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anarcho_zymurgist's review against another edition
adventurous
informative
medium-paced
4.0
Pretty cool.
carinthia72's review against another edition
5.0
Great translation, with the addition of explanatory appendices offering helpful summaries of Norse mythology and further information on heiti and kennings.
smitchy's review against another edition
2.0
I am working my way through some of the books my Oma had on her shelves and decided this is the place to start. The Prose Edda is a collection of Scandinavian / Norse mythology told in verse and prose.
This is clearly a gathered collection of what would have been oral stories and the stories themselves often repeat / confuse / contradict each other. There are many characters that similar (never identical) names that might have sounded completely different to the people of the time but to me they were too similar and I had to reread several passages in order to make sense of them.
The stories themselves are a blend of mythology (so-and-so is a god who looks after this thing), fables (and this is why we do this or call something that), and sometimes just entertainment (and then this god decided to to this and then everything went back to normal). Many of the stories are handed to us in a question and answer format: a traveller meets three beings who answer his questions. The three beings are imaginatively named The High, The Most High, and Third and they spill all the tea to King Gylfi (cleverly disguised as a traveller) about the gods and their adventures. The stories often have a made-up-on-the-spot feel and the minor character's names often feel like the person who made it up was looking around desperately for inspiration (I imaging it went something like this: "The 13 horses' names? Oh, yeah, so umm they were....Swift, Grey, Fast, ... ummm, Big, Tall, Fleet-of-foot, River-of-Silver, Blacky, ....Big-mane, Big-Hooves, Long-Tail, How many is that? ok 2 more... Prancer and ummm...Potato?" ) Ok so I made a few up there but that really was the feel of a lot of the stories especially when I read the footnotes for the English translations of the fancy looking Scandinavian words.
Overall I am glad I read it as I can see the roots of many story formats and there is part of me that thinks that if this can still be famous hundreds of years after it was written there is hope for even the most Rocky Flinstonian of writers!
This is clearly a gathered collection of what would have been oral stories and the stories themselves often repeat / confuse / contradict each other. There are many characters that similar (never identical) names that might have sounded completely different to the people of the time but to me they were too similar and I had to reread several passages in order to make sense of them.
The stories themselves are a blend of mythology (so-and-so is a god who looks after this thing), fables (and this is why we do this or call something that), and sometimes just entertainment (and then this god decided to to this and then everything went back to normal). Many of the stories are handed to us in a question and answer format: a traveller meets three beings who answer his questions. The three beings are imaginatively named The High, The Most High, and Third and they spill all the tea to King Gylfi (cleverly disguised as a traveller) about the gods and their adventures. The stories often have a made-up-on-the-spot feel and the minor character's names often feel like the person who made it up was looking around desperately for inspiration (I imaging it went something like this: "The 13 horses' names? Oh, yeah, so umm they were....Swift, Grey, Fast, ... ummm, Big, Tall, Fleet-of-foot, River-of-Silver, Blacky, ....Big-mane, Big-Hooves, Long-Tail, How many is that? ok 2 more... Prancer and ummm...Potato?" ) Ok so I made a few up there but that really was the feel of a lot of the stories especially when I read the footnotes for the English translations of the fancy looking Scandinavian words.
Overall I am glad I read it as I can see the roots of many story formats and there is part of me that thinks that if this can still be famous hundreds of years after it was written there is hope for even the most Rocky Flinstonian of writers!
twistedreader93's review against another edition
Learning all the stories is so interesting but confusing as hell. I again can’t give this a rating because I’m just using this to learn all I can
fjsteele's review against another edition
5.0
Decided to give myself credit for my class reading this year in a shameless year end push to make my numbers reflect all the time I spend with books. If you want to understand the relationship between myth -- any myth, not just Norse --and literary creation, you need to spend time with Snorri Sturluson.
lara_m02's review
3.0
Gylfaginning was really good, but the rest was a lot like reading a textbook🤷🏽