Vǫluspá is the most widely studied and celebrated poem in the Old Norse corpus. However, readers who own a few different translations of it know how different they can be from one another.
Translators also greatly benefit from comparing their rendering decisions who those who came before them, and students of the poems regularly seek out discussion of the poem's tightly-packed stanzas, particularly some of its more troublesome items.
Read MoreMimisbrunnr.info now hosts the first in-depth survey of English translations of the Prose Edda, including overviews of translations by Jesse Byock, Anthony Faulkes, Anthony Gilchrist Brodeur, Geoge Webb Dasent, and Rasmus Björn Anderson.
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Huge news for ancient Germanic studies: the International Saga Conference Archive is now online and open for perusal to the public. From the Saga Conference Archive website:
The goddess Sága chats with the god Odin in an illustration by Danish artist Lorenz Frølich (1895). Image from Wikimedia Commons.
From the start, the papers delivered at the conferences were published, either afterwards, as proceedings, or, increasingly, beforehand, as preprints, the idea being that one could read a printed version of a paper before hearing it presented. Although many of these conference papers subsequently appeared in revised versions in proper publications, the bulk are only available in this form and have become increasingly hard to get hold of. The purpose of the present website, maintained by the Arnamagnæan Institute at the University of Copenhagen and sanctioned by the Advisory Board of the International Saga Conference, is to collect materials from these conferences and make them available on the web for use by scholars and other interested parties.
The archive currently holds PDF versions of over 1300 papers and/or abstracts by some 600 scholars, scanned in most cases from the original proceedings/preprints. Where revised — or simply more legible — versions exist, these too can be made available if the authors so wish.
This is a massive amount of useful material available to many scholars for the first time that will certainly further all involved fields. Hats off from mimisbrunnr.info to the Arnamagnæan Institute and the Advisory Board of the International Saga Conference for making this publicly available!