The Poetic Edda

By Coach House Books

Gods, giants, violence, the undead, theft, trolls, dwarves, aphorisms, unrequited love, Valkyries, heroes, kidnapping, dragons, the creation of the cosmos and a giant wolf are just some of the elements dwelling within these Norse poetic tales. Committed to velum anonymously in Iceland around 1270, they were flash frozen from much-older oral versions that had been circulating throughout Northern Europe for centuries. The Poetic Edda is an epoch-making cache of mythological and heroic tales that have compelled Wagner, Tolkien, Borges and Auden, among many others. It is one of the few extent sources that provide a periscope into the Viking Age consciousness.

In this rousing line-by-line translation, award-winning poet Jeramy Dodds transmits the Old Icelandic text into English, placing it in the hands of poetry fans and academics alike, without chipping the patina of the original.

‘Jeremy Dodds's instinctive irony and musicality is a particularly apt fit for the idiosyncratic syntax and symbolism of Old Norse.’

– ARC Poetry Magazine

• Language: English
• Publisher: Coach House Books
• Release date: Oct 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9781770563858

Book preview

THE POETIC EDDA

Translated by

Jeramy Dodds

Coach House Books | Toronto

Translation and introduction copyright © Jeramy Dodds, 2014

Foreword copyright © Terry Gunnell, 2014

Map of the nine worlds © Gabe Foreman, 2014

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Edda Sæmundar. English

The poetic Edda / translated by Jeramy Dodds.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-55245-296-7 (pbk.)

1. Mythology, Norse--Poetry--Translations into English.

I. Dodds, Jeramy, 1974-, translator II. Title.

PT7234.E5D63 2014 839’.61 C2014-904399-6

Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 978 1 77056 385 8 (epub)

The Poetic Edda is also available as a print book: ISBN 978 1 77056 385 8

Þetta er fyrir stórbrotna foreldra mína sem settu mig

á herðar goðsagnar og gáfu mér taumana.

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

by Terry Gunnell

INTRODUCTION

by Jeramy Dodds

A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION

MYTHOLOGICAL POEMS

The Volva’s Prophecy (Volospá)

The High One’s Sayings (Hávamál)

Vafthrudnir’s Sayings (Vafðrúðnismál)

Grimnir’s Sayings (Grímnismál)

Skirnir’s Journey (For Skírnis)

Harbard’s Poem (Hárbarðzióð)

Hymir’s Lay (Hymisqviða)

Loki’s Flyting (Lokasenna)

Thrym’s Lay (Þrymsqviða)

Volund’s Lay (Volundarqviða)

Alvis’s Sayings (Alvíssmál)

HEROIC POEMS

The First Lay of Helgi Hundingsbani (Helgaqviða Hundingsbana in Fyrri )

Helgi Hjorvardsson’s Lay (Helgaqviða Hjorvarðzsonar)

The Second Lay of Helgi Hundingsbani (Helgaqviða Hundingsbana onnur)

Of Sinfjotli’s Death (Frá dauða Sinfiotla)

Gripir’s Prophecy (Grípisspá)

Regin’s Lay (Reginsmál)

Fafnir’s Lay (Fáfnismál)

Sigrdrifa’s Lay (Sigrdrifomál)

Fragment of Sigurd’s Lay (Brot af Sigurðarqviðo)

The First Lay of Gudrun (Guðrúnarqviða in Fyrsta)

Sigurd’s Short Lay (Sigurðarqviða in Scamma)

Brynhild’s Hel Ride (Helreið Brynhildar)

The Slaying of the Niflungs (Dráp Niflunga)

The Second Lay of Gudrun (Guðrúnarqviða onnur)

The Third Lay of Gudrun (Guðrúnarqviða in Þriðia)

Oddrun’s Dirge (Oddrúnargrátr)

Atli’s Lay (Atlaqviða)

Atli’s Greenlandic Lay (Atlamál in Grœnlenzcu)

Gudrun’s Whetting (Guðrúnarhvot)

Hamdir’s Sayings (Hamðismál)

POEMS NOT IN THE CODEX REGIUS

Baldr’s Dreams (Baldrs Draumar)

Rig’s List (Rígsþula)

Hyndla’s Poem (Hyndlolióð)

Grotti’s Song (Grottasongr)

An Annotated Index of Names

FOREWORD

by Terry Gunnell, University of Iceland

The Eddic poems, invaluable primary sources on early Nordic mythology and heroic legend, are preserved in two main manuscripts written by Christian scribes in Iceland in the late thirteenth/early fourteenth century, although most of them appear to have much earlier roots. The general consensus is that, prior to this time, the poems were passed on within the oral tradition for at least two hundred years, and that they have a background in a society that knew little about Christianity. Considering the comparatively positive attitudes expressed about the pagan gods in the poems, the gods named, the archaeological objects mentioned and the environment described, it would also seem that many of the poems have a background in mainland Scandinavia. It is possible that some of them (in an earlier form) were associated with pagan ritual. There is little question that they contain some of the earliest source material on pagan Old Norse mythology outside runic inscriptions and the iconography displayed on archaeological remains.

The fact that these were poems that lived in the oral tradition of Iceland (and possibly that of mainland Scandinavia before that) underlines that whatever an ‘Eddic poem’ has come to be today, it is not what it was: in other words, it was an entity that existed in the form of sound rather than symbols written on pergament, which would have been received by the ears and eyes of a living audience in a performance space that would often have taken the form of a smoky, shadowy, pillared hall or long house with beds or benches on either side, and lit by a long fire running down the middle of the building. The words in question would have been spoken by a skilled performer (or group of performers) who would have probably been known by their audience. Most of these performers would have learned the poem from others, and then adapted it to suit the performance surroundings. As texts learned, performed and passed on to others in the form of sound, the received poems would have been defined by their living context (environment, audience and social circumstances), each performance being totally individual (like any slam performance in our own time). There can be little question that these works would have been viewed by the poet, the later performers and the audience as something closer to music than literature – and for some, sacred music.

The means and nature of the performance of these works will also have varied. The Eddic poems seem to belong to more than one genre, the works having been gathered together in one manuscript to make up a thematic collection of poems relating to Nordic gods and heroes. The collection is usually often referred to as the Poetic Edda as a means of distinguishing it from the so-called Prose Edda, composed by the Icelandic chieftain, scholar and poet Snorri Sturluson for other budding Icelandic poets in the early thirteenth century, containing details of mythology and rules of poetics. The poems assigned to the Poetic Edda take at least two forms, distinguished by metre and performance demands. The most common are those poems composed in so-called ‘fornyrðislag’ (old-lore) metre, which is closely related to that used for Old English poems like Beowulf. Poems in this metre are most commonly broken up into strophes of eight alliterating lines, with two strong beats per line, which tell a story in the third person. While the poem might involve some dialogue, characters are usually clearly introduced as part of the poetic text. The performance would thus have involved a single poet telling an audience in the present about events that took place in the past or the mythological world of the gods. The second most common type of Eddic poetry would have been quite different. This was composed in ‘ljóðaháttr’ (the metre of charms/spells), which was closely related to the slightly longer ‘galdralag’ (the rhythm of magic). This metre involves shorter six-line strophes, usually made up of two strophe-halves of two lines with two beats followed by a third containing three beats. The other key distinguishing feature of ‘ljóðaháttr’ is that it is used only for poems taking the form of direct speech, works that take the form of dialogues or monologues, and for which both manuscripts consistently use additional initials placed in the outer margins to indicate the identity of speakers (for example, ‘þ. q.’ standing for ‘Þórr qvað’ [Thor said]). In performance, indoors or outdoors, these poems would have worked very much like drama, with the performer(s) taking on roles. More importantly, they would have involved gods and heroes literally entering the performing space in person and speaking to the audience, and the audience momentarily finding themselves in the roles of the jötnar (jötunns, sometimes wrongly translated as ‘giants’), or even the heroes of Valhöll (lit. the Hall of the Chosen). It is noteworthy that this type of poem also largely keeps to dramatic unities of time, place and action, and predominantly deals with mythology rather than heroes. There is good reason to assume that it has a background in a pre-Christian environment and has possible connections to early ritual.

Considering what has been said above about the essential ‘nature’ of Eddic poetry, it is clear that the versions of the poems in the earliest manuscripts are all translations of a kind. As the late John Miles Foley and other scholars of oral tradition have regularly pointed out, the transposition of an oral poem to pergament or paper means a translation from one form of transmission to another that is wholly different. Gone are the tones, rhythms, changes in speed and volume, gestures, eye contact, surroundings and other visual effects, and the immediacy that would have accompanied the ‘original’ works as they changed and developed over time, permanently ‘under construction.’ In place comes a static form of literary sheet music, in which the once-living poem has started to resemble a butterfly pinned to a board for examination.

Meaning is generated through the interplay of the words of the poet-performer and the understanding of his/her audience; the ‘original’ performer would have expected to play off the knowledge and expectations of the audience, much like a slam poet or stand-up comic will do today. Naturally, audiences and their knowledge change over time, meaning that the words of the poems will mean less (or something new) to those who read (or hear) them in later centuries. Nonetheless, the way the ‘original’ work was received is always going to be as lost to us, just as modern audiences of Shakespeare can never experience the earliest plays of the Bard as the London audiences of 1600 would have. Modern Icelandic readers of the Poetic Edda understand the words but still feel the poems come from a place that is essentially ‘foreign’ to them.

The translation of poetic texts like the Poetic Edda into a foreign language is thus always going to be a matter of translating not only words and music, but also meaning, sense, feeling and context. Arguably, it is impossible to translate any poem perfectly. One could aim for precise meaning using the language of the time at which the original was written (which will mean the work will be as or more difficult to read as the original is for modern native speakers). One can provide a literal translation in modern language (which in the case of the Eddic poems, Chaucer or Shakespeare will, of course, give foreign readers an advantage over native speakers trying to read or hear the original language). Here, however, there is a strong likelihood that one will tend to lose the music, metre, rhythms and alliterative sounds of the original, which many feel are essential features of Old Icelandic poetry. If, however, one concentrates on recreating these sonic features, exact meaning is bound to be lost. One can thus argue that a translation that aims to help modern audiences understand or sense the feeling of the original will have to make use of modern concepts and expressions that might have been unknown to the original audiences.

These translations by Jeramy Dodds, who has a firm knowledge of Old Icelandic, Old Nordic society and Old Norse mythology, have taken a ­refreshing middle course, bearing in mind the original oral qualities and inherent music of Eddic poetry while at the same time bringing the poems up to date and giving them a new immediacy. This approach paves the way for modern English-speaking readers and listeners to sense the meaning of the poems in a similar way to those who originally heard them. They are not direct word-for-word translations, but rather close recreations, revealing a modern poet who is working in a similar creative fashion to those original performers who would have probably adapted the poems for different audiences. Many of the originals appear to have been designed for listeners who believed in the old gods and ragnarök (the death of the gods), and lived in a world of long ships, wagons, halls, firelight, forests, mountains, farms, spears, swords and oral storytelling. These new translations are designed to provide a bridge that undertakes to carry the ancient words and music of the early Nordic world past to a technologically minded global audience trying to reach beyond 9/11, the collapse of banking systems and the seemingly endless political and religious conflicts that dog our planet. The surroundings may be different, but the human spirit and the fight for survival and understanding remain the same. If the words of these new, refreshing translations touch modern readers/listeners and make them sense the minds, world and complex artistic craftsmanship of the original poet-performers who originally spoke these words to audiences in the shadows of the ancient Nordic halls, then the translator will have succeeded. The bridge will have been made.

INTRODUCTION

by Jeramy Dodds

Like all translations, these are recreations that possess birthmark similarities, echoes, absolute similitudes and forgeries. They are re-enactors in period costume rehearsing a happening centuries after its origination. But the poems in the Poetic Edda have always been re-enactors: oral pagan poems, passed mouth to ear for centuries, until they were flash-frozen onto vellum sometime around 1270 by Christian monks in Iceland, centuries after they may have been known by heart. These poems are scored by elements of ancient Northern European lore, but a scribe who may or may not have understood them has refracted them through a distant lens. They were quilled in Old Icelandic, a variant of Old Norse. What you have here is a museum-grade replica of the original text, one made with the modern material of English.

The majority of these poems are housed in a fat, paperback-sized tome called the Codex Regius (The Royal Book, GKS 2365 4to). The Codex Regius’s only marginal adornment is that of tallow tar, co-mingled with the oil left by every finger that has leafed through it. In folio 41, the scribe has written around the rim of a natural hole, one left from the vellum being stretched. A sutured wound in the skin of folio 28 crosses the width of the page. A clutch of pages is missing: there were originally one hundred and six pages, we now only have ninety. These absent pages, eight leaves in total, have left us with a lacuna in Sigurd’s life and some missing Valkyrian wisdom from Sigrdrifa.

To say the scribe wasted no space is an understatement. The entirety of the Codex Regius is packed with a dense script, poetry rendered in long-line prose, repetitions and recurring names abbreviated to a letter or two. There is but a third of a page left blank at its end. Its condensing is reminiscent of dehydration, a meat or fruit shrunk for travel, awaiting a soak in a basin to reinflate.

When the Codex Regius was returned to Iceland in 1971, after being gifted to King Frederick III of Denmark in 1662 by the Bishop of Skálholt, Brynjólfur Sveinsson, it was sent by ship from Denmark for fear that air travel was still too dodgy. The ship, which crossed the Atlantic under military escort, was greeted in Reykjavík by a flag-waving, cheering throng that had gathered dockside. The crowd’s euphoria celebrated a postcolonial victory but also reaffirmed the Poetic Edda as an important global text, a milestone in medieval Northern European literature that has influenced countless scholars, artists, writers and composers.

The Poetic Edda (or the Elder Edda or Sæmundar Edda, as it is often called) and Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda are the primary textual warehouses of Northern European mythology and legend. The gods in both Eddas are, like us humans, perishable. They lack omniscience, they fear and are curious about their end, Ragnarok (Fate of the Gods [ragnarook] and/or Twilight of the Gods [ragnarookkr]). The mythological platform of the Norse universe consists of nine worlds, although the placement and sovereignty of these worlds are somewhat contested; one significant feature of this mythology is its many overlaps, its polytonal rhetoric. The map included here is a wonderful rendering of the nine (or more) worlds, but it is two-dimensional and cannot account for every intersection, and the location of each world is somewhat blurry. Asgard is where the Æsir, the gods, live and where Valhalla, the Hall of the Slain, can be found. It is surrounded by an incomplete wall built by a Jotun (see below). Vanaheim is the home of the Vanir (also gods); Alfheim is the home of the Light Elves (ljósálfar). Jotunheim is the home of the Jotuns and is East of Asgard and Midgard. It is often referred to as, simply, East. Nidavellir is the home of the Dwarves; Midgard, the closest equivalent to Earth, is the home of humans, and where the action in the heroic poems and part of the mythological poems takes place. Muspelheim is the home of the Fire Jotuns. Svartalfheim to the Dark Elves (dookkálfar) and some Dwarves. And, finally, Niflheim. Niflheim is home to the Frost Jotuns and the Niflungar (Mist Children), of which Hel, an area that also houses some of the dead, is part of, Niflheim being a darker, lower area than Hel. Hel is presided over by Loki’s daughter, also named Hel. Often in the poems (such as ‘Brynhild’s Hel Ride’ [Helreið Brynhildar]) we hear of various figures being buried or cremated with items so as to facilitate their journey to Hel.

The centrepiece of this universe is the ash tree Yggdrasil. On top of Yggdrasil sits a wise eagle with a hawk between its eyes. The squirrel Ratatosk scurries up and down the tree delivering vitriolic messages to the dragon Nidhogg, who gnaws on the tree’s roots below, while four stags chomp foliage from its branches. A few magical wells sprout from the tree. It is under this tree that the gods hold their assemblies. The Bilrost bridge, which is a burning rainbow, links Asgard to us here in Midgard.

This mythological universe is extremely complex and all that I can offer here is a basic glimpse into some of its many intricacies. It is a universe that is, at its core, linear; a straight projection of beginning to end, and then a rebirth. The beginning of its end is Ragnarok, a looming sequence of events that has yet to happen in the mythological poems, that culminates in a colossal, all-out battle that kills off the major gods and their monstrous ­opponents, leaving a small group of straggling survivors. A series of natural disasters then recalibrates the landscape and floods the world. But there’s hope. There’s renewal: the earth bobs back out of the sea.

This mythological universe is one shackled by fate. Many of the minor aspects of fate (outside of Ragnarok) are administered and controlled by the Norns, Disir and Valkyries, who are often portrayed as sitting at looms, weaving the strands of every individual’s destiny. Throughout the Poetic Edda there is an overlapping of function between these fate-dealers – the Norns, the Disir, the Valkyries and the fylgjur (a type of guardian spirit) – all of which are both antagonistic and benevolent in their duties and are