"She sees, coming up a second time,
earth from the ocean, eternally green;
the waterfalls plunge, an eagle soars above them,
over the mountain hunting fish."
After the terrible conflagration of Ragnarok, the earth rises serenely
again from the ocean, and life is renewed. The Poetic Edda begins with
The Seeress's Prophecy which recounts the creation of the world, and
looks forward to its destruction and rebirth. In this great collection
of Norse-Icelandic
mythological and heroic poetry, the exploits of gods and humans are
related. The one-eyed Odin, red-bearded Thor, Loki the trickster, the
lovely goddesses, and the giants who are their enemies walk beside the
heroic Helgi, Sigurd the Dragon-Slayer, Brynhild the shield-maiden, and
the implacable
Gudrun. This translation also features the quest-poem The Lay of
Svipdag and The Waking of Angantyr, in which a girl faces down her
dead father to retrieve his sword.
Comic, tragic, instructive, grandiose, witty, and profound, the poems of
the Edda have influenced artists from Wagner to Tolkien and speak to
us as freely as when they were first written down seven hundred and
fifty years ago.