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The Elder Edda: A Book of Viking Lore
Compiled by an unknown scribe in Iceland around 1270, and based on sources dating back centuries earlier, these mythological and heroic poems tell of gods and mortals from an ancient the giant-slaying Thor, the doomed Völsung family, the Hel-ride of Brynhild and the cruelty of Atli the Hun. Eclectic, incomplete and fragmented, these verses nevertheless retain their stark beauty and their power to enthrall, opening a window on to the thoughts, beliefs and hopes of the Vikings and their world.
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Published April 7, 2011
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About the author
Andy Orchard
29 books7 followersAndrew Philip McDowell "Andy" Orchard, FRSC, FBA is a British academic in Old English, Norse and Celtic literature. He is Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford.
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January 31, 2025
The elders of Viking Scandinavia no doubt enjoyed frightening and entrancing younger Vikings-in-training with these grim tales of the frozen North. And while not as many people across Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland believe in the old Norse gods as once used to be the case, the eddic poems that first set forth the stories of the gods, giants, and monsters of the Nine Realms retain their forbidding literary power, in a manner that is well set forth in this Penguin Books collection with the straightforward title of The Elder Edda: A Book of Viking Lore.
In an informative foreword, translator Andy Orchard of the University of Toronto explains the importance of the Codex Regius, an Icelandic manuscript that dates back to about 1270, in the preservation of this eddic poetry (the term “edda” may derive from the Old Norse word óðr, meaning “poetry”). Sadly, 8 of the original 53 pages of the manuscript are missing; scholars refer to this gap in the document as the “great lacuna.” Who knows what great stories of the gods, frost-giants, monsters, and mortals of Asgard, Jotunheim, Midgard (our world), and the rest of the Norse cosmology may have been lost to us?
With such questions being unanswered, and probably unanswerable, we are off into the poems themselves. The eddic poems are divided up as follows:
• 11 mythological poems, involving Norse divinities like Odin, Thor, Loki, Baldur, Freya, Frigg, and Hel;
• 20 heroic poems, setting forth the stark, revenge-oriented stories of a series of human characters like Sigurd, Gudrún, Atli, and Brynhild; and
• 4 epic poems that are not included in the Codex Regius but come from other sources.
A first-time reader of the Elder Edda might be surprised to see how often the Norse deities are figures of fun. A good example is the “Thrymskvida” (“The Song of Thrym”), in which the giant Thrym (Þrymr), a jötunn or frost-giant, has stolen Mjöllnir, the hammer of the thunder-god Thor. Thrym demands that Freya, the beautiful goddess of love and sexual desire, marry him as a ransom for the hammer’s return. Freya, understandably, wants no part of any such thing, and therefore Thor and the trickster-god Loki must travel to the realm of frost-giants, dressed as Freya and Freya’s maid respectively!
The humour of the story derives in large part from Thor’s decidedly un-feminine behaviour at the wedding feast. Why is “Freya” eating so much at the feast – a whole ox and eight salmon, washed down with three casks of mead? Loki, ever a trickster, assures Thrym that “Freyja hasn’t eaten at all for eight nights” (p. 100) because she’s been anticipating the wedding so avidly. Why do the eyes of “Freyja,” behind her bridal veil, look so red and fierce? Loki again has a trickster’s answer: “Freyja hasn’t slept at all for eight nights” (p. 100), again because of her eagerness to be married to Thrym. Eventually, the frost-giant is convinced, and calls for Mjöllnir to be placed on the lap of “Freyja,” to consecrate the union. That opportunity, of course, is all that Thor needs:
The heart of [Thor] laughed in his chest,
When the hard-hearted one felt his hammer.
Thrym, lord of ogres, was the first one he felled,
Before battering all of the giant-race. (p. 100)
It’s not the sort of scene that one might necessarily see brought to cinema for one of the Marvel Comics Universe movies about Thor, but it makes for compelling reading.
Eventually, one leaves behind the world of the gods and enters a world of singularly bitter human conflict. The general outline of the events chronicled in the heroic poems goes something like this:
• Sigurd, a dragon-slaying hero of unparalleled virtue, initially loves the Valkyrie Brynhild. But the sorceress Grimhild, Queen of Burgundy, gives Sigurd an elixir of forgetfulness so that he will marry Grimhild’s daughter Gudrún.
• In order for the wedding of Sigurd and Gudrún to take place, however, Sigurd has to help Gudrún’s brother, the Burgundian king Gunnar, marry Brynhild. Brynhild, who loves Sigurd, is outraged at being tricked into marrying Gunnar, whom she does not love.
• Seeking revenge, Brynhild lies to Gunnar, telling her that Sigurd slept with her. Gunnar, conspiring with his brother Högni, has Sigurd killed, and Sigurd’s son Sigmund is killed as well.
• Brynhild, at Sigurd’s funeral, admits that she lied about Sigurd sleeping with her, and then kills herself. Gudrún, broken-hearted, seeks shelter elsewhere.
• Later, Gunnar and Högni use trickery and deceit to induce their sister Gudrún to marry the Hunnish king Atli. They do so to keep the peace with Atli, who is outraged at the death of his sister Brynhild, and to protect the Nibelung treasure. Gudrún is the heir to the treasure, and Gunnar and Högni have hidden the treasure in the Rhine River. Once Gudrún realizes how she has been deceived, she hates Atli as Brynhild once hated Gunnar.
• Atli, who wants the treasure for himself, tries to force Gunnar and Högni to reveal its location. Both men refuse to tell. Högni’s heart is cut out of his body while he is still alive. Gunnar is hanged, cut down while still alive, and thrown into a pit full of venomous snakes. Gudrún’s pleas for mercy on her brothers’ behalf go unheeded.
• To avenge the killing of her brothers, Gudrún kills the sons that she and Atli have had together, and feeds their bodies to him at a feast. She then stabs him to death with Sigurd’s sword, and then sets fire to his palace, killing everyone inside.
This saga may have inspired some great works of art – Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle of operas, for example, or J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic fantasy The Lord of the Rings – but it is singularly grim.
These poems’ focus on fate, revenge, and dramatic irony comes through in “Gudrúnarkvida in forna” (“The Ancient Song of Gudrún”), a dialogue between Gudrún and King Thjódrek. The Thjódrek (Þjóðrekr) of this poem is a Norse variant on the real-life Ostrogothic king Theodoric the Great (ruled 471-526 A.D.) In this poem, Thjódrek is an ally of Atli, and his men have almost all been killed in battle. Thjódrek recalls a conversation in which Atli spoke of a grim dream he had had. He quotes Atli as saying, “So just now the norns [goddesses of fate] awoke me…I thought that you, Gudrún, Gyúki’s daughter,/Speared me with a harm-blended sword” (p. 201). The reply that Thjódrek reports having made to Atli – “It means fire, when one dreams of iron,/Secrecy and deception, when of a woman’s wrath” (p. 201) – looks ahead, though Thjódrek does not yet know it, toward the truly terrible revenge that Gudrún will take against Atli.
This edition of the Elder Edda benefits from translator Orchard’s helpful commentary on the poems. I appreciated, for instance, Orchard’s explanation of the significance of various aspects of the eddic poem “Alvíssmál” (“The Lay of All-Wise”). Orchard points out that this “dialogue-poem and test of wisdom” pits the dwarf Alvíss (“All-Wise”) against “the mighty Thor of the Aesir, who…is not otherwise known for his brains”, but who, in this instance, “delays his opponent until sunrise” (p. 307), when Alvíss turns to stone.
Orchard’s focus on Thor’s use of trickery – something that is not characteristic of this strength-oriented god of thunder – informs passages of the “Alvíssmal” like this one:
[Thor]: “Tell me this, All-wise, since, dwarf, I suspect
You know every creature’s whole history:
What the sun is called, which the sons of men see,
In every world there is.”
[Alvíss]: “‘Sun’ it’s called by men, but ‘sunlight’ by the gods,
The dwarfs call it ‘Dawdler’s deluder’;
‘Ever-glow’ giants, elves ‘pretty wheel,’
‘All-bright’ the Aesir’s sons.” (p. 109)
In context, it becomes clear that the original medieval Scandinavian audience for the poem would have seen this moment as a major example of foreshadowing. When Thor asks Alvíss to discuss the sun and explain what different residents of the Nine Realms call it, the hearers of the poem would have looked ahead right away to Alvíss’s inevitable defeat by Thor. The dwarves, we are told, call it "Dawdler's deluder," and accordingly Alvíss will be deluded, by Thor, into dawdling until the sun rises and turns him into stone.
These grim Northern tales of passion, deceit, cruelty, and vengeance are a perfect wintertime read. When nature is at its worst and most violent, it is a suitable time to read from these powerful tales in which revenge is always a dish best served cold.
In an informative foreword, translator Andy Orchard of the University of Toronto explains the importance of the Codex Regius, an Icelandic manuscript that dates back to about 1270, in the preservation of this eddic poetry (the term “edda” may derive from the Old Norse word óðr, meaning “poetry”). Sadly, 8 of the original 53 pages of the manuscript are missing; scholars refer to this gap in the document as the “great lacuna.” Who knows what great stories of the gods, frost-giants, monsters, and mortals of Asgard, Jotunheim, Midgard (our world), and the rest of the Norse cosmology may have been lost to us?
With such questions being unanswered, and probably unanswerable, we are off into the poems themselves. The eddic poems are divided up as follows:
• 11 mythological poems, involving Norse divinities like Odin, Thor, Loki, Baldur, Freya, Frigg, and Hel;
• 20 heroic poems, setting forth the stark, revenge-oriented stories of a series of human characters like Sigurd, Gudrún, Atli, and Brynhild; and
• 4 epic poems that are not included in the Codex Regius but come from other sources.
A first-time reader of the Elder Edda might be surprised to see how often the Norse deities are figures of fun. A good example is the “Thrymskvida” (“The Song of Thrym”), in which the giant Thrym (Þrymr), a jötunn or frost-giant, has stolen Mjöllnir, the hammer of the thunder-god Thor. Thrym demands that Freya, the beautiful goddess of love and sexual desire, marry him as a ransom for the hammer’s return. Freya, understandably, wants no part of any such thing, and therefore Thor and the trickster-god Loki must travel to the realm of frost-giants, dressed as Freya and Freya’s maid respectively!
The humour of the story derives in large part from Thor’s decidedly un-feminine behaviour at the wedding feast. Why is “Freya” eating so much at the feast – a whole ox and eight salmon, washed down with three casks of mead? Loki, ever a trickster, assures Thrym that “Freyja hasn’t eaten at all for eight nights” (p. 100) because she’s been anticipating the wedding so avidly. Why do the eyes of “Freyja,” behind her bridal veil, look so red and fierce? Loki again has a trickster’s answer: “Freyja hasn’t slept at all for eight nights” (p. 100), again because of her eagerness to be married to Thrym. Eventually, the frost-giant is convinced, and calls for Mjöllnir to be placed on the lap of “Freyja,” to consecrate the union. That opportunity, of course, is all that Thor needs:
The heart of [Thor] laughed in his chest,
When the hard-hearted one felt his hammer.
Thrym, lord of ogres, was the first one he felled,
Before battering all of the giant-race. (p. 100)
It’s not the sort of scene that one might necessarily see brought to cinema for one of the Marvel Comics Universe movies about Thor, but it makes for compelling reading.
Eventually, one leaves behind the world of the gods and enters a world of singularly bitter human conflict. The general outline of the events chronicled in the heroic poems goes something like this:
• Sigurd, a dragon-slaying hero of unparalleled virtue, initially loves the Valkyrie Brynhild. But the sorceress Grimhild, Queen of Burgundy, gives Sigurd an elixir of forgetfulness so that he will marry Grimhild’s daughter Gudrún.
• In order for the wedding of Sigurd and Gudrún to take place, however, Sigurd has to help Gudrún’s brother, the Burgundian king Gunnar, marry Brynhild. Brynhild, who loves Sigurd, is outraged at being tricked into marrying Gunnar, whom she does not love.
• Seeking revenge, Brynhild lies to Gunnar, telling her that Sigurd slept with her. Gunnar, conspiring with his brother Högni, has Sigurd killed, and Sigurd’s son Sigmund is killed as well.
• Brynhild, at Sigurd’s funeral, admits that she lied about Sigurd sleeping with her, and then kills herself. Gudrún, broken-hearted, seeks shelter elsewhere.
• Later, Gunnar and Högni use trickery and deceit to induce their sister Gudrún to marry the Hunnish king Atli. They do so to keep the peace with Atli, who is outraged at the death of his sister Brynhild, and to protect the Nibelung treasure. Gudrún is the heir to the treasure, and Gunnar and Högni have hidden the treasure in the Rhine River. Once Gudrún realizes how she has been deceived, she hates Atli as Brynhild once hated Gunnar.
• Atli, who wants the treasure for himself, tries to force Gunnar and Högni to reveal its location. Both men refuse to tell. Högni’s heart is cut out of his body while he is still alive. Gunnar is hanged, cut down while still alive, and thrown into a pit full of venomous snakes. Gudrún’s pleas for mercy on her brothers’ behalf go unheeded.
• To avenge the killing of her brothers, Gudrún kills the sons that she and Atli have had together, and feeds their bodies to him at a feast. She then stabs him to death with Sigurd’s sword, and then sets fire to his palace, killing everyone inside.
This saga may have inspired some great works of art – Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle of operas, for example, or J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic fantasy The Lord of the Rings – but it is singularly grim.
These poems’ focus on fate, revenge, and dramatic irony comes through in “Gudrúnarkvida in forna” (“The Ancient Song of Gudrún”), a dialogue between Gudrún and King Thjódrek. The Thjódrek (Þjóðrekr) of this poem is a Norse variant on the real-life Ostrogothic king Theodoric the Great (ruled 471-526 A.D.) In this poem, Thjódrek is an ally of Atli, and his men have almost all been killed in battle. Thjódrek recalls a conversation in which Atli spoke of a grim dream he had had. He quotes Atli as saying, “So just now the norns [goddesses of fate] awoke me…I thought that you, Gudrún, Gyúki’s daughter,/Speared me with a harm-blended sword” (p. 201). The reply that Thjódrek reports having made to Atli – “It means fire, when one dreams of iron,/Secrecy and deception, when of a woman’s wrath” (p. 201) – looks ahead, though Thjódrek does not yet know it, toward the truly terrible revenge that Gudrún will take against Atli.
This edition of the Elder Edda benefits from translator Orchard’s helpful commentary on the poems. I appreciated, for instance, Orchard’s explanation of the significance of various aspects of the eddic poem “Alvíssmál” (“The Lay of All-Wise”). Orchard points out that this “dialogue-poem and test of wisdom” pits the dwarf Alvíss (“All-Wise”) against “the mighty Thor of the Aesir, who…is not otherwise known for his brains”, but who, in this instance, “delays his opponent until sunrise” (p. 307), when Alvíss turns to stone.
Orchard’s focus on Thor’s use of trickery – something that is not characteristic of this strength-oriented god of thunder – informs passages of the “Alvíssmal” like this one:
[Thor]: “Tell me this, All-wise, since, dwarf, I suspect
You know every creature’s whole history:
What the sun is called, which the sons of men see,
In every world there is.”
[Alvíss]: “‘Sun’ it’s called by men, but ‘sunlight’ by the gods,
The dwarfs call it ‘Dawdler’s deluder’;
‘Ever-glow’ giants, elves ‘pretty wheel,’
‘All-bright’ the Aesir’s sons.” (p. 109)
In context, it becomes clear that the original medieval Scandinavian audience for the poem would have seen this moment as a major example of foreshadowing. When Thor asks Alvíss to discuss the sun and explain what different residents of the Nine Realms call it, the hearers of the poem would have looked ahead right away to Alvíss’s inevitable defeat by Thor. The dwarves, we are told, call it "Dawdler's deluder," and accordingly Alvíss will be deluded, by Thor, into dawdling until the sun rises and turns him into stone.
These grim Northern tales of passion, deceit, cruelty, and vengeance are a perfect wintertime read. When nature is at its worst and most violent, it is a suitable time to read from these powerful tales in which revenge is always a dish best served cold.
November 23, 2025
I’d only read these in Victorian translations so it was refreshing to be absorbed in this excellent new translation with good notes and introduction. Many of the tales are dark and primitive, of course, but after the horrors of Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebook, which I read at the same time, this was like the cold wind of Odin blowing down from the icy north and cleansing my brain of all defilement.
Thor, in female disguise at a wedding feast, nearly gives the game away by his Pantagruelian gluttony – an enjoyably comic moment. It also reminded of a much loved German friend – unlike Thor, a real woman – who once told me “There was a time when I would drink seven pints, eat a raw steak, and then smoke a pipe.” Despite working for the German Lutheran Church I feel she would not be out of place feasting in Valhalla. (Doris Lessing, on the other hand…)
Thor, in female disguise at a wedding feast, nearly gives the game away by his Pantagruelian gluttony – an enjoyably comic moment. It also reminded of a much loved German friend – unlike Thor, a real woman – who once told me “There was a time when I would drink seven pints, eat a raw steak, and then smoke a pipe.” Despite working for the German Lutheran Church I feel she would not be out of place feasting in Valhalla. (Doris Lessing, on the other hand…)
February 20, 2025
The best ever? There is a lot of competition from recent times, including the translations by Crawford, Dodd, Larrington (second edition), and Pettit (dual-language), all in Kindle.
Orchard is very good, but I have problems with some of his decisions: nitpicking in some cases, but then I have studied this off and on since the 1970s, so my opinion is at least somewhat informed.
The more interested you are, the more you will feel a need to see more exactly what is going on, and short of learning Old Norse, consulting other translations and commentaries is the most direct way in.
For readability, the very old Henry Adams Bellows translation is still pretty good: I have tested it with reading it aloud to junior high classes, and the stories I chose held their attention.
Orchard is very good, but I have problems with some of his decisions: nitpicking in some cases, but then I have studied this off and on since the 1970s, so my opinion is at least somewhat informed.
The more interested you are, the more you will feel a need to see more exactly what is going on, and short of learning Old Norse, consulting other translations and commentaries is the most direct way in.
For readability, the very old Henry Adams Bellows translation is still pretty good: I have tested it with reading it aloud to junior high classes, and the stories I chose held their attention.
August 5, 2024
All the glories of the Norse Mythos are arrayed in their splendour and deathly potency here. While some passages of the text are rather strangely translated in a way that occasionally breaks up the flow of reading, overall Andy Orchard does honour to the lore of the vikings. Hurrah!
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November 18, 2023By far the best translation ever, with comprehensive notes. Don't bother with any of the older translations.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews