The Poetic Edda
- Language:
- English
- Translation:
- Bellows
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Anonymous or composite
- Condition of the text:
- Some scanning errors (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand) · 37 illegible passages, excluded from answers
- Extent:
- ~170,000 words · 807 passages
Cite this work
- APAPoetic Edda. (n.d.). The Poetic Edda (Bellows, Trans.). Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/poetic-edda/the-poetic-edda
- MLAPoetic Edda. The Poetic Edda. Translated by Bellows. Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/poetic-edda/the-poetic-edda.
- ChicagoPoetic Edda. The Poetic Edda. Translated by Bellows. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/poetic-edda/the-poetic-edda.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
What it is about
The Eddic poems: songs about the Norse gods and about heroes, among them the Völuspá, which tells the origin and the end of the world.
Context and history
It should not be confused with the other Edda: this one is anonymous and is poetry; Snorri Sturluson's, which is also in the catalogue, is prose and is a handbook he wrote three hundred years after the matters it relates. The poems survive almost entirely in a single manuscript, the Codex Regius, which was lost until 1643. Which is to say: the Norse mythology we know depends largely on one book that turned up by chance.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
including some of the most remarkable poems which have been preserved to us from the period before the pen and the printing-press replaced the poet-singer and oral tradition. It is above all else the desire to make better known the dramatic force, the vivid and often tremendous imagery, and the superb conceptions embodied in these poems which has called forth the present translation. WHAT IS THE POETIC EDDA? Even if the poems of the so-called Edda were not so significant and intrinsically so valuable, the long series of scholarly struggles which have been going on over them for the better part of three centuries would in itself give them a peculiar interest. Their history is strangely mysterious. We do not know who composed them, or when or where they were composed; we are by no means sure who collected them or when he did so; finally, we are not absolutely certain as to what an “Edda” is, and the best guess at the meaning of the word renders its application to this collection of poems more or less misleading.