EDDIC TO ENGLISH

URSULA DRONKE: 1969, 1997, & 2011

The Poetic Edda, Vol. I: Heroic Poems (1969)
The Poetic Edda, Vol II: Mythological Poems (1997)
The Poetic Edda, Vol. III: Mythological Poems II (2011)
I: 251 page, II: 464 pages, III: 380 pages
Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press
Publisher websites:
Vol. I (no website), vol. II, vol. III

 

Translated Poems (14):

Vol. I (4)

Atlakviða, Atlamál in grœnlenzku, Guðrúnarhvǫt, Hamðismál

Vol. II (5)

Vǫluspá, Rígsþula, Vǫlundarkviða, Lokasenna, Skírnismál

Vol. III (4)

Hávamál, Hymiskviða, Grímnismál, Grottasǫngr

Other notable contents:

Numerous original essays (see discussion below)

Note format: Footnotes
Dual edition? Yes
Rendering: Jǫtunn = “giant” (I, p. 7), þurs = “ogre” (I, p. 9)
Censorship: None (cf. II. p. 340.32, 340.34)
Original illustrations? None

 

I. TRANSLATION SAMPLES

a.) Vǫluspá (II, p. 11-12):

An Ash I know there stands,
Yggdrasill is its name,
a tall tree, showered
with shining loam.
From there come the dews
that drop in the valleys.
It stands forever green over
Urðr’s well.

b.) Dronke does not translate Helgakviða Hundingsbana II.

c.) Rígsþula (II, p. 173):

With Rígr Jarl
he disputed runes,
teased him with tricks
and knew better than he.
Then he got his due
and gained the right then
to be called Rígr,
and have knowledge of runes.

 

II. REVIEWS

  • Holtsmark, Anne. 1971. Review of volume I. The Modern Language Review, vol. 66, no. 2, April 1971, p. 428-429.

Excerpt:

In her critical analysis the author is fortunate in her solid knowledge of Old English poetry, especially of Beowulf. It enables her to present the world of heroes and the ethics of heroes in a persuasive light.

Ursula Dronke’s work is very promising. She says herself that it is the result of ten years’ work; it is hoped that she will have the leisure to write the other three volumes. I am afraid it will take time, the German scholars I began by mentioning needed fifty years.

The book has a good, almost exhaustive biography, which will be of great value for the student.

  • Hollander, Lee M. 1972. Review of volume I. The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 47:1, p. 73-75.

Excerpt:

This is a notable contribution to Eddic scholarship. The authoress comes to her task de longue haleine well prepared: beside being broadly read in Old Norse literature, particularly of course in the substantial literature surrounding the Eddas, she is at home in Old English literature and shows a wide knowledge of Classical mythology. As a result, her work is stimulating reading.

  • Glendinning, Robert J. 1973. Review of volume I. Scandinavian Studies, vol. 45, no. 4, Autumn 1973, p. 383-388.

Excerpt:

The part of the present work most likely to invite disagreement is the translation of the poems. While the style of the translation is for the most part natural and unaffected by the mannerisms that have made many translations of the Edda painful to read, they nevertheless leave some doubt in at least one respect as to the wisdom of the method followed. The first impression created is that of a line-for-line prose translation of the original. (This is possible because of the paratactical Zeilenstil of Eddic verse.) Yet one is very quickly struck by the frequency of alliteration, which occurs not only when it would be difficult to avoid (e.g., Akv 21 and 23, Am 54), but in such a large number of other instances that it must be assumed to have been used deliberately. Is the translation then intended to be a verse translation? A large number of lines can, indeed, be read rhythmically, though not without some degree of effort. Yet without the controlling factor of consistent and correctly distributed alliteration (often only short lines contain alliteration), this soon becomes an utterly tedious and frustrating exercise, only to flounder completely on lines such as Akv 24/4 “to cry out never entered his thoughts,” or Akv 30/5 “by the sun southward-curving,” or Akv 31/4, “sovereign of enmity, to death” (all of the original stanzas are in fornyrðislag).

  • Poole, Russelle. 1998. Review of volume II. Parergon, vol. 16, no. 1, July 1998, p. 148-150.

Excerpt:

Altogether, this is a brilliant discussion of the five principal poems. Dronke eloquently conveys their literary and mythological qualities, with a perhaps unrivalled empathy for their unfolding logic. Fittingly for such an important contribution, the production values in this book are uniformly excellent. The virtual absence of misprints and other micro-scale errors represents a triumph over extraordinarily recalcitrant materials.

  • Kalinke, Marianne E. 1998. Review of volume II. Scandinavian Studies, Winter 1998; 70, 4, p. 531-533.

Excerpt:

Occasionally one is puzzled by the commentary for example, concerning Vǫluspá 50/3-4 and Lokasenna 42/1-3, both of which make mention of the loss of Freyr’s sword. Dronke considers Loki’s accusations that Freyr surrendered his sword for the sake of Gerðr … a blatant lie, “since Gerðr refused the gold and the sword was a threat, not a gift” (366). Concerning the same passage, but in the commentary of Vǫluspá, Dronke assets that “Loki … mockingly says that Freyr gave it [the sword] to the giants as a price of Gerðr, but neither Skm nor any other ON source (SnE 41 depends on Lks) corroborates this” (148). As a matter of fact, Loki does not say that Freyr gave the sword to the giants. All he says is that Freyr gave it away. While Skírnismál relates that the recipient was the proxy wooer of Skírnir …, it is silent about the sword’s ultimate fate. Since Skírnismál does not relate that Skírnir returned the sword upon the successful conclusion of his bridal quest, why should Loki—and like him Snorri Sturluson—not interpret the silence concerning the sword as implying its loss during the quest? Occasionally the interpretations are quite free and not supported by the text. For example, in the discussion of dramatic techniques in Skírnismál, Dronke draws attention to “reported circumstances to accompany the action …the noise and tremor of Skírnir’s arrival as Gerðr claps her hands over her ears” (395). Yes, noise aplenty is reported in stanza 14, but no, Gerðr does not hold her ears shut.

  • Faulkes, Anthony. 1999. Review of volume II. Medium Ævum, 68, 1., p. 159-161.

Excerpt:

The parallel prose translation is claimed in volume I (and on the dust wrapper of volume II) to render the wording of the original poetry closely; but as translations go this is rather free, and often gives imaginative or tentative renderings which would be better suggested in notes, since the unwary make take the translation presented in this way to be uncontroversial or authoritative. … In any case the absurd and unjustifiable price of the volume … means that few will have access to it, and in spite of the presentation of the text of each poem with introduction and commentary immediately following so that they could be published separately, no such separate editions of individual poems have yet appeared. … The careless and incompetence of Oxford University Press in the field of Old Norse studies is well illustrated by the advertisement on the dust cover of this volume for An Introduction to Old Norse, second edition, by E. V. Gordon revised by Norman Davis.

  • Clunies Ross, Margeret. 2000. Review of volume II. JEGP: Journal of English and Germanic Philology. July, 2000, p. 414-419.

Excerpt:

It is beyond the scope of this review to give a thorough analysis of Dronke’s editorial methodology (for this see Faulkes’s review in Medium Ævum), but it is perhaps worth expressing my disappointment of her treatment of the various manuscript versions of Vǫluspá. Although, as always, there are some valuable insights (I liked in particular her deductions about which stanzas Snorri is likely to have known but not quoted), there is also a range of assumptions about the transmissions of these texts, about scribal practice, and about what is and is not an inferior reading, what is or is not interpolation, that are not always justified (though sometimes Dronke is probably right) and may sit rather awkwardly with notions of permissible variation in the transmission of an originally oral poem.

  • Gay, David. 2000. Review of volume II. Folklore Forum 34 (1), p. 85-86. Online. Last accessed November 29, 2020.

Excerpt:

Dronke's commentary has some problems as well, especially the tendency to fully present only that evidence most favorable to her readings and the failure to draw from relevant folklore scholarship and primary materials.

  • Mundt, Marina. 2001. Review of volume II. Speculum, vol. 76, no. 2. April 2001, p. 438-439.

Excerpt:

The first of the poems included in this collection is Vǫluspá, a grand view of the world’s destinies, from the establishment of the cosmos to its downfall, ending with some short, but colorful, descriptions of a new earth materializing after the destruction of the old, the whole vision interpreted as inspired by or partly based on sibylline oracles and Christian ideas and presented as spoken by a female magician or prophetess without religious function. The introduction to this poem alone, together with the following commentary, amounts to nearly 130 pages, which makes it all the more puzzling that little is said about the type of eschatology presented in the poem, the closest parallel of which is found in ancient Iran, a fact much discussed in the twenties and more recently stated anew by Jaan Puhvel in Comparative Mythology (Baltimore, 1987), p. 285.

  • McKinnell, John. 2001. Review of volume II. Alvíssmál 10, p. 116–28. Online. Last accessed November 29, 2020.

Excerpt:

This book is a great achievement, and all serious scholars of Old Norse mythology will need to use it. I particularly value its clear elucidation of textual problems, its illuminating commentaries, and its sensitive and imaginative literary paraphrase-interpretations of the poems … However, it also has flaws: Dronke occasionally creates the textual details she wants for her interpretations (especially in Rígsþula) and often ignores the arguments of those who take different views from hers (especially about date and provenance), rather than presenting the reasons why she disagrees with them. She also seems to me to underrate the seriousness and importance of Lokasenna and to impose a single, rather partial view on Skírnismál. Perhaps, with the continual growth of modern scholarship, the time is past when a single scholar can hope to produce an authoritative edition of the whole eddic corpus, or even of a major section of it, such as is covered here. While there is much in this book to admire and to learn from, it does not in the end provide the authoritative modern edition of these poems for which many of us were hoping.

  • North, Richard. 2001. Review of volume II. Saga-Book, vol. XXV, p. 219-226. Viking Society for Northern Research. Online. Last accessed November 30, 2020.

Excerpt:

Less convincing, perhaps, in ‘Weland as Christian figura’, is Mrs Dronke’s view of the Christian allegorical uses to which Weland could have been put, or of the use by Alfred of his name to render that of ‘Fabricius’, an ancient paragon of virtue, in the West Saxon translation of Boethius’s De consolatione Philosophiae (surely Alfred mistook Fabricius for ‘craftsman’ after Latin faber?). Yet Mrs Dronke is probably right to see the Weland-story as spreading out from Germany. However, not everyone will agree with her (pp. 287–89) that it was Ohthere, the Norwegian skipper who called on Alfred in the 880s, who brought the Weland-poem from Wessex to Haraldr Finehair’s court in Norway, whence it came to Þjóðólfr of Hvinir, who could not otherwise have alluded to Níðuðr in his Haustlǫng (c.900). Or that it was Ohthere who took Weland to Hálogaland, his home, where a local poet, adding the Lappish colouring, used it as a basis for Vǫlundarkviða. These theories are however boldly delineated. Section IV contains Mrs Dronke’s reconstruction of this poem’s impaired text and anomalous metre; and an excursus traces the surprising influence of Vǫlundarkviða through Gräter’s 1812 German translation, in Hoffmann’s ensuing tale of Cardillac, a Paris goldsmith and nocturnal murderer (Das Fräulein von Scuderi), and in Hindemith’s later use of this figure in his opera.

  • Gay, David. 2012. Review of volume III. Fabula 53, p. 126-127.

Excerpt:

There is no doubt that there is much of interest in this volume, but I do find Dronke’s readings of several of the poems problematic. In the earlier volumes of her edition she often played down the possible Christian elements in the poems; in this volume she reverses herself, and argues for a Christian reading of the poetry. She suggests, for instance, that “to celebrate their pagan past the Christian poets created Grímnismál as a verbal monument of their own imagination, to herald the new era.” (p. 111) Yet, as Dronke explains in her foreword to the poem, “The Lay of Grímnir, the Visored God is a dramatic, poetic monologue, entirely spoken by Óðinn [...]. The poetic focus is on the thoughts and memories in his time as a god, the whole mythical scenery of the world.” (ibid.) It seems unlikely to me that medieval Christians would write a poem in praise of paganism and the main pagan deity, and thus I find it difficult to follow Dronke in accepting that Grímnismál is a product of Christian poets, rather than, as is usually thought, a product of earlier pagan poets preserved in the Christian era. Her account of Hymiskviða is even more puzzling: it does not seem credible that the poem was “intended [...] to celebrate the defeat of the Devil by Christ.” (84) She refers to Þórr as “Christ-Þórr”, and suggests that “the role of the devil is played by the world serpent” while “Hymir and his giants” play the role of “the enemies of Christ” (84). Christian influences in Old Icelandic literature are often downplayed, but this seems to be a case of overplaying the possible Christian analogues, meanings, and origins of a poem. It thus seems to me very unlikely that Hymiskviða is a Christian allegory, as Dronke proposes, though it is possible – many texts were probably reinterpreted in Christian terms after the conversion. Still, there is no evidence for that having happened with Hymiskviða, either internally in the text, or externally.

  • Mundal, Else. 2013. Review of volume III. Speculum, vol. 88, no. 3, July 2013, p. 786-788.

Excerpt:

It is also unfortunate that Dronke, with few exceptions, presented her own ideas without entering into discussion with the views of other scholars. The bibliography includes very few references to scholarly literature from the two last decades.

Surely the editors at Oxford University Press discussed whether it would be right to publish Dronke's manuscript, for it obviously must have appeared a work in progress. In spite of my objections, I am nevertheless glad that Dronke’s final work was published. Ursula Dronke was for many decades one of the leading scholars within the field of Old Norse philology, and her contributions to the study of Eddic poetry have inspired and promoted scholarly discussions for as long as most scholars within the field today can remember. Therefore, her last thoughts about these four poems are certainly of interest. It is a pity that she did not have the time and the strength to finish her work on the Eddic poems in the way both she herself and her many readers would have liked.

 

III. Observations

Compared to other English translations of the Poetic Edda, English scholar Ursula Dronke’s three-volume translation of segments of the Poetic Edda makes for a very odd duck. The first of Dronke’s three volumes saw publication in 1969, followed by another volume in 1997, and then a third volume in 2011. Dronke died in 2012 at age 90 (her obituary, authored by scholar Heather O’Donoghue for The Guardian, may be read here).

Readers will note that Dronke’s translation editions contain scant few poems in comparison to other translations of the Poetic Edda: From 1969 to 2011, Dronke published in total three volumes containing a total of only 14 poems, far fewer than the contents of the Codex Regius. Dronke appears to have at some point intended to publish more volumes. For example, in 1997, she writes that “volumes III and IV are already well advanced in their preparation … and volume I is to be reprinted with corrections and bibliographical updating” (1997: vii). Volume III, published in 2011, decades later, contains only a few more poems.

In her preface to volume II, Dronke informs readers that “the purpose of this edition is literary: to open up for the common reader the delights of the complexities and felicities of the poems and the beauty of the language, and to show the poets’ intellectual command of their themes, mythological, religious, and human” (1997: vii). Yet Dronke’s edition of the Poetic Edda places barriers before the “common reader” in three crucial ways:

1. Accessibility: Copies of Dronke’s translation dwell primarily in the bowels of university libraries. Few copies appear to be available at these institutions today.

2. Expense: Unlike every other English translation of the Poetic Edda, Dronke’s edition remains solely priced for university collections. As of summer 2019, readers can expect to pay hundreds of dollars per volume to obtain copies.

3. Scope: As mentioned above—and evidently based solely on personal preference—Dronke chooses comparatively few poems to translate. Although the concept of the Poetic Edda is amorphous, Dronke provides so few poems that her translation can only be considered partial.

These three factors render Dronke’s translation the least approachable, least available, and least comprehensive English translation of the Poetic Edda to date. More so than any other translation of the Poetic Edda, Dronke’s collective editions are not for “the general reader” unless that reader is someone who happens to have access to the few university libraries that retain all three volumes of her translations or is willing to pay several hundred dollars for these editions. (It’s notable that, as a specialist composing the present study, I myself encountered numerous barriers finding copies of Dronke’s translations at university libraries.)

Adding to these problems are major issues with the content of these volumes. To her credit—particularly in light of more recent translations by Jeramy Dodds (2014) and Jackson Crawford (2015)—Dronke provides copious notes, in fact more so than many other editions of the Poetic Edda, and many of them technical. However, unlike nearly every other English language translator of the Poetic Edda, Dronke also includes numerous self-authored essays along with her translations. These essays become increasingly dubious over time.

These problems seem to have intensified as the years passed and volume numbers increased. Consider the notes left behind by a former owner of the present author’s copy of volume II: In Dronke’s translation of Vǫluspá, this anonymous commentator wrote “Wrong! Fantasy!” next to Dronke’s discussion about invoking an image of an armed statue of the god Óðinn (1997:31)—indeed, no such statue receives any mention in the poem—and a hastily scribbled “what about the Norse sibylline evidence not included here?” appears next to the first paragraph of Dronke’s “A Christian Context of Vǫluspá” (1997: 93). As in many of the commentator’s other notes, the anonymous writer is correct to raise this question: Dronke neglects to discuss the extensive Germanic record of seeresses, preferring to discuss potential Christian influence.

Unfortunately, Dronke’s final volume only amplifies these problems. For example, volume III contains an essay on the god Þórr’s battle with the monstrous serpent Jǫrmungandr. In this essay, Dronke essentially ignores the wider comparative contexts of the battle—of which there exists a tremendous amount of scholarship—in favor of an unfounded and, frankly, bizarre approach in which she interprets the god Thor as somehow representative of Jesus (for more discussion, see David Gay’s 2012 review above). This is hardly the only example of this sort of angle in volume III, and it’s easy to imagine this causing the aforementioned anonymous annotator to throw their copy through a window.

The comparatively tremendous amount of reviews that followed volume II also deserve some commentary. There appears to have been something of a review boom surrounding this volume, and many of these reviews go to lengths to shower Dronke with flowery praise—some reading more like job application cover letters than critical assessments. These gushing reviews are little evidenced for volume III, however, where customary praise for a notable scholar is truly strained between careful commentary about the bizarre contents within. Some of Dronke’s essays, particularly those found in volume III, most closely resemble scholarship now long rejected, such as that of Sophus Bugge (d. 1907).

This raises an important question: When is it appropriate to note when a well-known and evidently well-liked scholar has used her platform and publishing agreement to promote material that would almost certainly otherwise be thoroughly lambasted—potentially even described as entering fringe territory?

Ultimately, Dronke’s translations provide some value for scholars seeking manuscript discussion and, with extreme caution, commentary here and there, with increased caution warranted as the volumes progress. Yet without a general audience-oriented paperback reprint available to, as Dronke puts it, “the common reader”, only the most privileged can ever expect to leaf through these strange volumes.