In literature, the advice often given is to show and not tell. In academia, it is the opposite: tell and do not show. Sigurd’s Lament is a text that asks the question, can scholarship show rather than tell? On the surface, it is the collected work of a mid-twentieth-century scholar, Hawthorne Basil Peters, who has curated the life’s work of his father—the translation of a Welsh epic into the alliterative meter of the English Revival. The poem is produced in full, but so too is the historic introduction, commentary, and academic apparatus. Peters, for the first time, shares with the world his father’s wonderful translation and his previously unpublished academic ideas. In a text rife with distention, however, Peters draws the reader’s attention to the unexpected flexibility of language and asks only one thing in return: drink deeply. For Sigurd’s Lament is a text of the most serious play. It is ambiguous and obfuscating and riddled with footnotes that have lurking within them—like goblins in the weeds—future tales of past narratives.

Volume 2.

She sees, coming up a second time, earth from the ocean, eternally green; the waterfalls plunge, an eagle soars above them, over the mountain hunting fish. After the terrible conflagration of Ragnarok, the earth rises serenely again from the ocean, and life is renewed. The Poetic Edda begins with The Seeress's Prophecy which recounts the creation of the world, and looks forward to its destruction and rebirth. In this great collection of Norse-Icelandic mythological and heroic poetry, the exploits of gods and humans are related. The one-eyed Odin, red-bearded Thor, Loki the trickster, the lovely goddesses, and the giants who are their enemies walk beside the heroic Helgi, Sigurd the Dragon-Slayer, Brynhild the shield-maiden, and the implacable Gudrun. This translation also features the quest-poem The Lay of Svipdag and The Waking of Angantyr, in which a girl faces down her dead father to retrieve his sword. Comic, tragic, instructive, grandiose, witty, and profound, the poems of the Edda have influenced artists from Wagner to Tolkien and speak to us as freely as when they were first written down seven hundred and fifty years ago.

This book examines translations of Icelandic sagas and the Victorian and Edwardian children's literature they inspired, some of which are canonical while others are forgotten. It covers authors like William Morris, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Thomas Gray, Walter Scott, H. Rider Haggard, W.H. Auden, John Greenleef Whittier and more. In lavish volumes and modest schoolbooks, British and American writers claimed Nordic heritage and explored Nordic traditions. The sagas offered a rich and wide-ranging source for these authors: Volsunga saga's Sigurd the dragon slayer; King Olaf's saga of opposing Nordic Gods and Christianity; Frithiof's model of headstrong youth beset with unfair opposition and lost love. Grettir and Njal tell of men who accepted fate and met conflict and enemies unflinchingly; Aslaug, Gudrida, Hallberga and Hervar exerted remarkable influence; and Eric the Red and Leif the Lucky provided Americans with a Nordic heritage of discovery.

The Saga of the Volsungs is an Icelandic epic of special interest to admirers of Richard Wagner, who drew heavily upon this Norse source in writing his Ring Cycle and a primary source for writers of fantasy such as J. R. R. Tolkien and romantics such as William Morris. A trove of traditional lore, it tells of love, jealousy, vengeance, war, and the mythic deeds of the dragonslayer, Sigurd the Volsung. Byock's comprehensive introduction explores the history, legends, and myths contained in the saga and traces the development of a narrative that reaches back to the period of the great folk migrations in Europe when the Roman Empire collapsed.

Scholars have often focused on understanding Aristotle's poetic theory, and particularly the concept of catharsis in the Poetics, as a response to Plato's critique of pity in the Republic. However, this book shows that, while Greek thinkers all acknowledge pity and some form of fear as responses to tragedy, each assumes for the two emotions a different purpose, mode of presentation and, to a degree, understanding. This book reassesses expressions of the emotions within different tragedies and explores emotional responses to and discussions of the tragedies by contemporary philosophers, providing insights into the ethical and social implications of the emotions.