that the poem conjures is well worth the difficulty of the reading. A fantastic epic!
    • 4/5
      Tolkien taught Old Norse language and literature for several years at Oxford, so he was familiar with such ancient poetry as the Elder Edda. This book includes two poems that he wrote in modern English but in the style - the metrical form, alliterative techniques, and the sense of "seizing a situation" (7) as Tolkien himself describes it - used in the Old Norse poetry he taught. The first of the two poems is "The Lay of the Volsungs," in which we read of Sigmund and Sigurd and their deeds. The second, "The Lay of Gudrun," focuses on the fates of Gunnar and Hogni, the brothers of Gudrun.I enjoyed seeing the form of the poetry, after being clued in by the introduction what kind of alliterative and metrical technique to look for. I liked the sound of the verses. As is typical for me and poetry, however, I sometimes had difficulty following exactly what was happening. The notes were thorough; I wish I had realized before starting to read that each poem had notes that went along with it, as many of these notes were organized by stanza and were hard to follow once I had finished the poem, particularly "The Lay of the Volsungs" with its 9 parts. I think I would have had an easier time if I were more familiar with the original legends. Recommended for those interested in Norse mythology and Tolkien completists.
    • 5/5
      The five stars are for the poetry within this book. It reaches right inside you to a primitive level and makes you shiver. I also enjoyed the commentary around the poems about the mythology, the history, the languages and inner workings of this type of poetry, though I must admit that some of the finer linguistic details were beyond me. The saga itself is simply exciting and fun to read.