Thursday 9 February 2012

Eddaedda

Reading Carolyne Larrington's Oxford translation of The Poetic Edda (although, according to these disgruntled readers, it's not a very good rendering). I like her note on the meaning of 'Edda':
Why the name "Edda"? Snorri Sturluson, an Icelandic author and historian who lived between 1179 and 1241, wrote a treatise on Norse poetry which he called an edda, a word whose etymology is uncertain but which clearly means "poetics" where it occurs in fourteenth-century Icelandic. [xii]
So, the title Poetic Edda means Poetic Poetics. That's splendid.

No comments: