Folio Society Hardcover

The Poetic Edda

2016 Limited Edition

AS NEW UNREAD condition in DECORATIVE SLIPCASE

Illustrated by Simon Noyes

Translated by Carolyne Larrington

Limited to 980 hand-numbered copies of which this is copy number 711

This elegantly presented collection of Old Norse poetry tells tales of gods, heroes and monsters, war, folly and deceit. 

Bound in polished leather, this collection of mythological and heroic poems is the most important source for tales of the Norse gods – of Odin, Thor and Loki, and of heroes such as Sigurd and Brynhild.

With both the Norse text and Carolyne Larrington’s English translation printed side-by-side, perfectly complimented by 20 new runic illustrations by Simon Noyes, this is the ultimate reading edition of these enthralling Scandinavian legends.

J. R. R. Tolkien found inspiration in the Edda for his creation of Middle Earth.

496 text pages

Printed on Abbey Wove paper

20 color illustrations printed on Natural Evolution Ivory and tipped on to text pages

Bound in hand-polished leather with five raised bands

Pages colored on three edges

Spine blocked in gold foil

Slipcase bound in canvas

11 ¾ × 8 ½ inches

THE ULTIMATE READING EDITION OF ‘THE POETIC EDDA’

The Folio Society limited edition of the Poetic Edda presents the poems in a manner which is at once elegant, accessible and discreetly scholarly. With meticulous attention to type size and line length, the Norse and English texts are displayed side by side, the first line of each stanza aligned to facilitate comparison of original and translation. 

Notes are provided at the foot of each page, providing vital elucidation of the poems’ meaning without impinging on the main text, and an index of names provides a helpful digest of the Edda’s huge cast of characters. The combination of sensitive design and judicious inclusion of scholarly apparatus makes this parallel-text presentation of the Poetic Edda the ultimate reading edition of this endlessly fascinating work.

OF GODS AND GIANTS: THE MYTHOLOGICAL POEMS

The sense of deep antiquity which so enthralled The Poetic Edda’s early readers – something more primal than anything offered by Classical literature or indeed any other European tradition – is most evident in the mythological poems which open the collection as presented in the Codex Regius. 

The first 11 poems in the manuscript comprise a Norse theogony recounting the creation of the world from chaos, the descent of gods such as Odin from primordial giants, and then the travails of the principal gods, the Æsir, until their final destruction at the great conflagration of Ragnarok, after which the world is reborn and populated by a new generation of gods and surviving humans. 

The Seeress’s Prophecy (or Völuspá) which opens the collection is probably the best known of all the poems in the Edda, and our most important source for the stories of the Norse gods. Its 62 stanzas take the form of a systematic recital of ancient lore by the Seeress to Odin, culminating in her announcement of the Doom of the Gods to come. Generally dated to the late 10th century, just before the conversion of the pagan North to Christianity, The Seeress’s Prophecy is widely considered a kind of sacred text of the old Scandinavian religion. Densely allusive and apparently the product of a world in religious transition, it has fired the imagination of scholars and artists perhaps more than any other poem in the collection. 

After this account of divine origins, the mythological poems are organized by protagonist, with poems featuring Odin followed by Skirnir’s Journey – which focuses on Freyr, son of the sea-god Niord – then tales of Odin’s son Thor and other, marginally divine figures. This last group includes The Poem of Völund, the tale of the smith Völund, ‘lord of the elves’, and his violent revenge on his captor Nidud, a legend familiar to visitors to the British Museum from its depiction on the famous 7th-century Anglo-Saxon Franks Casket.

The translation selected for this edition is the authoritative and highly readable text by Oxford scholar and founder of the Eddic Research Network Carolyne Larrington, first published by Oxford University Press in 1996. Her addition of seven further poems not found in the Codex Regius completes this comprehensive presentation of the verse Eddic corpus. Formerly a student of the late, great authority on the Poetic Edda, Ursula Dronke.

The poems of the Old Norse collection known as the Poetic Edda respond to one of humankind’s greatest urges – the search for origins. Subtle, complex and suggestive, yet disarmingly direct in style, these tales of gods, heroes and monsters, of love, war, folly and deceit, inhabit a world more primal in character than any other corpus of European mythology. We do not know who composed them, or when, but ever since their rediscovery in the 17th and 18th centuries they have inspired intellectuals and artists in all media, for whom these poems held the tantalizing key to a shared Northern identity. 

All but a few of the poems in the Poetic Edda were preserved in a single manuscript known as the Codex Regius, copied by an unknown Icelandic scribe in the 1270s and presented by the Lutheran Bishop of Skálholt, Brynjolf Sveinsson, to the Danish court nearly four centuries later. Bishop Brynjolf was convinced that this unassuming manuscript contained the hitherto lost source material for the great treatise on Norse poetry by the Icelandic historian Snorri Sturluson (1179– 1241), which its author had referred to as an edda or poetics. The Codex Regius was duly dubbed the Poetic Edda or Elder Edda, to distinguish it from Snorri’s ‘younger’ prose work. 

Translations into Latin, French and English were enthusiastically received by a public eager to construct a sense of its own legendary past. Early adaptations of the Edda poems such as Thomas Gray’s The Descent of Odin heralded a mania for the Norse myths in the 19th century, reaching its apogee in works by William Morris and in Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle, of which the mythological substrata are formed from Eddic tales. The fascination with the collection continued into the following century, with Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden and Jorge Luis Borges all professed admirers. 

I recently acquired a large and interesting collection of Folio Society titles in AS NEW UNREAD condition from a collector who purchased most of them new and sealed, and displayed them in a smoke free, climate controlled home.

I will be listing these as time permits so please check back often for new listings.

Please let me know if you have questions. 

PLEASE NOTE: To be eligible for returns, all books must be undamaged and be repacked as sent.