Greetings my esteemed subscribing tones happy new year. Now I haven't made any new years resolutions per se, but I have decided something of a similar nature and that is that I will make more book reviews in video format here on youtube and audacity of course in accord with your wishes I am but your humble servant I post a poll to telegram and the majority of you would like to see more book reviews in video format so here we go here we go and of course we do start with as you can surmise from the title of the video the poetic edda and we have a nice addition here admire the this absolute unit thick boy big boy now it's actually not that much to read because half of it or half of the poetry at least is in Icelandic so you can see there that one page in the original Icelandic the other page in English now of course it contains this addition it contains a lot of explanations notes introductions that sort of stuff also as you can see a forward by our man survive the jive good stuff so it's very much information in addition to the poetry itself so the poetry section half Icelandic but the introduction and everything like that it's in English so yeah great stuff great stuff indeed now there are those who are much more knowledgeable when it comes to the poetic edda this is the first time I read it now of course I've been familiar with the sacred have a mile for many years so it was nice to finally get to the source material and I will say the following this video this is just my you know first impressions on the book and maybe I'll make a video in a few years when I've read it a few more times meditated upon the the poetry certain stances etc now what I would say though with this fine book right here is that it doesn't really give you any precise answers because what it is this is written by Icelandic men in the middle ages and they are you know the the poetry the epics the myths they are much older and they have been transmitted orally so I don't know how much has been lost in translation but what we can say and this is only my view this is only my first impression upon reading it is that you know we can get a sense of the material but can we pinpoint exactly everything no perhaps not and you know a lot of the extreme information in the book is you know speculation could this stance have been our miss um miss play store should this stance up along somewhere else or stuff like that so it's not a precise thing we're talking about here but you can definitely read it if you want to get a good sense of the Germanic belt and shoun so the Germanic worldview and just reading it without understanding exactly everything we can see that certain things are you know always coming back to the the storyline in a matter which poet or poem or story so on or war love vengeance knowledge the gods stuff like that so we can get a good sense of what is important to um to our ancestors so that is something you can view it as if you read it for the first time to get a nice sense a nice feel for the overall vibe that it comes to you now something else I thought to mention I want to take our beloved lady Freya in defense here it's quite common to hear heretics and Christians and people to claim that she was promiscuous and there are of course certain myths that would support this but there is a particular poem the locusena and in this particular poem it basically consists of locus insulting the gods and the goddesses and he says and he says to Freya that yeah basically you are promiscuous but he also says to the male gods he accuses them of cowardice and unmanly behavior and of course none of the gods at least not as far as I know were cowardly or unmanly so it would be Loki actively lying to provoke them and the same thing would go for for Freya he says that to provoke her so we can see a few things by reading this particular poem that unmanly behavior cowardice for men very bad that is something you can insult others so it's important to not be cowardly or unmanly and for a woman then it's important to not be promiscuous so we can actually see locus lies and insults as you know the opposite of the ideal so that Freya would be promiscuous doesn't really hold up if you interpret it in that way I know there are other myths such as she's supposed to be to have slept with Fordwarves but this can also esoterically be interpreted as you know her imbuing a certain piece of jewelry with the four elements something like that just top of my head coming up with something there so it doesn't really mean that but if you read it too literally you can construct a narrative to fit your agenda and of course this was very useful for the early Christians to try to portray a goddess as promiscuous and modern feminists could also do it but for a sincere devoted pagan that honors Freya we should of course defend her in that regard but again I'm not an expert I'm just speculating I'm just sharing something I found in this fine-tome of knowledge now that about how you can interpret the certain myths at least and of course I need to defend our lady Freya here now something else and probably you saw this on social media I posted my one of my favorite stances or two stances rather and I will read it and I will read them to now as well so that you can admire the beautiful poetry now I didn't actually quote bellows word for word because I replaced certain words to make it more epic and I will do so now as well so here is my take on it I know that I hung on the windy tree hung there for nights full nine with a spare I was wounded and offered I was to odin myself to myself on the tree that none may ever know what root beneath the drums neither horn they upheld nor handed me bread and there below I looked I took up the rooms screaming I took them and forth with back I fell how about that absolutely epic this is poetry at it's very best I will make a separate video on how to appreciate poetry but basically my point is that you need to find these very epic moments that you know conjures up a really really nice image in your head that you can just keep with you so I I can't stop thinking about these two stances very powerful indeed so Odin hung himself he offered himself to himself for nine nights to gain the knowledge of the runes now anyway I have rambled on enough about this I could of course talk a lot more about it read it for yourself if you feel so inclined view it as a good source material if you want to get really deep into it then of course if you are a beginner if you don't know where to start this might be a bit too too heavy you can read or you know get familiar with myths in in different ways if you feel that an easier step to begin with now also I would like to say that this is an addition by Imperium Press this video is not sponsored in any way but it's a good publisher and I'm comfortable in promoting them because they do great work with our great classics and of course the speaking of which you have a rather controversial poem the rig stula where heimdall goes around and he creates the different costs I will not say more about it here since this is on YouTube as well but yeah it's a bit controversial but it appears as it should here so they haven't done any funny alterations to the story which perhaps you could find in in different publishers because of political reasons no anyway that being said I have a wild hunt challenge video incoming in a week or so stay tuned for that thank you for watching thank you for being with me full steam ahead this year good times good stuff no thank you for watching xxo boom you