The Poetic Edda (Oxford World's Classics Hardback Collection)

The Poetic Edda (Oxford World's Classics Hardback Collection)

<strong>"She sees, coming up a second time,</strong><br>earth from the ocean, eternally green;<br>the waterfalls plunge, an eagle soars above them,<br>over the mountain hunting fish."<br><br>After the terrible conflagration of Ragnarok, the earth rises serenely again from the ocean, and life is renewed. The<em> Poetic Edda </em>begins with <em>The Seeress's Prophecy</em> which recounts the creation of the world, and looks forward to its destruction and rebirth. In this great collection of Norse-Icelandic mythological and heroic poetry, the exploits of gods and humans are related. The one-eyed Odin, red-bearded Thor, Loki the trickster, the lovely goddesses, and the giants who are their enemies walk beside the heroic Helgi, Sigurd the Dragon-Slayer, Brynhild the shield-maiden, and the implacable Gudrun. This translation also features the quest-poem <em>The Lay of Svipdag</em> and <em>The Waking</em> <em>of Angantyr</em>, in which a girl faces down her dead father to retrieve his sword.<br><br>Comic, tragic, instructive, grandiose, witty, and profound, the poems of the <em>Edda</em> have influenced artists from Wagner to Tolkien and speak to us as freely as when they were first written down seven hundred and fifty years ago.<br>