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A review by bucketoffish
The Prose Edda by Snorri Sturluson
3.0
Since this book is kind of a historical document, it's a bit odd to review. Instead I'll just list some of the thoughts I had while reading it.
- The Catholic stuff is super shoehorned into this. It's funny that Snorri tries to rationalize away the existence of the Norse gods by saying e.g. Odin was actually Hector who moved from Troy to Scandinavia, but at the same time all this crazy magic stuff is happening, and that's accepted without question.
- There are a lot of Tolkien influences here. The cursed ring, the dragon on the hoard of gold, the races of dwarves and elves and men etc. I found it interesting that both Gandalf and Thorin were names of the First Dwarves. There was also a passage that sounded a lot like Theoden's speech to his riders.
- Thor is a huge jerk. He'll kill anyone for any reason and nobody even comments on it. Moral of the story is don't piss Thor off. Don't even look at him. Just stay away from Thor.
- Over half of this book is just talking about how to periphrase objects in Norse poetry. For instance, the book will talk about how silver can be periphrased as snow, and there will be a dozen example passages of different poets calling silver snow. No stories or anything, just pages after pages of people calling things different names. You would think there was more to Norse poetry than just calling things by the names of other things. These passages were extremely uninteresting to me and I started skimming over them after a while.
- So many names. At one point there was a rock that had a name, and the rope that went around the rock had a name, and the pin that was used to pin down the rope had a name. What a crazy world.
- It's interesting that the army of Valhalla was described as unimaginably immense, but the number of actual warriors given in the text was smaller than e.g. Napoleon's army.
- I think I would have rather read a collected book of Norse mythology than this. I guess it's good for people interested in history, but big parts of it were not fun to read.
- The Catholic stuff is super shoehorned into this. It's funny that Snorri tries to rationalize away the existence of the Norse gods by saying e.g. Odin was actually Hector who moved from Troy to Scandinavia, but at the same time all this crazy magic stuff is happening, and that's accepted without question.
- There are a lot of Tolkien influences here. The cursed ring, the dragon on the hoard of gold, the races of dwarves and elves and men etc. I found it interesting that both Gandalf and Thorin were names of the First Dwarves. There was also a passage that sounded a lot like Theoden's speech to his riders.
- Thor is a huge jerk. He'll kill anyone for any reason and nobody even comments on it. Moral of the story is don't piss Thor off. Don't even look at him. Just stay away from Thor.
- Over half of this book is just talking about how to periphrase objects in Norse poetry. For instance, the book will talk about how silver can be periphrased as snow, and there will be a dozen example passages of different poets calling silver snow. No stories or anything, just pages after pages of people calling things different names. You would think there was more to Norse poetry than just calling things by the names of other things. These passages were extremely uninteresting to me and I started skimming over them after a while.
- So many names. At one point there was a rock that had a name, and the rope that went around the rock had a name, and the pin that was used to pin down the rope had a name. What a crazy world.
- It's interesting that the army of Valhalla was described as unimaginably immense, but the number of actual warriors given in the text was smaller than e.g. Napoleon's army.
- I think I would have rather read a collected book of Norse mythology than this. I guess it's good for people interested in history, but big parts of it were not fun to read.