★★★☆☆ The Elder Edda, Andy Orchard (translator)
A mythology that glorifies battle over all else
The Elder Edda
Andy Orchard (translator and editor)
A mythology that glorifies battle over all else
I will start by admitting that I didn't appreciate this book as much as I might have, and that that is largely my fault. Many of the stories seemed terribly complicated and full of arbitrary and senseless events. They presumably would have made more sense if I had read the notes. However, I didn't realize how extensively annotated the book was until I reached the end of the main text and saw pages and pages of endnotes. The stories are connected to these notes by links, but I could not get the links to work in my kindle paperwhite. So, that's on me.
The Elder Edda, also known as the Poetic Edda or the Codex Regius (that's King's book in Latin -- thereby hangs an interesting tale of how most of these stories reached us) is one of the two main sources for Norse legend and mythology. (The other is called the Younger Edda or the Prose Edda or Snorre's Edda.)
There are, crudely speaking, two sorts of stories in the Elder Edda: mythology and stories of heros. The mythology tells of the origin of the the world and the gods, and also of their destruction in the final battle Ragnarok, yet to come. These were very difficult to follow, at least without the notes. The heroic stories were easier. They're a little more coherent. Also, Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen is a cleaned-up version of them, and I know that story very well.
Greek mythology is largely about gods boinking each other and humans. Norse gods do a certain amount of boinking, too, but they are much less single-minded about it than the Olympians. Instead, Norse gods and heroes are all about hitting each other with sticks. (Under "sticks" I am including sticks made of iron and also sharpened on the edge or tip: swords, axes, battle-hammers, spears and even arrows.) It is noteworthy that the way you get to heaven is by dying bravely in battle. There are two Norse heavens: Valhalla and Fólkvangr. Fólkvangr, which is run by the goddess Freya, sounds like a pretty generic heaven: peaceful and pleasant. Odin's heaven, Valhalla, is a place where slain warriors can spend eternity drinking beer and fighting each other. If you're killed in Valhalla you come back to life in short order.
It's a worldview in which nothing really matters as much as prowess in battle. It is true that we are told of Odin's wisdom, but honestly, Odin's wisdom didn't impress me all that much. We also hear of Loki's cleverness and trickery, but those stories were also unconvincing, to my mind. (Marvel's Loki strikes me as a rather more interesting character than the Norse god on whom he is ostensibly based.)
I am glad I read this, because I now know (or will, when I have also read the The Prose Edda) what all the Norse-influenced fantasy fiction I read is based on. But, with the important caveat that I didn't read the notes, the original disappointed me.