Approaches To Asgard

Myths of the Norsemen – originally published as The Saga of Asgard, was another in Roger Lancelyn Green’s series of retellings of classic bodies of mythology for young(ish) readers. As with his volumes of Arthurian and Greek mythology, Green endeavours to be as true to the source material as he can, whilst weaving the stories into a strong central narrative.

Unlike those volumes, where the range of source material Green had to draw on was staggering, the actual major sources for Scandinavian mythology are actually fairly sparse – in fact, we can read Green’s two main sources fairly easily, because they are still the two main sources we have on the subject. Perhaps, then, it’s worth taking a look at them before we look at Green’s treatment itself.

One source is the body of poetry known as the Poetic Edda. The exact scope of the Poetic Edda is hard to pin down because whilst our primary source for it is the Codex Regius, a compilation of Norse poetry penned in Iceland some time in the 1270s by an anonymous scribe (and which is the only known source for much of the material within), some compilers and translators also include within the body of work a few other stray pieces of poetry which clearly sit within the same tradition in both style and theme.

Between this and the fact that the Codex Regius has some gaps here and there (and some portions which, quite possibly, the original compiler simply botched the transcription of, since Norse scholars aren’t able to figure out what the hell they mean), any presentation of the Poetic Edda involves not only translating the text itself, but also a certain amount of editorial decision-making in interpreting ambiguous parts, filling in gaps (or leaving them empty), and selecting what to include in the first place.

The edition I own and have read is the version produced by Carolyne Larrington. This includes all of the Codex Regius poems, plus those other poems which are believed by current scholarship to be from the same general time, with useful notes to clarify obscure language (the poems make much use of “kenning”, using colourful punning descriptions of things to refer to them like talking of gold like it’s a “serpent’s bed” because snakes and dragons were supposed to like sleeping on gold), references to stuff not explained elsewhere in the poems themselves but clarified by other sources, and so on.