Volume 3, Number 10 · December 31, 1964
A Hero's History
By Ted Hughes
Heimskringla
by Snorri Sturluson, translated by Lee M. Hollander
University of Texas, 880 pp., $10.00
The Prose Edda
by Snorri Sturluson, translated by Jean I. Young
University of California, 131 pp., $1.50 (paper)
Gods, Demons and Others
by R.K. Narayan
Viking, 256 pp., $6.00
Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla, the history of the Norse Kings up to the end of the twelfth century, is a unique sort of historical work. It supplies the vital accompaniment to our Saga picture of the heroic age of the Norsemen that the epic worlds of the Iliad, the Irish Cycles, the Niebelungenlied, and so on, have to do without. Those are unequalled and infinitely lively stuff, but they don't give what we'd also very much like—some touchstone sense of the atmosphere they grew out of, the minute to minute life that the poets looked at, and that men turned back to when the sound of the verse ceased. Everything's in a slight flush of glorification, which in its special quality may well be what makes those poems so valuable to us. But when we come down to it, still don't know what a Homeric duel was really like. We don't know, for instance, whether it was fought within a certain agreement of formal styles—as in the duelling of rattlesnakes, or seventh-century Blades—or whether it exploded straight off into mutual destruction by all means, as between modern infantrymen. We don't know whether under all that godly coverage the warriors—so much closer to the selective breeding of the Pleistocene—were physically tremendously strong, like orangutans of an equivalent weight, like Sandows, or about like modern heavy construction workers, or comparatively feeble, as Burton said all 'primitives' are, and as he found the North American Indians. We lack essential details of that sort.
Review, 1835 words
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