Jesse L. Byock takes the spotlight for the inaugural entry into this wild and crazy new category that I’m calling Heroes of Norse Proliferation. Basically, it just seemed like a good idea to me to give a shout out to the folks out there who have done a lot of good work in making information about the Norse more accessible and/or promoting it, and it’s a lazy Sunday at the end of October, so I consider this to be time well-spent.
But joking aside, Mr. Byock is a heavyweight in the world of Norse studies. He is a Professor of Old Norse in the archeology department at UCLA and you can’t have read the sagas without coming across his name as one of your English-language translators at some point. There are other translators out there as well, and they are all worthy of a good, hearty skål, but Mr. Byock deserves to drink his mead from the metaphorical horn of honor. Counted among his translations are:
The Prose Edda
Grettir’s Saga
The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki
The Saga of the Volsungs
as well as a fine selection of other tomes of high relevance about Viking Age Iceland and the Old Norse language.
I’ve personally been spending a lot of time with Mr. Byock’s translation of The Prose Edda lately and will likely be blogging about it again here within the next month or so, so I especially owe Mr. Byock a debt of gratitude for that fine work.
Lastly, anyone out there who somehow happened to accidentally stumble across this blog and actually kept reading should check out Mr. Byock’s own site at http://www.viking.ucla.edu/.
The photo above was legally stolen from Örlygur Hnefill’s flickr stream.