Our understanding of Viking Age mythology largely comes from the poetic edda,

a 12th century compilation of fascinating Old Norse poems that explains how Norse people understood the world around them.

In this episode of the History Extra podcast, Dr Jackson Crawford tells

James Osborne about the second edition of his translation of the poetic edda and examines

what it tells us about the Old Norse ideas of masculinity and femininity.

Today I'm delighted to say that we're joined by Old Norse Specialist Dr Jackson Crawford.

Jackson, you've recently published the second edition of your translation of the Old Norse Poetic Edda.

Now, many listeners might have heard of this before, or might have heard of the prose edda, or perhaps not.

Can you explain what the poetic edda is exactly and set out how it differs from the prose

edda?

The poetic edda and the prose edda have sort of unfortunately similar names in, at least

as we refer to them in English today.

But what these two books are, are our best,

most direct sources of pre-Christian Norse mythology, even though they're written down

more than 200 years after the conversion of Iceland to Christianity. So the poetic edda is a

compilation of traditional oral poems.

The manuscript that we have called the Codex Regis of the Poetic Eta dates to about 1270 AD.

We can see from some lines of evidence that it's copied from an earlier manuscript, perhaps from about 1,200.

And the poems themselves are mostly in language

that is more similar to language in poems that we know from the 900s. So these appear to have been

passed down pretty faithfully over a few centuries since before the conversion, although surely nothing gets

spessed down without some modification and enlargement and probably shortening.

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