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aeudaimonia's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
slow-paced
4.0
Hollander's is a fantastic translation, to start with. The deliberately archaic vocabulary is hard to get used to but not impossible (with a glossary of terms in the back). The English is difficult to understand in places because of the jumbled word order - word order meant, I believe, to evoke the syllabic patterns of various Old Norse meters. Once you overcome these two hurdles, however, the beauty of the Norse verse shines through wonderfully. That said, the material is dense, repetitive, and complicated; I'd recommend starting with the Prose Saga or an easier poetic arrangement, such as Tolkien's Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun (itself a five-star read) to get some of the basic plot points down before diving in to the many different iterations of the North's Niflung legend.
The book's greatest strength is also its greatest weakness: the late Hollander unfortunately reads as overconfident and sometimes downright mean with respect to a given poet's artistic merits, or a scholar's intellectual ones. Literary scholarship isn't so easily outdated as in STEM, but it's been 60 years since this book was originally published and I highly doubt that all of Hollander's points are uncontested today. The smorgasbord of violence, sexual assault, and misogyny warrants some caution for sensitive readers.
The book's greatest strength is also its greatest weakness: the late Hollander unfortunately reads as overconfident and sometimes downright mean with respect to a given poet's artistic merits, or a scholar's intellectual ones. Literary scholarship isn't so easily outdated as in STEM, but it's been 60 years since this book was originally published and I highly doubt that all of Hollander's points are uncontested today. The smorgasbord of violence, sexual assault, and misogyny warrants some caution for sensitive readers.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Violence
Moderate: Misogyny, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, and Cannibalism