All the poems quoted in the Younger Edda have in this edition been traced back to their sources in the Elder Edda and elsewhere.
Where the notes seem to the reader insufficient, we must refer him to our Norse Mythology, where he will, we trust, find much of the additional information he may desire.
Well aware that our work has many imperfections, and begging our readers to deal generously with our shortcomings, we send the book out into the world with the hope that it may aid some young son or daughter of Odin to find his way to the fountains of Urd and Mimer and to Idun's rejuvenating apples. The son must not squander, but husband wisely, what his father has accumulated. The race must cherish and hold fast and add to the thought that the past has bequeathed to it. Thus does it grow greater and richer with each new generation. The past is the mirror that reflects the future.
R. B. ANDERSON. University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wis., _September, 1879_.
CHAPTER VI. The First Works of the Asas--The Golden Age 69
CHAPTER VII. On the Wonderful Things in Heaven 72
CHAPTER XI. The Giantess Gerd and Skirner's Journey 101
CHAPTER XIII. Odin's Horse and Frey's Ship 109
CHAPTER III. How Njord got Skade to Wife 158
Thor and Hrungner 169 Thor's Journey to Geirrod's 176 Idun 184 Æger's Feast 187 Loke's Wager with the Dwarfs 189 The Niflungs and Gjukungs 193 Menja and Fenja 206 The Grottesong 208 Rolf Krake 214 Hogne and Hild 218
Enea 221 Herikon 221 The Historical Odin 221 Fornjot and the Settlement of Norway 239 Notes to the Fooling of Gylfe 242 Note on the Niflungs and Gjukungs 266 Note on Menja and Fenja 267 Why the Sea is Salt 268
The records of our Teutonic past have hitherto received but slight attention from the English-speaking branch of the great world-ash Ygdrasil. This indifference is the more deplorable, since a knowledge of our heroic forefathers would naturally operate as a most powerful means of keeping alive among us, and our posterity, that spirit of courage, enterprise and independence for which the old Teutons were so distinguished.
The religion of our ancestors forms an important chapter in the history of the childhood of our race, and this fact has induced us to offer the public an English translation of the Eddas. The purely mythological portion of the Elder Edda was translated and published by A. S. Cottle, in Bristol, in 1797, and the whole work was translated by Benjamin Thorpe, and published in London in 1866. Both these works are now out of print. Of the Younger Edda we have likewise had two translations into English,--the first by Dasent in 1842, the second by Blackwell, in his edition of Mallet's Northern Antiquities, in 1847. The former has long been out of print, the latter is a poor imitation of Dasent's. Both of them are very incomplete. These four books constitute all the Edda literature we have had in the English language, excepting, of course, single lays and chapters translated by Gray, Henderson, W. Taylor, Herbert, Jamieson, Pigott, William and Mary Howitt, and others.
