Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda, vol. 6: Heldenlieder (review)

This, the fifth and nearly the largest volume to be published in the most extensive commentary there has yet been on the Old Norse-Icelandic Poetic Edda corpus, is also the third published volume of the Frankfurt commentary series on Norse heroic poetry, Volumes 4 and 5 being the other two, published in 2004 and 2006 respectively. Volumes 2 and 3, dealing with mythological poems, appeared in 1997 and 2000, and the scholarly community now awaits the final volume, which will complete the commentary on the mythological poems.

The five volumes of Kommentar to appear so far are the work of a team of scholars from the Frankfurter Institut für Skandinavistik, led by Klaus von See and Beatrice La Farge, and assisted by several other researchers. Like most long-running projects, the Kommentar has required dedication and high levels of expertise from its authors, as well as continuing financial and infrastructural support, in this case from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the Goethe University of Frankfurt respectively. It is also of interest that the Kommentar series is now to be complemented by another project, on “Edda-Rezeption,” from the same Institute but under the leadership of Julia Zernack. It will be fascinating to see the extent to which the two research projects are able to interrelate.

The enormous body of scholarship that has been generated—and will continue to be generated—by a small anthology of medieval Icelandic poetry speaks to the unique importance of its contents. Most of the Poetic Edda corpus comes down to us in a single late thirteenth-century Icelandic codex, GKS 2365 4°, now in the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies in Reykjavík, though some of its texts are also found in other Icelandic manuscripts. The codex divides into two parts, the first eleven poems having subjects relating to the pre-Christian gods of early Scandinavia, the second group of twenty poems dealing with high and low points in the lives of figures of Old Norse heroic legend. Some of the subject-matter of the heroic poems is common to a number of early Germanic legendary traditions, and is therefore of interest to scholars of Old High German and Old English as well as to scholars of Old Norse. It is also of key significance to those interested in oral literature and Germanic myth and religion. The Poetic Edda’s importance to so many areas of study and research readily explains how it is possible to produce a commentary of several thousand pages to a poetic corpus that runs to only a little over three hundred pages of edited text in the standard edition of Hans Kuhn and Gustav Neckel (5th edn 1983).

The volume of Kommentar reviewed here deals with a group of poems of the Poetic Edda codex that come immediately after a lacuna in the manuscript between stanzas 1–37 of Sigrdrífumál (The Speech of Sigrdrífa) and what remains of the poem now called by most editors Brot af Sigurðarkviðu (Fragment of a Poem about Sigurðr), which is an overview of the events of the Germanic hero Sigurðr’s adult life leading up to his death. (Volume 5 was devoted to poetry about Sigurðr’s youth.) The group of poems in Volume 6 treats the various legends about the hero’s tragic and tangled relations with his brother-in-law and rival Gunnarr and two women, Brynhildr and Guðrún. The relationships between these four characters are narrated in some detail in Völsunga saga and in part of Snorri Sturluson’s Edda, as well as in the Middle High German Nibelungenlied. Because part of the Poetic Edda codex is missing at this point (exactly how much continues to be debated), the Kommentar authors add a section at the end of the volume (pp. 943–62) on fragments of poetry recorded in...