Review: "The Poetic Edda. Stories of the Norse Gods and Heroes". Trans. Jackson Crawford (2015)

Reviews 155 for example, might have given a stronger sense of its relevance to the Viking Age had it engaged with the appearance of its motifs on Anglo-Scandinavian stone sculpture. The book has been designed with the curricular requirements of an undergraduate history programme in mind, a milieu in which the interdisciplinarity that characterises modern Viking studies is sometimes ill at ease. As a guide to the written sources, however, this disciplinary restraint allows the authors to exhibit both the possibilities and the limitations of the written evidence, in ways that will undoubtedly be valuable to students and their teachers. Its pedagogical awareness makes The Vikings and their Age a useful primer for beginners, and a good foundation for further study. Dale KeDwarDs University of Southern Denmark the poetic eDDa. stories of the norse goDs anD heroes. Translated by JacKson crawforD. Hackett. Indianapolis, 2015. 366 pp. ISBN 978-1-62466-356-7. The publication of Jackson Crawford’s The Poetic Edda comes at an interesting time, relatively soon after the appearance of Andy Orchard’s translation of the same material (The Elder Edda. A Book of Viking Lore. London, 2011) and hot on the heels of the latest edition of Carolyne Larrington’s translation (The Poetic Edda. Oxford, 2014). From this fact alone, one assumes that Crawford’s Edda must aim to offer something that these translations, as well as previous ones, do not. Commentary and explication are at a premium in the book itself, which avoids any reference to secondary sources apart from a brief but helpful list of suggestions for further reading. However, Crawford explains the intentions underlying his translation in a post on his blog (https://tattuinardoelasaga.wordpress. com/2015/12/14/why-a-new-edda-translation/): his Edda translation is ‘for a reader who is primarily focused on myths rather than poetry’, not made to ‘suit the needs of detailed textual scholars’. This statement opens up some interesting avenues for thought about the purpose, use and reception of Eddic poetry. It also places the present reviewer in a somewhat curious position: should one be checking the accuracy of this translation, or forgetting one’s background knowledge of the source material and attempting to read Crawford’s Edda with fresh eyes? It is tempting to stick to the more familiar, former option, and yet the above statement of purpose implicitly asks us to judge this book by how well it meets its stated goals: Crawford reformulates the question of translation from one of accuracy to one of accessibility. Crawford’s Edda is easy to pick up and read. Commentary is minimal but useful, and the verse itself is presented in a visually clear style. A published poet in his own right, Crawford renders his translation in a modest, cautiously elegant free verse with a rigorous consistency that gives the material a fluency impossible in a translation reflecting the original Old Norse syntax. Crawford’s 156 Saga-Book sense of rhythm is perhaps his strongest suit here, contributing significantly to the readability of the verse. The diction is simple and clear; Crawford is rigorous in avoiding the archaic and abstruse. These qualities combine to produce verse that reads easily, and yet seems almost diametrically opposed to the Old Norse Eddic style, which favours obliquity and opaque diction, as well as an economy of language that does not contribute to clarity. Crawford’s verse does, however, have a conservative sparseness that often comes close to echoing the terseness of Old Norse Eddic metres. However, style is not the primary focus of Crawford’s Edda; the style employed aims at transparency, seeking to shift the focus of the reader away from itself and toward the matter at hand. This matter, we are told, is mythology. Crawford joins a scholarly tradition that arguably reaches back to Snorri Sturluson (and, indeed, the compiler(s) of the Codex Regius) in conceptualising and treating Eddic poetry primarily as a repository of mythological knowledge, ‘rather than poetry’ .To that end, Crawford’s Edda includes a preamble written by the translator for each poem and a general introduction, including a brief overview of the Eddic cosmological system and one on the social context of early medieval Scandinavia. Discussion of the context of Eddic scholarship is excluded from Crawford’s contextual information, presumably to make the book as a whole more accessible or approachable for the casual reader. The strength of this approach is that it manages to avoid discussions which may weigh heavily on the minds of Eddic scholars but have little relevance for non-specialists; its weakness is that it fails to reflect the variety of points of view from which Eddic poetry has historically been approached, and continues to be approached. As such, though the information is useful, one feels it could have benefitted from adopting a more suggestive and less prescriptive tone, challenging the casual reader to consider the complexity of the topic at hand rather than presenting the information as a list of facts. In terms of faithfulness to the source material, Crawford has taken various liberties in simplifying and streamlining the text. In almost all cases it should be sufficiently clear to specialists that these changes have been made for purposes of clarity and accessibility, though one might question many individual choices. However, except in a few cases in the introduction, in which specific systematic changes in orthography and spelling are brought to the reader’s attention, none of these editorial decisions will be visible to the casual reader. Some specialists may not be fully satisfied with the transliteration of orthography (and a few will grind their teeth at the use of valhalla for valh†ll), but by and large these are concerns that would indeed be of doubtful relevance to Crawford’s stated audience. However, the tricky business of translating idioms sometimes comes up short in Crawford’s Edda. Both immediately noticeable and arguably symptomatic of this tendency is the translation of v†lva as ‘witch’, a choice with which many Old Norse scholars would reasonably disagree. One wonders why this term, loaded as it is with cultural associations which do not straightforwardly apply to v†lur, was chosen in favour of any of the more standard options; surely a brief explanation of the Old Norse term would have been of considerable interest and usefulness for Crawford’s readership. Ultimately, it lies somewhat beyond the scope of this review to say conclusively Reviews 157 how useful this Poetic Edda is as a resource for non-specialists. It does, however, raise interesting questions for specialists. Popular interest in medieval Scandinavian topics has surged in recent years, but who are these interested readers? What brings them to Eddic mythology, and what do they hope to get out of it? What do we as scholars have a responsibility to try to transmit to the public? How can we say everything we mean to say and still remain accessible to non-specialists? What is the difference, exactly, between the concerns of the specialist and those of the non-specialist? Is there an essence of Eddic mythology that we as scholars can translate? Crawford’s Edda represents a particular moment in this discussion; though it raises more questions for Old Norse scholarship than it answers, it presents an interesting argument, one we would all, specialist and non-specialist alike, do well to consider. pete sanDberg University College London the poetics of commemoration. sKalDic verse anD social memory, c.890–1070. By erin michelle goeres. Oxford University Press. Oxford, 2015. 208 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-874574-7. This monograph, adapted from an Oxford DPhil thesis, takes its cue from recent developments in the theory of cultural memory and its application to the Old Norse/Icelandic literary corpus, as outlined in the Introduction. On the whole, however, Goeres eschews theorising. Such leading exponents as Mary Carruthers, Sigmund Freud, Paul Ricoeur, Pierre Nora and Maurice Halbwachs are briefly cited, as is almost ritual in studies of cultural memory these days, but by contrast such an authority on mourning as Elisabeth Kübler-Ross is not discussed, nor do we hear about Elizabeth Loftus, Endel Tulving and other leading empiricists in the field of memory. Instead, Goeres’s monograph focuses almost entirely upon the skaldic corpus itself in a series of what the author calls ‘case studies’. After a brief Introduction, the book divides into five main chapters. These are 1. Remembering Ancestors: Ynglingatal and the Early Scandinavian Kings; 2. The Afterlife of Kings: Eiríkr blóðøx, Hákon inn góði, and Óláfr Tryggvason; 3. Changing Patrons: The Poets of Haraldr gráfeldr and Hákon inn góði; 4. Elegy, Hagiography, and Advice to Princes: The Commemoration of Óláfr inn helgi; and 5. Divided Loyalties: Arnórr jarlaskáld and the Jarls of Orkney. These are followed by a Conclusion and a detailed Bibliography and Index. The analysis is in an essayistic mode of literary appreciation. Goeres succeeds in her general aim, which is apparently to point to the complexities of her chosen verses in respect of ideology, genre and style. She seeks to show the poets positioning themselves in a variety of ways for a variety of motives, some more altruistic than others. She favours a reflexive model where, for example, ‘the poet . . . demonstrates that only the ordered structure of poetic language can