A review by cayley_graph
The Poetic Edda: Stories of the Norse Gods and Heroes by Jackson Crawford

dark mysterious fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

I started off disliking all of the stories, with my modern sensibilities. Wayland the smith is dubious with consent, at best, with his wife (the one that leaves him without a glance backwards) and then punishes the king that imprisoned him by murdering his sons and raping his daughter. It’s a story from a hard and harsh world. When Loki insults the gods, he insults the women by calling them promiscuous and he insults the men by likening them to women and/or calling their wives promiscuous. Alviss is a bearable story. Thor protects his daughter (Tolkien copied his trick of using sunrise to turn the evil-doer into stone) and I liked all the names of the things and the places. Also, this book is where Tolkien sourced all the names of the dwarves and many other place names, like Mirkwood. In the end, I was engrossed by the Völsunga saga and the power of story.