:crystal_ball: (Henry Adams Bellows’ translation side by side with the original Old Norse text) ⚔Atlamál hin groenlenzku (The Greenlandish Lay of Atli) ⚔Guðrúnarkviða III (The Third Lay of Gudrún) ⚔Guðrúnarkviða II (The Second Lay of Gudrún) ⚔Dráp Niflunga (The Slaying of The Niflungs) ⚔Helreið Brynhildar (Brynhild’s Ride to Hel) ⚔Sigurðarkviða hin skamma (The Short Lay of Sigurd) ⚔Guðrúnarkviða I (The First Lay of Gudrún)

⚔Brot af Sigurðarkviðu (Fragment of a Poem about Sigurd) ⚔Frá Dauða Sinfjötla (The Death of Sinfjötli) ⚔Helgakviða Hundingsbana II (The Second Poem of Helgi Hundingsbani) ⚔Helgakviða Hjörvarðssonar (The Poem of Helgi Hjörvardsson) ⚔Helgakviða Hundingsbana I (The First Poem of Helgi Hundingsbani) My personal preference though is the Jackson Crawford translation (which you can buy on Amazon). There is one translation of the Poetic Edda that is public domain (meaning you can quote it all you want because it isn’t under copywrite restrictions) this is the Henry Adams Bellow’s translation and the translation that you will find online for free. Which translation you should use comes down to personal preference. It should go without saying that translations with more modern wording are easier to read (like reading Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet vs JK Rowling’s Harry Potter). The differences between translations usually comes down to whether or not the poetic elements were retained or ignored and the use of archaic language vs more modern language. There are many different translations of the Poetic Edda available. It’s a collection of completely random stories (or perhaps the most well known ones at the time) about Norse Gods and Heroes. To quote Jackson Crawford, The Poetic Edda is much like a shuffled iTunes playlist. The poems likely did not all come from the same person, but from many people (much like the Bible was not written by just one person). The individual poems Themselves would have been authored by minstrels.

The person who compiled the manuscript is unknown. 2) there are a few known poets from before the 13th century that quote some lines of the poems within The Poetic Edda. Though the Codex Regius was compiled in the 13th century, the stories themselves are believed to be older than that because 1) there are errors in the text that make it pretty clear that the manuscript we have is a copy of another/earlier manuscript (see the video source at the bottom for explanation). Most of these poems were written down in an Icelandic manuscript called the Codex Regius, around the 13th century. The Poetic Edda is the closest thing we have to a primary source (a first-hand account). (Photo: timeline taken from This video cropped to only include relevant dates)

Faulkes prose edda