by Tom Birkett
these poems date from ‘the Viking Age’ or were composed by or for men actively
undertaking viking expeditions.
Embarking on the translation of the Poetic Edda involved addressing some
important questions of canonicity, for it is not immediately clear what the Poetic
Edda canon actual y is.8 If one is translating Beowulf, then it is clear what constitutes the poem; the only comparable questions about inclusion arise in relation to
supplementary texts in appendices, whether to add The Finnsburg Fragment, relevant portions of Widsið and a range of other texts.9 While the poems in the Codex Regius (Reykjavík, Stofnun Árnar Magnússonar GKS 2365 4to) form the obvious
core of the collection, over the last two hundred years – the span of the English
translation history of the Poetic Edda – all sorts of poems in eddic metre have crept
in and out of the canon. These include the probably very late Hrafnagaldar Oðins
and the highly Christian vision poem Sólarljóð, rejected in the eighteenth century as being ‘filled with little else but the absurd superstitions of the Church of Rome’, 1903).
6 The Poetic Edda, trans. H. A. Bellows (New York, 1923); The Poetic Edda, trans. L. M.
Hol ander (Austin TX, 1928).
7 Poems of the Vikings: The Elder Edda, trans. P. Terry (Indianapolis, 1969); The Elder Edda: A Selection, trans. P. B. Taylor and W. H. Auden with P. Salus (London, 1969) and Norse Poems, trans. W. H. Auden and P. B. Taylor (London, 1981). The second volume is an expanded version of the 1969 volume. See C. Larrington, ‘Translating the Poetic Edda into English’, in Old Norse Made New, ed. David Clark and Carl Phelpstead (London, 2007), pp. 21–42 at p. 29. This book can now be downloaded in its entirety from the Viking Society publications website at: http://vsnrweb-publications.org.uk/
8 At the Sixteenth International Saga Conference at Zürich University, at a round-table on eddic poetry (10 August 2015), John McKinnell pleaded for the term ‘Poetic Edda’ to be abandoned in favour of ‘eddic poetry’.
9 See Klaeber’s Beowulf, 4th edn, for example, as an edition, and Liuzza’s exemplary translation, Beowulf.
Translating the Poetic Edda
167
but re-admitted to the canon briefly in the twentieth century.10 The very interesting
Svipdagsmál, a poem which can be categorised as neo-eddic (composed in eddic
style, but likely as late as the fourteenth century), is often found in the same manu-
scripts as Sólarljóð.11 These then have been included in editions and translations at various times, along with the four now more-or-less canonical poems, Baldrs
Draumar, Grottasöngr, Rígsþula and Hyndluljóð. As noted above, many of the Icelandic fornaldarsögur or legendary sagas contain verses in eddic metre.12 These poems, somewhat unhelpful y known as the Eddica minora, are at last being properly edited and translated and should be published in 2017.13 This volume will be a
very welcome addition to the corpus and will stimulate a great deal of further work
on eddic poetry in general. Once we have ful y searchable modern editions, it will
be much easier to generate new insights into the worlds, the situations and speakers,
and the poetics and rhetoric of this remarkable type of Norse poetry.
Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks preserves three important poetic sequences, known by later editorial titles. These are The Waking of Angantýr, the Riddles of Gestumblindi and The Battle of the Goths and Huns, and are often candidates for inclusion in eddic translations.14 The obscure Hrafnagaldar Óðins appears in Benjamin Thorpe’s translation of 1866, but has general y been excluded from the canon thereafter.15 The
Danish scholar Annette Lassen has argued that the poem is probably seventeenth
century in origin, arising from the circle around Bishop Brynjólfur Sveinsson at
Skálholt.16 Most recently Shaun Hughes has offered an edition and translation of
Gunnars slagur (24 sts) and Valagaldur Kráku (14 sts).17 Haukur Þorgeirsson, whose PhD dissertation examines these very late-preserved poems, has convincingly
established that these two poems are eighteenth-century imitations of the medieval
style, composed by séra Gunnar Pálsson (1714–91) and Árni Böðvarsson (1713–76),
10 Icelandic Poetry: Or the Edda of Sæmund, trans. A. Cottle (Bristol, 1797), pp. xxix–xxx; Sólarljóð is translated by Auden and Taylor. For the most recent edition of Sólarljóð with a translation, see Sólarljóð, ed. C. Larrington and P. M. W. Robinson, in Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages, VII.1, ed. Margaret Clunies Ross (Turnhout, 2007), pp. 287–357.
11 See Peter Robinson’s unpublished Oxford DPhil thesis, ‘An edition of Svipdagsmál’, University of Oxford, 1991 for a full discussion of the relationship between the poems.
12 See on these poems most recently, Margaret Clunies Ross, ‘The Eddica Minora: A
Lesser Poetic Edda?’, in Revisiting the Poetic Edda: Essays on Old Norse Heroic Legend, ed. P.
Acker and C. Larrington (London, 2013), pp. 183–201.
13 Margaret Clunies Ross is the general editor of Poetry in Fornaldarsögur, vol. 8 of Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages (Turnhout, forthcoming).
14 Hannah Burrows has edited and translated these poems for Poetry in Fornaldarsögur; on The Waking of Angantýr see her chapter in this volume; a translation of The Waking of Angantyr is in The Poetic Edda, 2nd edn, trans. Larrington; see also Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks, ed. Christopher Tolkien (London, 1956) and Christopher Tolkien’s translation The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise (London, 1960).
15 Edda Sæmundar hinns Fróða: The Edda of Sæmund the Learned, trans. B. Thorpe, 2
vols (London, 1866).
16 Hrafnagaldur Óðins (Forspjal sljóð), ed. and trans. A. Lassen (London, 2011).
17 S. Hughes, ‘“Where Are All the Eddic Champions Gone?” The Disappearance and
Recovery of the Eddic Heroes in Late Medieval Icelandic Literature, 1400–1800’, Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 9 (2013), 37–67.
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Carolyne Larrington
respectively.18 Gunnars slagur purports to be the song sung by the hero Gunnarr as he defiantly played the harp in the snake-pit into which he had been cast by his
brother-in-law, Atli; Valagaldur Kráku is the report made by falcons to Áslaug, the daughter of Sigurðr the Dragonslayer, that her husband King Ragnarr lóðbrók is
busy wooing the daughter of the king of Sweden over in Uppsala. Ragnarr thinks
that his intelligent and talented wife is only a peasant’s daughter, but Áslaug has
inherited her father’s capacity for understanding the speech of birds and she very
soon puts a stop to Ragnarr’s initiative and clears up her erring husband’s misappre-
hension. Lee Hol ander asserted that Svipdagsmál is ‘undoubtedly genuine’, though this view would by no means command universal agreement (and it opens up lots
of questions about what ‘genuine’ means).19 The Poetic Edda canonical net might be
cast very widely indeed and bring all sorts of strange fish to shore.
Translation Issues
Once the poems that could reasonably be included in a comprehensive translation
have been identified, a decision must be made about which text or texts to use as
the basis for translation. In the 1990s I chose Neckel and Kuhn’s fourth edition of
the Edda, revised by Hans Kuhn and published in 1962; an important ground for
this decision was the fact that I had my own copy of it.20 I also made use of Ursula
Dronke’s edition (then only the first volume, published in 1969) and the incomplete
Jón Helgason edition which contains the poems only up to the lacuna in the Codex
Regius.21 Neckel and Kuhn’s fourth edition thus became my central text and I will
discuss
the limitations and advantages of that below.
The Poetic Edda offers its own unique difficulties when it comes to translation.
Of course translation theory warns us that source and target are ever running in
parallel, that words cannot be simply mapped onto one another, and this is of course
true for all kinds of translation. Yet the ramifications of translation theory do not
offer much practical help to the translator in the field, for much of the time we are
struggling with questions at a highly specific level, and have to make quite ad hoc
decisions. To my mind, the essence of the translator’s dilemma is: how to strike a
balance between accuracy and expressiveness. Like the wise man in the Old English
poem The Wanderer (lines 65b–69), the translator must strike a happy medium. And perhaps the Wanderer’s watchwords, among them to be patient ( geþyldig), and not to be too hrædwyrde (‘hasty of speech’) or too wanhydig (‘dark-hearted’) are good ones for a translator. The wise translator must not be too stilted, not too archaic, not too slangy, nor too colloquial. But there are other more technical problems. What
18 See Haukur Þorgeirsson, ‘ Gunnars slagur og Valagaldur Kráku: Eddukvæði frá 18. öld’
(unpublished BA thesis, University of Iceland, 2008) and Haukur Þorgeirsson, ‘ Gul karsljóð og Hrafnagaldur – framlag til sögu fornyrðislags’, Gripla 21 (2010), 299–334.
19 Old Norse Poems: The Most Important Non-Skaldic Verse Not Included in the Poetic Edda, trans. L. M. Hol ander (New York, 1936), p. xv.
20 Edda. Die Lieder des Codex Regius nebst verwandten Denkmälern, 4th edn, ed. G.
Neckel, rev. H. Kuhn (Heidelberg, 1962).
21 The Poetic Edda: Volume I. Heroic Poems, ed. and trans. Ursula Dronke (Oxford, 1969); Eddadigte, ed. Jón Helgason, 3 vols (Oslo, Stockholm and Copenhagen, 1971).
Translating the Poetic Edda
169
about names, for example? Some names are ‘speaking’; are meaningful – we have for
example a whole set of dwarfs in Vǫluspá ( The Seeress’s Prophecy), the first poem in the collection, whose names are cited below:
Nýi oc Niði, Norðri oc Suðri,
Austri oc Vestri, Alþjófr, Dvalinn,
Bífurr, Báfurr, Bamburr, Nóri,
Ánn oc Ánarr, Ái, Miǫðvitnir.
Veigr oc Gandálfr, Vindálfr, Þráinn,
Þekkr oc Þorinn, Þrór, Vitr oc Litr,
oc Nár oc Nýráðr – nú hefi ek dverga
– Reginn oc Ráðsviðr – rétt um talða.
( Vǫluspá, sts. 11–12) 22
(New-moon and Dark-of-moon, North and South,
East and West, Master-thief, Dvalin,
Bivor, Bavor, Bombur, and Nori,
An and Anar, Great-grandfather and Mead-wolf.
Liquor and Staff-elf, Wind-elf and Thrain,
Known and Thorin, Thror, Wise and Colour,
Corpse and New-advice: now I have rightly
– Regin and Counsel-clever – reckoned up the dwarfs.)23
Should one translate all these names, even the ones whose meanings we do not
know, as Ursula Dronke does, even inventing the nonce-word Trumbler to chime
with Trembler to render Bivorr and Bavorr?24 Dronke’s readership was scholarly rather than popular, and her readers were well placed to follow up the proposed
etymologies or argue with the translations. Should we leave the names in the
original, or try for a half-way effect, as I elected to do? Should we leave Gandalf in its original form, for the Tolkien enthusiasts to recognise, or is it better, since it is translatable, to translate it?
To the annoyance of one of the US Amazon commenters on my 1996 transla-
tion, who demurred, ‘I’d have liked it named him wind-elf’ ( sic), I chose to translate Gandalf as Staff-elf, for whatever a gandr is, it is not a word for ‘wind’.25 But I think that the casual reader will be more pleased to recognise where J. R. R.
Tolkien’s dwarf-names, such as Thrain, Bombur and so on come from, rather than
to learn about their literal meanings. Then again Þráinn – from þrá (‘yearning’ or 22 Edda. Die Lieder des Codex Regius, 4th edn, ed. Neckel and Kuhn. All eddic citations from this edition unless otherwise noted, with normalisation.
23 Poetic Edda, 2nd edn, trans. Larrington. All translations unless otherwise noted are from this edition.
24 The Poetic Edda: Volume II. Mythological Poems, ed. and trans. Ursula Dronke (Oxford, 1997), pp. 9–11.
25 Reading Amazon reviews, except the good ones of course, is a recipe for extreme
frustration. My wise editor took the view that there was no particular need to accommodate the particular quibbles of Amazon reviewers, unless they were self-evidently sensible.
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Carolyne Larrington
‘obstinacy’) – is an excellent name for the father of Tolkien’s (and Peter Jackson’s)
dwarf-hero.26 Its archaic English cognate thrawn survives in modern Scots with the second meaning: ‘stubborn’.
Also difficult to translate is a long list of what are, in effect, poetic synonyms
presented as personal names in the poem Rígsþula ( The List of Ríg). Here are the children of Farmer (Karl) and Daughter-in-Law (Snør); the tone is very difficult to
capture:
Bǫrn ólo þau, biuggo oc unðo;
hét Halr oc Drengr, Hǫlðr, Þegn oc Smiðr,
Breiðr, Bóndi, Bundinsceggi, Búi,
oc Boddi, Brattsceggr oc Seggr.
Enn héto svá ǫðrom nǫfnom:
Snót, Brúðr, Svanni, Svarri, Spracci,
Flióð, Sprund oc Víf, Feima, Ristil ,
þaðan ero komnar karla ættir.
( Rígsþula, sts. 24–5)
(Children they had, they lived together and were happy,
called Man and Tough-Guy, Landlord, Thane and Smith,
Broad, Yeoman, Boundbeard,
Dweller, Boddi, Smoothbeard and Fellow.
And these were called by other names:
Lass, Bride, Lady, Maiden, Damsel,
Dame, Miss, Mistress, Shy-girl, Sparky-girl;
from them descend all the race of farmers.)
Andy Orchard’s translation has both ‘Bloke’ and ‘Guy’ (st. 24) as two of the male
names in these verses. I tried not to have anything too colloquial or too British
in my version. In the original 1996 text, I translated Sprund as ‘Fanny’. The Old Norse word sprund means ‘split’, and in modern Swedish, apparently, ‘bunghole’, so I thought that a not-too-obscene term for female genitals might work here. But it
stood out too much among the other names so now it has been replaced with ‘Miss’.
I aimed to translate the text not into poetry, but not exactly into prose either. I
made some effort to imitate alliterative and rhythmic effects, but no explicit attempt to echo eddic metrical form. Modern English simply does not have enough synonyms (despite a lexis derived both from Germanic and Romance languages) to
accommodate alliteration and variation as Old Norse does. I also avoided looking
at other people’s translations into English, lest they usurp my own voice. I could not however quite escape from Ursula Dronke’s versions, for her translations are very
good of their kind. After teaching from her 1969 volume for many years, I could
not put them right out of my mind. Nor, on re-translating, did I read other English
versions. However, I did make use of translations in German, both when I first
26 Peter Jackson, Dir., The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012); The Desolation of Smaug (2013); The Battle of the Five Armies (2014).
Translating the Poetic Edda
171
translated the Edda and in particular when working on the new text in 2012, when
I had constant recourse to the
Frankfurt Edda-Kommentar series.27 This helped to clarify different grammatical possibilities in the interpretation of individual lines, and it also reinforced my sense of what kind of lexis was essential y Germanic, and
thus perhaps more appropriate when choosing between words of different etymo-
logical origins. How far it might be possible to triangulate translations into Modern
English from German translations of Old English (which might be argued to be
unsuitable for translation with Latin-derived lexis) is an interesting question.
Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century translators of the Edda were prone to using
Latin terminology in order to stress the parallels – and claims to high cultural
status – of eddic verse beside classical literature.28 To one poem, Lokasenna, which I cal , perhaps rather boringly, Loki’s Quarrel, Benjamin Thorpe in 1866 gave the resounding title of Œgir’s Compotation, or: Loki’s Altercation. Ægisdrekka ( Ægir’s Drinking-Feast) is a title which is found in some later paper manuscripts of the poem, and indeed it must have been very tempting to Thorpe to make his titles
chime in that way.
Few eddic translators are very explicit about how they approach their transla-
tions; there is little of a sense of a manifesto in their introductions. Auden and
Taylor do have a substantial section on rhythm in their introduction, reminding us
how important ear is to the practising poet – as of course Auden was. Guðbrandur
Vigfusson and Frederick York Powel , back in 1883, produced an arresting compar-
ison to express the inadequacy of the translator’s efforts beside the original: ‘At best his version is to the original as the thin, muffled, meagre, telephone-rendering is
to the full rich tones which it transmits, faithful y, it is true, but with what a difference to the hearer!’ they exclaim.29 Usual y however, translators seem to use their
introductions to extol the virtue of the source text and explain context and vital
information for understanding, and very much less frequently to discuss their own
philosophy of translation. The paratext – that part of a book which is not the actual
text – is something that publishers often want to keep to a minimum; it is more
complicated to lay out and too much of it, the commercial publisher will often