'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. New in this revised translation are 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 a new generation of video-game and film makers.
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