The Prose Edda cover art

The Prose Edda

The Rasmus Björn Anderson Translation

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The Prose Edda

By: Snorri Sturluson
Narrated by: Collin Moore
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About this listen

Eight hundred years ago, an heir to the Vikings collected their myths and wrote them down. Here are those original tales of Odin and Thor, magic and might, presented for your listening enjoyment.

The Prose Edda (also known as Snorri's Edda or The Younger Edda) is a manual of poetics written by Snorri Sturluson around the year 1220. In it, Snorri compiled the old myths and legends of the Norsemen, in order that poets from his time might draw on these stories to keep the Icelandic-Viking heritage alive.

Although they are a secondary source, they remain one of our oldest references for the original Norse Myths, as the Vikings themselves told them.

©2020 Ayrton Parham (P)2020 Ayrton Parham Classics

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Most relevant  
Fascinating look into ancient scandinavian beliefs and myths, stories that shaped the literature of the world

Viking lore

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Well told pice of history, well nerated would highly recommend pice of work 👏

wonderful book

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lovely listen and will for many years. couldn't ask for a better read. recombination

Great bit of history

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This is abridged and a poor translation

Narrator was better than some but rife with mispronunciation and misreading.

Abridged and a incorrectly written

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for this title. That's it. C Moore may have a beautiful cut-glass English accent but it is simply not appropriate for this content.

Sorry, but the narrator could not be more wrong -

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I’m learning to read old Norse and bought this translation so i could see how well I could read the original while listening along, (having already finished my own translation as practice work).
For the most part I could always see how this translator got from the Norse text to his English equivalents, however there are some major, and I mean major problems, including entire missing sections, which should be made clear before you buy.

I don’t want to say much about the reader he’s competent but hardly sparkling, he does a good Fenrir voice though.

No Notes:
There are four main manuscripts of the prose Edda, all are slightly different and all have gaps, so some notes explaining which texts this translations is based on would be useful, however there are no notes to explain the translation at all, or which manuscripts have been used as the primary text and for ordering the content. Many of the translation decisions beg for an explanation, some of them really rather drastic, see below.

Missing Sections:
The prose Edda contains four sections, an introduction, Gylfaginnings, Skaldskapermal, and Hattatal.
1. Snorri’s Introduction is completely missing.
2. The final paragraph of Gylfaginnings is missing, (this paragraph relates Gylfaginnings back to the introduction).
3. After beginning the first chapter of Skaldskapermal the translation then skips forward all the way to chapter seventeen, (about fifteen pages in my textbook). Cutting out a lot of examples, explanations of kennings, lists of different kennings for each of the gods, and more text relevant to the Snorri’s introduction. (The translator appears to have given up tracking the chapter numbers at this point, although the chapter numbers for Skaldskapermal are a little confusing anyway.)
4. So much more of skaldskapermal is missing that it has become pointless keeping track. Most of the big chunks of mythological story are retained but almost all references to poetry and Kennings are gone, which is most of this section of the book.
5. Hattatal is completely missing

Mostly Missing

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