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KOMMENTAR ZU DEN LIEDERN DER EDDA. BAND 2: GOTTERLIEDER (SKIRNISMAL, HARBARDSLIOD, HYMISKVIDA, LOKASENNA, PRYMSKVIDA). Von Klaus vOn See, Beatrice La Farge, Eve Picard, Ilona Priebe and Katja Schulz. Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag Carl Winter, 1997. Pp. iv+ 575. DM 148.
THE POETIC EDDA. VOLUME II: MYTHOLOGICAL PoEms. Edited with Translation, Introduction and Commentary by Ursula Dronke. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Pp. xiv + 443- L65.
It is an unusual coincidence that two large and significant studies of Old NorseIcelandic Eddic poetry should appear in the same year and it is thus instructive to compare them, as well as to evaluate each book's contribution to the subject. While Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda is, as its name indicates, a commentary to the texts of the five poems of the Elder Edda listed above, which takes the fifth edition of Neckel-Kuhn (I 983) as its base text, Ursula Dronke's work is the second volume of a new edition of the Elder Edda, with translation, introduction, and commentary, which began with her edition of four heroic poems in 1969 as Volume z (to be reissued with revisions in due course). She promises to bring forth another two volumes to complete the work.
Although she has had the assistance of others in more recent years, Ursula Dronke has worked for the most part alone on her edition and commentary. Volume iI contains Vqluspaa (with Baldrs Draumar as an appendix), Riqspula, Vqlundarkvida, Lokasenna, and Skirnismal. The Kommentar the first of six promised volumes, and began with the issue of a sample commentary on Skirnismal in 1993. When completed, it will include a general Introduction and an Index to the whole commentary. It is the work of a team of five scholars, led by Klaus von See, and has had financial support both from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the University of Frankfurt. Two poems, namely Lokasenna and Skirnismal, are treated in both the Dronke and von See et al. volumes.
A number of editions and commentaries to the often enigmatic Old Norse poems of the Elder Edda already exist, although most of them are the work of scholars of the nineteenth or earlier twentieth centuries, many of them German. It is probably timely to produce a new edition and a new commentary,...