Often held to have been at least partially authored or to some extent assembled in the 13th century by Icelander Snorri Sturluson (hereafter referred to simply as Snorri), the Prose Edda is an enigmatic work that draws from the folklore of the North Germanic peoples, what we today know as Norse mythology. Nonetheless, some brief discussion regarding the Prose Edda and its structure may assist readers in navigating commonalities and differences among translations, and so we provide it here. While the present survey aims to serve as a valuable resource for both new and seasoned students of the Prose Edda, it was not designed to function as an introduction to the text. Where links to full reviews are absent, readers can often find reviews mentioned in this resource through online databases such as JSTOR. The author has chosen excerpts from reviews based on the sole criteria of ‘is this somehow useful for the reader?’ and encourages readers to read full reviews wherever possible.
The purpose of highlighting reviews in this text is to provide useful insight for the reader, including future translators.
Reviews vary in length and approach, and can at times descend into flattery over critical analysis. These sections are no doubt incomplete and, given the historic distribution of reviews, may always remain so. Wherever possible, entries contain excerpts of reviews from scholarly and popular publications.
The Prose Edda is closely related to the Poetic Edda, for which provides a survey of English translations here, and readers entirely new to Norse mythology can find a guide to getting started with the topic here. While Faulkes’s edition remains the clear go-to translation of the text, researchers-including those who seek to produce translations of their own-will find much of interest in the various translations of the Prose Edda, and always recommends comparing at least three translations when analyzing a text. It is for this reason that recommends Faulkes’s translation of the Prose Edda to all readers. Only one English translation to date, that of Anthony Faulkes, can be said to approach ‘completeness’. Navigating translations of the Prose Edda can prove time-consuming, difficult, and befuddling, particularly for new readers. Some editions suffer from censorship and only one edition contains normalized Old Norse text.
English translations of the Prose Edda vary in scope and content, and contain entire or partial translations of the four sections of the book. The present article provides the first in-depth survey of English translations of the Prose Edda.
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