Why should English-speaking Americans care about a corpus of work written in a foreign tongue a thousand years ago?
It's a fair question.
It's important to recognize, first, that the tongue of the Eddas, Old Norse, is not as "foreign" as, say, Hebrew or Chinese--or even Greek or Latin. Like English, it is a Germanic (or Teutonic) tongue, and a tongue which had a vast impact upon English in the Middle Ages. It is instructive to remember that the English and the Icelanders are no farther removed from each other than the Irish are removed from the Scots--two peoples who are often confused with each other by outsiders.
Old Norse speakers lived in a cultural milieu which was closely akin to that of the Anglo-Saxons, as is clearly demonstrated by the fact that they shared many of the same Gods and Goddesses, legends, and concepts. Indeed, the surviving manuscripts provide important clues to the beliefs of the ancient Teutonic peoples before we were "converted" to Christianity.
The study of Old English texts is a valuable exercise--but due to the wholesale destruction of manuscripts in the sixteenth century, it can only take us so far. We must rely on comparative evidence to have a clearer view of our ancestors' beliefs and the Gods and wights they worshiped.
For this purpose, the Eddas are a most important source, since they come from a closely-related people and contain more thorough documentation of such beliefs and attitudes. There were local variations of Teutonic Paganism--but they were all variations on an overarching theme whose structure can be discerned using the texts available to us, fleshed out by folklore and archaeological evidence.
Such an approach can be compared to that of some modern practitioners of Santeria who study native Yoruba mythology to come to a fuller understanding of their own beliefs. Santeria was created by a people ripped from their homeland, forced to forget their native tongue, and "convert" to Christianity, while living in the restricted conditions imposed by their slavery--yet after hundreds of years the major deities, their myths, and many spiritual concepts are still easily correlated with their living African counterparts.
The same may be said of Teutonic Paganism. Despite the fact that some modern scholars have worked hard to try to dispel what Groenbeck called the "specter" of a unified pantheon, the widespread unity of the idea of the major Gods is borne out by, among other things, the simple fact that in ALL Teutonic lands where the folk created an "interpretatio Germana" for the days of the week, the same Teutonic Gods are always used for their Roman equivalents.
The long and short of it is that reading, listening to, even reciting the Eddas is not at all akin to doing the same with a truly foreign text like the I Ching, or even the Bible. When I memorize an Eddic lay, I am aided immeasurably by the similarity
between Old Norse and English--which would not be the case with texts
in Hebrew, Greek, or Chinese. This lore reflects an essential part of our heritage on the deepest levels--and as such is worthy of our attention and respect.
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