The Poetic Edda (Limited Edition)

The Poetic Edda. London: The Folio Society,  2016. With a translation by Carolyne Larrington, illustrated by Simon Noyes. 306 × 221 × 47 mm. Pp. [i–vii] viii–xxxi [xxxii–xxxvi], [1–3] 4–419 [420]: [20] leaves of colour plates. Type: Minion Pro. Printed on Abbey Wove paper by Memminger MedienCentrum. Bound by Josef Spinner in full dark red leather; pale brown endleaves. Slip case bound in brown canvas. The edition statement reads in part ‘limited to 980 numbered copies for sale, and 20 lettered copies, which are hors de commerce’. Noyes’s illustrations, inspired by runic carvings, are tipped in. Norse and English is printed side by side.

Limited edition, luxuriously bound in hand-polished leather with five raised bands, pages coloured on three edges, and spine blocked in gold foil, housed in a canvas-bound slipcase. Hand-numbered 320 out of 980.

A near-fine book with pages clean, bright and tightly bound, with plates in pristine condition and virtually no wear. In like slipcase that has a hint of shelf-wear to bottom; else clean and structurally sound.

From the Folio Society website: "The poems of the Old Norse collection known as the Poetic Edda respond to one of humankind’s greatest urges – the search for origins. Subtle, complex and suggestive, yet disarmingly direct in style, these tales of gods, heroes and monsters, of love, war, folly and deceit, inhabit a world more primal in character than any other corpus of European mythology. We do not know who composed them, or when, but ever since their rediscovery in the 17th and 18th centuries they have inspired intellectuals and artists in all media, for whom these poems held the tantalising key to a shared Northern identity.

All but a few of the poems in the Poetic Edda were preserved in a single manuscript known as the Codex Regius, copied by an unknown Icelandic scribe in the 1270s and presented by the Lutheran Bishop of Skálholt, Brynjolf Sveinsson, to the Danish court nearly four centuries later. Bishop Brynjolf was convinced that this unassuming manuscript contained the hitherto lost source material for the great treatise on Norse poetry by the Icelandic historian Snorri Sturluson (1179– 1241), which its author had referred to as an edda or poetics. The Codex Regius was duly dubbed the Poetic Edda or Elder Edda, to distinguish it from Snorri’s ‘younger’ prose work. 

Translations into Latin, French and English were enthusiastically received by a public eager to construct a sense of its own legendary past. Early adaptations of the Edda poems such as Thomas Gray’s The Descent of Odin heralded a mania for the Norse myths in the 19th century, reaching its apogee in works by William Morris and in Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle, of which the mythological substrata are formed from Eddic tales. The fascination with the collection continued into the following century, with Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden and Jorge Luis Borges all professed admirers. Most pervasively of all, J. R. R. Tolkien found inspiration in the Edda for his creation of Middle Earth."