Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/420

 366 Reviews.

to Professor Meyer. It propounds many problems, and opens up many and suggestive lines of enquiry, some of which can best be tracked by students of folk literature. It deserves close and exhaustive study. Alfred Nutt.

VoLUSPA : done into English out of the Icelandic of the Elder Edda. By Ananda K. Coomaraswamy. Nutt, 1909. 8vo, pp. 29.

This issue of Mr. Coomaraswamy's translation of Vohispd constitutes the second edition, limited to one hundred copies, a first edition of forty copies having been printed in Kandy, Ceylon, in 1905. It seems a pity thus to limit the circulation of a work which many readers would be glad to possess. Vohispd has been rightly styled the grandest of all the Eddaic poems, and is essential to the study of the ancient faith of our Anglo- Saxon and Scandinavian forefathers. Yet it has hitherto been locked away from English readers in rare and costly works, though Miss Bray's translation of the Elder Edda, recently issued by the Viking Club,^ has done something to make it more accessible. Mr. Coomaraswamy's rendering of Vohispd is perhaps closer to the spirit of the original than Miss Bray's, and will appeal more to scholars. It is terser and avoids rendering the Icelandic proper names by English translations, though this, and the somewhat too frequent use of obsolete words or forms, would stand in its way with the general reader. Both versions appear to follow almost identical texts, and from the standpoint of accuracy there is little to choose between them, while in neither is there any attempt to throw light on the problem of what was the original form of a poem which has reached us in a sadly mutilated shape. We note one or two misprints in the version before us. In line 4 on page 13, " Eikniskialdi " is found for " Eikinskialdi," which appears in its correct form lower down on the same page. In line 5 of the third stanza on page 27, "there" should read "their." Also, in the account of the sun and moon on page 10, the ^ Re\4ewed in vol. xix., pp. 493-6.