Part of a new series Legends from the Ancient North, The Elder Edda is one of the classic books that influenced JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings 'So the company of men led a careless life, All was well with them: until One began To encompass evil, an enemy from hell. Grendel they called this cruel spirit...' J.R.R. Tolkien spent much of his life studying, translating and teaching the great epic stories of northern Europe, filled with heroes, dragons, trolls, dwarves and magic. He was hugely influential for his advocacy of Beowulf as a great work of literature and, even if he had never written The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, would be recognised today as a significant figure in the rediscovery of these extraordinary tales. Legends from the Ancient North brings together from Penguin Classics five of the key works behind Tolkien's fiction.They are startling, brutal, strange pieces of writing, with an elemental power brilliantly preserved in these translations.They plunge the reader into a world of treachery, quests, chivalry, trials of strength.They are the most ancient narratives that exist from northern Europe and bring us as near as we will ever get to the origins of the magical landscape of Middle-earth (Midgard) which Tolkien remade in the 20th century.

Originally published in 1920, this book provides a theory of the dramatic origin of the older Eddic poems. Whilst the Eddic collection in general can be seen to contain a variety of unrelated elements, there is an essential unity to the older poems on native subjects. This can be seen in their special metre, their dialogic or monologic form, bearing traces of improvisation by one or more speakers, their stage directions, their stock scenes, their taste for disguised or theriomorphic characters, and their fixed traditional plots. In analysing this unity, the text brings forth observations on the relationship between the poems and the socio-cultural context in which they were written. This is a highly informative volume that will be of value to anyone with an interest in Old Norse literature and literary criticism.

The great poetic tradition of pre-Christian Scandinavia is known to us almost exclusively though the Poetic Edda. The poems originated in Iceland, Norway, and Greenland between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, when they were compiled in a unique manuscript known as the Codex Regius. The poems are primarily lyrical rather than narrative. Terry's readable translation includes the magnificent cosmological poem Völuspá ("The Sibyl's Prophecy"), didactic poems concerned with mythology and the everyday conduct of life, and heroic poems, of which an important group is concerned with the story of Sigurd and Brynhild. Poems of the Elder Edda will appeal to students of Old Norse, Icelandic, and Medieval literature, as well as to general readers of poetry.

"King Gylfe was a wise man and skilled in the black art. He wondered much that the asa-folk was so mighty in knowledge, that all things went after their will. He thought to himself whether this could come from their own nature, or whether the cause must be sought for among the gods whom they worshiped. He therefore undertook a journey to Asgard. He went secretly, having assumed the likeness of an old man, and striving thus to disguise himself. But the asas were wiser, for they see into the future, and, foreseeing his journey before he came, they received him with an eye-deceit. So when he came into the burg he saw there a hall so high that he could hardly look over it. Its roof was thatched with golden shields as with shingles..."

The Prose Edda, also known as the Younger Edda, is an Old Norse textbook written in Iceland during the early 13th century. The work is often assumed to have been, to some extent written, by the Icelandic scholar and historian Snorri Sturluson. Today, it is considered the fullest and most detailed source for modern knowledge of Norse mythology.