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/lit/ - Literature

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4056679 No.4056679 [Reply] [Original]

/lit/, where do I start with the Norse sagas?

>filename not related.

>> No.4056692

I dunno... try pick up one of the sagas?

Find the penguin sagas of warrior poets. Besides being tough and angsty and poetic, having 5 of them together lets you get a sense for the formulaic structure.

Then if you want something longer, go for Njal or Grettir the Strong.

>> No.4056695 [DELETED] 

disregard, testing

>> No.4056710

What about the Poetic or Prose Eddas? Would you recommend either as a good jumping off point for learning about the mythology?

>> No.4056727

>>4056710
I think that if reading the sagas is what you want to do, then find a wiki or something to get the idea of the mythology. The eddas are great if the mythology is what you want. Mostly, beyond a name-drop or a character encountering an odinic figure, the mythology is not of terribly great importance. It's obviously in the background, but you don't need it to enjoy reading the sagas . . . they're about the characters' actions principally.

>> No.4056737

>>4056679
Heimskringla!
why?
only one i know.
ll

>> No.4056741
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4056741

I recommend starting with Grettis saga, Burnt-Njals saga, Egils saga and Gisla saga. Read Poetic Edda if you want to acquaint yourself with with Norse mythology. Háva-mál deals with Nordic etiquette during the viking ages and Heimskringla recounts the sagas of the myriad of kings from the beginnings of Nordic culture.

There are plenty of Icelandic sagas and I really recommend starting with these I listed because the more obscure ones often deal with law-speak, family squabbles and often tedious dramas.

>> No.4056754

>>4056727
My hope was that, as a layman to the history in general, that reading the sagas would give me a good look at pre-Christian Scandinavia, the mythology, and some good stories too!

>> No.4056773

>>4056741
Excellent, thank you!

>> No.4056778

>>4056754
Well, the Eddas were written about two centuries after the Christianization of Iceland, so keep that in mind if you end up reading them.

>> No.4056808

>>4056737
i like it, it's /lit/ in one post, good parody

>what is the best homer translation?
>OHHH! OOH! PICK ME! I READ ONE FOR A CLASS AND CAN NAME IT!

>> No.4056816

>>4056808
derail: Can anyone give me a better answer for the Odyssey than the E. V. Rieu translation I read for class? Nothing too archaic, and preferably not verse.

>> No.4056822

>>4056816
http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/homer/homertranslations.htm

Pope is venerable but free with the text and you might not like his style, some strongly prefer Chapman (but definitely sample it first), Lattimore and Fagles are the undergraduate favourites so I don't know about them and you might want to make your own call there, the site I'm linking seems to lean toward Fitzgerald and favour his style of freer rearranging of the text to be poetically virtuous without caring too much about preserving exact word order and such. Personally I read Fitzgerald and loved him, and the nice thing is he did the Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid, so you can get used to his style and ride him all the way through the three best Greco-Roman epics.

No idea about Rieu, don't wanna shit on a guy who translated Homer, but he might be just the cheapest thing Penguin could get its hands on. They do that.

>> No.4056830

>No idea about Rieu, don't wanna shit on a guy who translated Homer, but he might be just the cheapest thing Penguin could get its hands on. They do that.

He did co-found the Penguin classics series so they probably got it pretty cheap...

>> No.4056833

>>4056830
Shit, shows what I know!