BRINGING OUT A second revised and expanded edition of my translation of the Poetic Edda, which appeared in September 2014, gave me a chance to reappraise what I did nineteen years earlier when I first undertook the translation: to think about translation and what happens when you can revisit a translation, to adjust my perceptions of publishing cultures and audiences, and also to take on board how thinking about eddic poetry has changed since the mid 1990s. In this essay I offer some reflections on my attitude as a translator then, and talk about what I know now, and did not know in 1994 when I first approached the project. My observations may – or may not – be valid both for other translators and other kinds of translation.

The Poetic Edda is a collection of mythological and heroic poetry, largely written down in one manuscript in Iceland in 1270, now GKS 2365 4to in the Stofnun Árna Magnússonar in Reykjavík. Many of the poems are likely to be much earlier, some at least dating from before Iceland's conversion to Christianity. It was my idea to embark on the translation of the Poetic Edda, for I had been living at close quarters with it when writing my doctoral thesis on Old Norse and Old English wisdom poetry. I was quite easily able to persuade Judith Luna, the Commissioning Editor at Oxford World's Classics, of its usefulness. Further proposed translations of Old Norse poetry in popular translation series have not found favour: translation projects for the so-called Eddica minora (poems mostly preserved in a prose context in the ‘legendary sagas’ or fornaldarsogur) have not tended to be commissioned. Back in the early 1990s there were a few Edda translations around, such as Bellows (1923) and Hollander (1928) (American versions from early part of the last century with a great number of archaic usages such as I ween and thou and thee). Patricia Terry's version (1969), and closer to home, Auden and Taylor with Salus (1969) and the expanded Auden and Taylor (1981) were then the most recent translations. Terry's translation was published in the USA and not easy to get hold of while Auden and Taylor and Salus had not been reprinted since 1973. My translation then was timely.