The Saga of the Volsungs – January 1, 2000 Author: Visit Amazon's Jesse L. Byock Page | Language: English | ISBN:
0140447385 | Format: PDF
The Saga of the Volsungs – January 1, 2000 Description
Review
"[Byock is] very successful in his adept renderings of Eddic rhythm... The translation of prose is equally fine." --
Judy Quinn, Parergon --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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- Series: Penguin Classics
- Paperback: 160 pages
- Publisher: Penguin Classics; New Ed edition (January 1, 2000)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0140447385
- ISBN-13: 978-0140447385
- Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5 x 0.4 inches
- Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Jesse L. Byock's translation of the Old Icelandic "Volsunga Saga" -- a prose version of older stories, some surviving in Old Norse poems, including events going back at least to the fall of the Roman Empire -- is the most readily available English-language version, and in my opinion is one of the best -- arguably, the best, period.
"Volsunga Saga," the story of the ancestors and deeds of Sigurd the Dragon-Slayer, his murder, and the following vengeance, has been translated into English a number of times; a reflection in part of its own qualities as a story, in part of the celebrity of Wagner's "Ring" cycle, portions of which are, rather loosely, based upon it, as well as other Norse and German versions, and Wagner's own notions of what Germanic myths should have been. (The relations between versions of the tales, which seem to have been popular over a wide area for many centuries, are complex. I have discussed some examples in a review of another translation, as "Volsung Saga.")
The Saga differs from the "Nibelungenlied" in more than details, and in being in Old Icelandic prose rather than Middle High German verse; the Icelandic narrative is rich in a sense of personal honor offended, and legal precepts followed or ignored, in places where the German account is very much concerned with the outer signs of rank and feudal hierarchy. Both are equally reflective of reality; but different realities.
William Morris worked up a fine-sounding English version with the assistance of the Icelandic scholar Eirikr Magnusson, first published in 1870; it had a long-lasting paperback edition from Collier Books, beginning in 1962 (also published in a British edition as a Collier-Mac). That version had a good introduction by Robert W.
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