The Prose Edda: Tales from Norse Mythology [Paperback]

Snorri Sturluson (Author), Jean I. Young (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 25, 2002

Prose Edda is a work without predecessor or parallel. Snorri Sturluson feared that the traditional techniques of Norse poetics, the pagan kennings, and the allusions to mythology would be forgotten with the introduction of new verse forms from Europe. Prose Edda was designed as a handbook for poets to compose in the style of the skalds of the Viking ages. It is an exposition of the rule of poetic diction with many examples, applications, and retellings of myths and legends. The present selection includes the whole of Gylfaginning (The deluding of Gylfi)--a guide to mythology that forms one of the great storybooks of the Middle Ages--and the longer heroic tales and legends of Skáldskaparmál (Poetic diction). Snorri Sturluson was a master storyteller, and this translation in modern idiom of the inimitable tales of the gods and heroes of the Scandinavian peoples brings them to life again.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Iceland's most versatile literary genius, Snorri Sturluson (1179-1241) was born in western Iceland, the son of a great chieftain. Early in his career, he won a reputation at home and in Norway for his poetic talents. Later he traveled to Norway and wrote about the lives of the kings: Heimskringla Saga, Egil's Saga, and Saint Oláf's Saga, a work unsurpassed in Icelandic prose.

Product Details

• Paperback: 131 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1st edition (April 25, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520234774
• ISBN-13: 978-0520234772
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.5 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #593,496 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

49 of 52 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Excerpts from the Prose Edda, March 19, 2001

By 

Gunnvor (McDade, TX United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Prose Edda: Tales from Norse Mythology (Paperback)

While Young's translations are quite good, it should be noted that these are *selections* from the Prose Edda, and are not complete. Notably missing are large sections of Skaldskarpamal, or "Poetic Diction". This is a good edition if you just want the mythological stories, but having the complete Prose Edda is even better -- there are a lot of kennings and other details of the poetry that shed further light on the mythology.

Fortunately, there is a good, complete, and inexpensive translation available, and Amazon also carries it -- the Anthony Faulkes translation.

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ian Myles Slater on: A Readable "Standard Version", March 9, 2006

By 

Ian M. Slater "aylchanan" (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Prose Edda: Tales from Norse Mythology (Paperback)

Jean I. Young's translation of selections from "The Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson: Tales from Norse Mythology," with an Introduction by the distinguished Icelandic scholar Sigurdhur Nordal, was originally issued in 1954 by Bowes & Bowes Publishers Ltd., Cambridge, with an American edition from the University of California Press; I have a 1964 hardcover printing of the latter version.

UC Press has been reprinting it as a trade paperback for decades. It currently has a new cover (an apparently Victorian vision of Thor in his thunder-chariot, wielding his hammer against the Giants), but Amazon's "Look Inside" function has the old green cover showing a giant eagle carrying off Loki, from an older edition. Not a very good representation of the scene as described inside -- besides Loki's clichéd horned helmet, the hapless trickster should be dragging on the ground, not soaring over the mountains -- but it is a dramatic composition. (The digital version looks much nicer than the cover of my faded and crumbling 1971 printing of the paperback!)

The "Prose Edda" is the main source for a great deal of what we know (or think we know) about the myths and legends of pre-Christian Scandinavia; and often has guided, not always for the better, the interpretation of other, less entertaining or more opaque sources. Leaving aside challenges to Snorri's veracity about his sources, Wagner's "Twilight of the Gods," for example, follows what seems to be a mis-reading or mis-hearing of a word on Snorri's part. (I would follow those who accept Snorri as mainly very reliable, but sometimes in error about what was already in the twelfth century a fading pagan past.)

Young's translation of substantial excerpts was by far the most readily available English version of the material for several decades; and, even with two new competitors, has some merits. Except in a few places, for reasons I can understand in a 1950s context, it seems quite accurate. Some may prefer its prose style (others won't), and it has been used by half a century of secondary sources, including quotations in quite scholarly works.

From the whole Icelandic original, it includes the best-known material; the historicizing "Prologue," the main exposition of Norse mythology, as "The Deluding of Gylfi," and the narrative sections of the "Poetic Diction" (Skaldskaparmal), omitting the long lists of vocabulary and metaphors. As is the case with every English translation but one, the "Hattatal," a poem by Snorri in a hundred-plus meters with his own commentary on each stanza, itself both a virtuoso performance and pedagogical tour-de-force, is omitted.

The Young version had no real competition in the market until the Everyman translation by Anthony Faulkes (1987), as "Edda" the first English rendering to contain the whole body of material, both prose and verse, as found in the original (with the verses in Hattatal given in Icelandic as well as translation, without which the commentary is unintelligible). This is a solid work of scholarship, but it is probably more accessible, as well as more valuable, to serious inquirers than it is to beginners.

Young's version had supplanted for most readers -- and apparently in the minds of publishers -- the excellent 1916 American-Scandinavian Society version by Arthur G. Brodeur, which is long out of print (although available on-line at several sites). Brodeur's translation now seems a bit stilted, is not quite complete (minus "Hattatal," as usual) and in some places is just antiquated, but it is still worth consulting. Young's version really wasn't designed to compete with it as a resource for scholarship, but seems to have done so in practice. In terms of approach and ambitions, Brodeur's version is really the immediate predecessor of the Faulkes even more extensive translation. (Faulkes also edited the Icelandic text.)

Although Young or his publishers felt obliged the soften the relatively blunt language about some body parts and functions, and otherwise render it acceptable to nervous parents, schools, and librarians, I have always found it an enjoyable translation to read. Nordal's introduction, reflecting a consensus half-a-century old, which he had himself championed, is a bit more problematic, but what it has to say is worth considering, too.

A close match in contents to Young's selection is a new Penguin Classics volume from Jesse Byock, "The Prose Edda: Norse Mythology" (2005) to which Young's translation was briefly linked by Amazon. It omits the same large blocks of material (with a few samples offered), and is somewhat closer in style to Young's simple modern English; but the scholarship is considerably more up to date, and my first impression is that it is a much more attractive version. However, those worried about offending the prudish may still prefer Young's slightly bowdlerized rendering, which is by no means a bad translation. (The really interested will want all three; and have a web version of Brodeur bookmarked, too.)

(I can't honestly recommend any of the nineteenth-century versions, such Rasmus B. Anderson's 1869 version, also available on-line, or George Webbe Dasent's rather mannered 1842 translation, which doesn't seem to be available in digital form. Some may find these older translations readable, but at any point they may be seriously antiquated in textual or linguistic scholarship.)

I have discussed at some length the author (named as such in medieval sources), the name of the work, and the confusing existence of a "Poetic" or "Elder" Edda, and other complications, in a review of the Byock translation; to which I would direct the curious; and anyone pondering which version to buy.

I would point out, for those who don't bother with it, that the "About the Author" description for the Young translation, based on that used by the UC Press itself, flatly adopts as true Nordal's tentative suggestion that Snorri was the author of "Egil's Saga." This is a modern idea with no period support, and which has not met with overwhelming approval. ("Egil's Saga" is one of the greatest of the Sagas of the Icelanders, and I wish I could accept the attribution.)

The description also confuses both "Egil's Saga" and "Saint Olaf's Saga" with "Heimskringla," Snorri's compilation of biographies of the Kings of Norway (mostly his own work), in which his distinctive adaptations of the Sagas of Olaf Trygvasson and Olaf the Holy are incorporated. This is worth noting, since two in-print modern translations of "Heimskringla" silently include the two Olaf Sagas, while an Everyman's Library edition in two volumes treated the saga of "King Olaf Trygvesson" and "King Olaf the Saint" separately, and out of chronological order. There should be no need to look for both titles, unless you want that revision of the somewhat creaky nineteenth-century Samuel Laing translation.

23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent translation of Sturluson's edda, March 23, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: The Prose Edda: Tales from Norse Mythology (Paperback)

This is an excellent translation of Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda. The text is very easy to read; it doesn't seem translated in the least. A big plus is the fact that the book contains both the original names of characters in old Icelandic, and a translation in English. Sturluson is a great writer, and I would recommend this book to anyone who is the least bit interested in the old Norse tales