The Poetic Edda, revised edition

Carolyne Larrington is a scholar of Old Norse literature, and this Oxford University Press volume is her scholarly revised translation of the Poetic Edda, the collection of anonymous Old Norse mythological and heroic poems preserved primarily in the medieval Icelandic manuscript known as the Codex Regius. Its strength is that it remains a standard modern scholarly English translation, incorporating updated scholarship and notes in this revised edition beyond her original version. Its limit is what any translation of a fragmentary, orally transmitted medieval poetic corpus carries, the poems' composition dates and the reliability of specific passages remain debated among Old Norse scholars, so a claim resting on the exact original meaning of a difficult verse benefits from checking Larrington's own notes alongside another translator's rendering.