Revisiting the Poetic Edda: Essays on Old Norse Heroic Legend ed. by Paul Acker and Carolyne Larrington (review)

This companion to Acker and Larrington’s volume on the mythological poems of the Poetic Edda (Routledge, 2002) comprises twelve articles and a series of introductory segments conceived as aids specifically to readers of the PE (abbreviations hereafter based on Neckel-Kuhn). Four of the chapters are reprints; all chapters show high-quality work. The organization of the book with bibliographies following not only the chapters but also every segment should be helpful to students; the endnotes are also less inconvenient than usual (have publishers forgotten the art of the footnote?) because they are grouped after each article and segment. The last four chapters, which appropriately lack introductory segments, move beyond the PE itself to its reception and later analogues. The chapters follow in manuscript order, the extra-Eddic Grottasöngr and reception studies coming at the end. These chapters, however, are thematically governed articles; this makes them engaging to read but in need of introductions that are free to proceed poem by poem in an explanatory manner. The combination of specialized articles with an introductory function entails a good deal of paraphrase and rehearsal of basic facts, but the result should be interesting and useful to a variety of readers.

The first article seems to set the keynote of the volume in its attention to gender/ violence, society/family: David Clark’s “Heroic Homosociality and Homophobia in the Helgi Poems” (pp. 11–27) successfully imports some concepts and structural elements from Eve Sedgwick. The flytings are certainly homophobic, and the idea that abjection of the homosexual is the price of successful homosociality rings true; but I am uncertain what “desire” adds to our understanding of the homosocial in this specific context (discussed pp. 12, 23–24). I encountered a number of blemishes beyond the copious ordinary typos: omission of “and Sigrún” in “Helgi and Sváva were reincarnated as Helgi Hundingsbani” (p. 23); omission of vina and a comma in quotation (p. 13) and of sleit in quotation (p. 14); translation mistakes in Old English (d.o. of gewyrcean is the þæt clause; gode is instr.; on fæder bearme, not “from” [p. 13]); textual and translation mistakes in Old Norse (p. 15: the d.o. of Segðu is þat … at …; at omitted; translation wrong); p. 16: skæða agrees with valkyria [nom., not gen. pl.]; p. 16: skass is voc. [thus not “you were the destructive witch, of the valkyries” but “you were, witch, the destructive valkyrie”]; p. 16: at Alföður, not “of the Allfather”; p. 17: látt is 2nd pers. sg. rather than 3rd [thus “you were the stepson of Siggeir, you lay under the grain stacks at home”]); mistypings in Old Norse (p. 17: mólaðir for mólcaðir; Imðrs for Imðar); p. 18: hringom ráð for hringom ráða). On p. 13, blóðrekin should read blóðrekinn (the ms, agreeing with hilmir) or be emended to blóðrekna to agree with hodd, as Clark translates. On p. 19, st. 20 from HHv is printed as if it were (very bad) fornyrðislag/málaháttr, but the poem is in ljóðaháttr; Clark prints hreina rödd (so the manuscript, but this is a reindeer! Neckel-Kuhn has the traditional emendation reina), but Clark correctly uses reini ‘stallion’ further down the page.

Other problems concern content, among them: In flytings the “insults all pertain to a man’s masculinity and putative deviations from the sexual norm” (p. 15), but this “all” crumbles immediately as insults having to do with nonsexual forms of deviation or simple social status are mentioned. In the HH flyting, “Helgi follows this up in the next strophe” (p. 16), but the speaker was still Sinfjötli. “Sinfjötli and Atli both enable their companions to attain their valkyrie...