Inside the Viking battle of the genders

Our understanding of Viking Age mythology largely comes from the Poetic Edda, a 12th century compilation of fascinating Old Norse poems that explains how Norse people understood the world around them. In this episode of the History Extra podcast, Dr. Jackson Crawford tells James Osborne about the second edition of his translation of the Poetic Edda and examines what it tells us about the Old Norse ideas of masculinity and femininity. Today I'm delighted to say that we're joined by Old Norse specialist Dr. Jackson Crawford.

Jackson, you've recently published the second edition of your translation of the Old Norse poetic edder. Now, many listeners might have heard of this before or might have heard of the prose edda or perhaps not. Can you explain what the poetic edda is exactly and set out how it differs from the prose edda? The poetic edda and the prose edda have sort of unfortunately similar names in at least as we refer to them in English today.

But what these two books are are our best, most direct sources of pre-Christian Norse mythology, even though they are written down more than 200 years after the conversion of Iceland to Christianity. So the poetic edda is a compilation of traditional oral poems. The manuscript that we have called the Codex Regius of the Poetic Eda, dates to about 1270 AD.

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