A new translation is making old Viking poems accessible to general readers. The stories of gods and heroes were written down in 13th century Iceland. But for translator Jackson Crawford—who lives in Riverton—the existing English translations of the Poetic Edda were just hard to read.
“There seems to be this sort of conceit among translators that if something is old, it needs to sound old.” Crawford tells Wyoming Public Radio’s Micah Schweizer all the ‘thees’ and ‘thous’ got in the way of the stories. So he set out to make the language more direct; to make the Poetic Edda more readable.