Creations

 

 

Siân Echard, University of British Columbia

Siân Echard’s home page

... Finnish... set the rocket off in story. I was immensely attracted by something in the air of the Kalevala .... the beginning of the legendarium, of which the Trilogy is a part ..., was in an attempt to reorganize some of the Kalevala ... into a form of my own.

... the names of the Dwarves in The Hobbit... are derived from the lists in Völuspá of the names of dvergar ...

For this class we will be discussing Tolkien’s created world alongside some of the myths, legends, and sacred texts that might have influenced it. This page offers a few links to more information about some of those texts.

 

Kalevala: The Finnish National Epic: a very useful site from Virtual Finland; includes a summary, a history of the collection and publication of the epic, and its role in Finnish national identity

Finnish Literature Society has a section on its site devoted to the Kalevala

Projekt Runeberg has mounted the Kalevala online in Finnish

Sacred Texts has the Kalevala online in English: as with all texts from this source, beware of occasional typographical errors that have resulted from scanning

Sacred Texts also has an online version of Voluspo, from the Poetic Edda, as well as a translation of Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda

Northvegr Foundation is a massive site that bills itself as a “world class heathen web resource”; you can find several translations of the Eddas here, along with a massive collection of northern texts

There are several versions of Völuspá in Norse at Heimskringla, though not all are public access, and a lot of the material on the site (which is based in Norway) is in Norwegian or Danish

Jörmungrund is a website which includes a handy parallel-text edition of the different manuscript versions of Völuspá; the individual Norse versions can also be found here

 
©Siân Echard. Not to be copied, used, or revised without explicit written permission from the copyright owner.