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Edited with Translation, Introduction and Commentary by Clive Tolley.
"Grottasǫngr" or the "Song of Grótti" is an Old Norse poem, sometimes counted among the poems of the "Poetic Edda" as it appears in manuscripts that are later than the "Codex Regius". The tradition is also preserved in one of the manuscripts of Snorri Sturluson's "Prose Edda" along with some explanation of its context.
This is a scholarly edition of "Grottasǫngr", with the text presented in Old Icelandic with English translation, accompanied by introduction and commentary. The poem, possibly from the twelfth century in its extant form, is found in some manuscripts of Snorri's Edda; it relates the tale of the gold-working mill Grotti and the giant slave girls who work it for King Fróði. It concludes with the demise of Fróði, brought about by the slave girls in chagrin at their maltreatment by the king. I seek in this edition to present the poem in its mythological, legendary, historical and poetic context.
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Grottasõngr the song of grotti
edited by
Clive Tolley
viking society for northern research university college london 2008
© Clive Tolley 2008 All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Clive Tolley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published 2008
Viking Society for Northern Research, London
ISBN 978-0-903521-78-9
The printing of this book is made possible by a gift to the University of Cambridge in memory of Dorothea Coke, Skjaeret, 1951.
Typeset in Ehrhardt by Word and Page, Chester, UK Printed in Great Britain by Short Run Press Limited, Exeter
Preface The present edition of Grottasõngr was originally to be included in the fourth volume of The Poetic Edda, edited by Ursula Dronke, with the assistance of the present editor, for Oxford University Press. As work progressed on that volume, however, it became clear that a somewhat different and shorter treatment would be needed for this poem, which is not, indeed, found in the Codex Regius which forms the basis of Ursula Dronke’s edition. Hence we decided it would be better to issue the present version separately. It is with great pleasure that I am able to offer it for publication through the Viking Society, which does so much to promote scholarship devoted to medieval Scandinavia. The present edition began as a collaborative effort between me and Ursula Dronke, and reflects many of her suggestions (in particular in the reading of the text itself), though the bulk of the editorial work was carried out by me. The edition was largely already completed before the appearance of the third volume of the edition with commentary by Klaus von See et al., Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 2000). There is, needless to say, much agreement between them, though the presentation of the material differs. I have not felt it would make a marked improvement to my own edition to repeat the many additional bibliographical references and smaller points of discussion included in the German edition, where they can readily be consulted; von See has aimed at a commendable degree of comprehensiveness in the 128 large pages devoted to the poem, but the present, rather shorter, edition seeks, in the tradition and indeed format set by Ursula Dronke in her own edition of The Poetic Edda, to be somewhat more selective and more focused on the presentation of the poem as a literary artefact (though historical a