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Jón KARL HELGASON, Echoes ofValhalla, The Afterlife of the Eddas and Sagas. Trans. Jane Victoria Appleton. London: Reaktion Books, 2017. Pp. 242. ISBN: 978-1-78023-715-2. $24.95.
W.H. Auden, The Avengers (both the film and comics series versions), Alexander Stirling Calder, the Monty Python troupe, Captain America, Scrooge McDuck, Tolkien, Hedda Gabler and Nora Helmer, Joey Tribbiani and the rest of the cast from the TV show Friends, William Shakespeare, Richard Wagner and the RingCycle, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis, The Vikings (the film and its short-lived TV spin-off), and Led Zeppelin-these are just a few of the topics discussed in this ground-breaking, well-written, always-intriguing study of the extensive, post-medieval legacy of the Icelandic eddas and sagas. The pervasiveness of that legacy is astounding, as Helgason moves beyond Andrew Wawn's thorough but more limited study of the Victorian embrace of many things Viking. And, for Helgason, such a study is something of a labor of love: he grew up in Iceland, surrounded by the legacy of the eddas and sagas in everything from the books he read in school to the names of the streets in his neighborhood.
Especially intriguing here are the multiple linear connections in that legacy which Helgason is able to trace, connections many of us might well have never thought of tracing. Hedda Gabler, for instance, 'can be regarded as among the fourth generation of robust protagonists in Nordic literature, and among her foremothers are: a) Hiordis [from Ibsen's earlier play The Warriors/The Vikings at Helgeland], b) Hallgerd [from Njáls saga] and Gudrun Osvifursdottir [from Laxdæ la saga], and finally c) Gudrun Gjukadottir and Brunhild Budladottir [from the eddic poems]' (p. 86).
Helgason...