Poems of the Elder Edda

The great poetic tradition of pre-Christian Scandinavia is known to us almost exclusively though the Poetic Edda . The poems originated in Iceland, Norway, and Greenland between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, when they were compiled in a unique manuscript known as the Codex Regius . The poems are primarily lyrical rather than narrative. Terry's readable translation includes the magnificent cosmological poem Völuspá ("The Sibyl's Prophecy"), didactic poems concerned with mythology and the ev