A New Edition and Translation of the Old Norse Elder Edda

Author: Edward Pettit

E-mail: yggdrasill AT yggdrasill . plus . com (remove spaces and replace AT with @)

Last updated: 13 July 2006

Introduction to the Project

Title: The Elder Edda: Old Norse Poems of Gods and Heroes from the Codex Regius (Gammel kongelig samling 2365 4to) and AM 748 4to Manuscripts of the Árni Magnússon Institute in Iceland.

Aim: Principally to create an attractive reading edition and English translation of the Old Norse Eddic poems of the Codex Regius. The readings of this manuscript will be supplemented by select variants from the related manuscript AM 748 4to and Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda, and an appendix will give full texts and translations of Völuspá ('The Prophecy of the Seeress') from Hauksbók (AM 544 4to) and of Baldrs draumar ('Baldr's dreams') from AM 748 4to. Each poem will be accompanied by detailed explanatory notes reflecting prior scholarship. An index will give details of each character's actions and relationships, and indicate the etymological sense of their names (where known).

Justification: To my knowledge, none of the published English translations of the Elder Edda is at once accurate, complete and pleasing to the ear. Nor is there a full edition with English notes. When finished, Ursula Dronke's five-volume edition and translation will be of enormous value (only two volumes have appeared so far). But its price, size and erudition put it beyond the reach of most readers, and it does not present the poems in the sequence found in the Codex Regius. Andy Orchard's translation has yet to appear, and John Porter and I expressed our disappointment with Carolyne Larrington's version for the Oxford World's Classics series in a review in Saga-Book 25 (1998), pp. 92-5. The other full translations are, to my mind, too inaccurate to be acceptable (see below for brief comments on the main ones).

Intended audience: English-speaking students of Old Norse, medievalists in other disciplines, mythologists, and, not least, the general reading public.

Form: A printed book — or, more likely, books — containing an introduction, Old Norse texts with facing-page translations and explanatory footnotes, a bibliography and an annotated index of names. The spelling of the Old Norse will be regularized to make it simpler to read and easier to use in conjunction with the Glossary to the Poetic Edda by Beatrice la Farge and John Tucker (Heidelberg, 1992). When translating, I aim for accuracy, but still strive to create worthwhile poetry, by, for example, favouring words that lend the verse an alliterative flavour. Unlike some earlier translations, I avoid using archaic English and dialect words.

Basis of Old Norse text: Facsimiles of the manuscripts, and reference to earlier editions and scholarship. For the Codex Regius, I use the Konungsbók Eddukvæða facsimile, published in Reykjavík in 2001, which includes colour photographs of each page and both diplomatic and Modern Icelandic transcriptions.

Author's credentials: BA in English (with specialism in Old Norse), MA in English Language and Literature Before 1525 (with specialism in Old Norse), and PhD in Old English, all from the University of London. Author of books and articles on Anglo-Saxon medicine, Norse myth, J.R.R. Tolkien and the English language.

Unfinished .pdf sample of text, translation and notes to Völuspá stanzas 1 to 10: please click here.

Sample Translations, for Comparison

Völuspá, stanza 31 (Codex Regius)

Ek sá Baldri,    blógum tívur,
Óðins barni,   ørlög fólgin;
stóð um vaxinn,    völlum hæri,
miór ok miök fagr,   mistilteinn. (Text from my edition)

My translation:

'I saw for Baldr, for the bloody sacrifice,
for Óðinn's child, a fate concealed;
full-grown there stood, higher than the fields,
slender and most fair, the mistletoe.'

Carolyne Larrington, The Poetic Edda (Oxford, 1996):

'I saw for Baldr, for the bloody god,
Odin's child, his fate concealed;
there stood grown higher than the plain,
slender and very fair the mistletoe.'

My comments:

i. ON tívurr might mean 'god', but another possibility is 'sacrifice' or 'victim'. An explanatory note to this effect seems necessary, given the importance of this stanza for the interpretation of the poem and for our understanding of the myth of Baldr's death. Unfortunately, Larrington, in common with several other translators, does not provide one.

ii. The second line is undesirably ambiguous: the reader might momentarily take 'Odin's child' to be a direct object. It is better to translate 'for Odin's child' to avoid this problem and reflect the emphatically parallel construction of the Norse text.

iii. The third line manages only a weak hint of internal alliteration ('there ... than') at best, though the 's' of 'stood' does chime with other words ('saw ... concealed ... stood ... slender ... mis-').

iv. 'Plain' would be better pluralised, to reflect the simplest emendation of the scribe's mistaken accusative plural völlu: dative plural völlum (rather than dative singular velli). Doing so also increases the still, lonely drama of the scene.

Ursula Dronke, The Poetic Edda, vol. 2 (Oxford, 1997):

'I saw for Baldr—
for the bloodstained sacrifice,
Óðinn's child—
the fates set hidden.
There stood full-grown,
higher than the plains.
slender and most fair,
the mistletoe.'

My comments:

i. Inserting 'for' before 'Óðinn's child' would improve the rhythm and remove the need for dashes.

ii. Ørlög (literally 'things laid out') is translated as 'fates' to reflect its plural form. But this grammatical fidelity raises the distracting existential question of whether Baldr could have more than one fate. (Hermann Pálsson's approach seems better: he extrapolates the sense 'threads of fate', with reference to the ørlögþættir, 'fate-threads', of the third stanza of Helgakviða hundingsbana in fyrri, 'The First Lay Helgi, Slayer of Hundingr'.)

iii. 'Set' is the translator's addition, perhaps to provide 's' alliteration with surrounding words ('saw ... -stained ... sacrifice ... set ... stood ... slender ... mis-').

iv. The third and fourth verses are not linked by alliteration, and the fifth and sixth only weakly, as in Larrington's version.

Patricia Terry, Poems of the Elder Edda (Philadelphia, 1990):

'I saw Balder stained with blood,
I saw the fate of Odin's son:
above the fields, fragile and fair,
stands the slender mistletoe.'

My comments:

i. This translator strays, in my view, too far from the sense of the original in search of alliteration.

ii. The lack of a word to reflect tívurr ('sacrifice'? 'god'?) is unfortunate.

iii. Stóð means 'stood' (or 'was'), not 'stands'.

iv. Miök ('most, very') is unaccounted for, but miór is apparently translated twice ('fragile ... slender').

W.H. Auden and Paul B. Taylor, Norse Poems (1981):

'Baldur I saw, the bleeding god,
His fate still hidden, Odin's son:
Tall on the plain a plant grew,
A slender marvel, the mistletoe.'

My comments:

i. In my view, this translation strays much too far from the original.

ii. 'Still' has no basis in the Old Norse text. It has presumably been added to supply 's' alliteration.

iii. 'Odin's son' is moved to the end of the line, for no obvious reason. This undermines the tension and tragic significance built up by the three consecutive, drum-beat references to Baldr.

iv. 'Plain' would, as noted above, be better plural.

v. 'Plant' is another word inserted by the translators for alliteration. It weakens the surprise intended by the poet's postponement of mistilteinn ('mistletoe') until the very end of the stanza.

vi. 'Marvel' seems to be a guess at the sense of miór, a word usually supposed to mean 'slender' nowadays.

vii. The words miök fagr ('most fair') are not translated.

Lee M. Hollander, The Poetic Edda, second edition (Austin, Texas, 1962):

'I saw for Baldr, the blessed god,
Ygg's dearest son, what doom is hidden:
green and glossy, there grew aloft,
the trees among, the mistletoe.'

My comments:

i. Hollander set himself the impossible task of imitating Norse metres in English. The result often has an archaizing charm, but is far from an accurate reflection of the sense of the original.

ii. 'Blessed' is wrong.

iii. 'Ygg's' unnecessarily replaces 'Odin's'.

iv. 'Dearest' is the translator's invention, as are 'green and glossy' and 'trees among'.

v. The 'plains' of the original have vanished.

Henry Adams Bellows, The Poetic Edda (New York, 1936):

'I saw for Baldr, the bleeding god,
The son of Othin, his destiny set:
Famous and fair in the lofty fields,
Full grown in strength the mistletoe stood.'

My comments:

i. 'Set' provides alliteration, but misses the point: destinies are invariably set, but some are more obvious than others, and Baldr's was an appalling surprise.

ii. 'Famous' represents miór (cf. Old English mære).

iii. 'Lofty fields' is wrong: it is the mistletoe that is higher than the fields.

iv. Miök ('most') is unaccounted for.

v. 'In strength' is inserted, evidently to provide 's' alliteration.

vi. In rejigging the stanza's second half, Bellows unfortunately fails to leave the word 'mistletoe' till the end. Presumably he wanted to avoid having two alliterating words next to each other ('Full grown in strength stood the mistletoe').