Item #66244 The British Edda: The Great Epic Poem of the Ancient Britains on the Exploits of King Thor, Arthur or Adam and his Knights in Establishing Civilization, Reforming Eden and Capturing The Holy Grail about 3380-3350 B.C.; Reconstructed for the First Time from the Medieval Mss. by Babylonian, Hittite, Egyptian, Trojan & Gothic Keys and done literally into English. With 30 Plates & 162 Text Illustrations of Scenes from Sumerian, British & Other Ancient Monuments, Maps, Foreword, Introduction, Notes & Glossary. British Edda, L. Austine WADDELL.
The British Edda: The Great Epic Poem of the Ancient Britains on the Exploits of King Thor, Arthur or Adam and his Knights in Establishing Civilization, Reforming Eden and Capturing The Holy Grail about 3380-3350 B.C.; Reconstructed for the First Time from the Medieval Mss. by Babylonian, Hittite, Egyptian, Trojan & Gothic Keys and done literally into English. With 30 Plates & 162 Text Illustrations of Scenes from Sumerian, British & Other Ancient Monuments, Maps, Foreword, Introduction, Notes & Glossary.

The British Edda: The Great Epic Poem of the Ancient Britains on the Exploits of King Thor, Arthur or Adam and his Knights in Establishing Civilization, Reforming Eden and Capturing The Holy Grail about 3380-3350 B.C.; Reconstructed for the First Time from the Medieval Mss. by Babylonian, Hittite, Egyptian, Trojan & Gothic Keys and done literally into English. With 30 Plates & 162 Text Illustrations of Scenes from Sumerian, British & Other Ancient Monuments, Maps, Foreword, Introduction, Notes & Glossary.

London: Chapman & Hall Ltd., 1930. First edition. Hardcover. Large octavo. lxxxii + 332pp. Blue cloth with gilt titling and illustrated band to spine, gilt device to upper cover, b&w frontis, plates and in-text illustrations. Maps, notes & glossary. Laurence Waddell (1854–1938) was a surgeon by education but is best known for his writings on Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism. "The British Edda", is to put it mildly, a very idiosyncratic work. Waddell had come to be convinced that the great literary work known as the "Elder Edda" was not, as commonly thought, an Icelandic or Scandinavian mythological saga, but rather a historical work of British origin. As he wrote: "the Edda is not at all a medley of disjointed Scandinavian mythological tales of gods as has been imagined ; but that it forms one great coherent epic of historical human heroes and their exploits, based upon genuine hoary tradition ; that it is an ancient British epic poem written with lucid realism in the ancient British language; and that it is one of the great literary epics of the world, and deals circumstantially with the greatest of all heroic epochs in the ancient world, namely, the struggle for the establishment of Civilization, with its blessings to humanity, over five thousand years ago." In this volume Waddell offers his own "translation" or really reconstruction of the "Edda" drawn from his knowledge of the English, Sumerian, and Ancient Egyptian languages, and his knowledge of the history and mythology of the ancient Britons, and that of the peoples of the ancient Middle East. What follows a fascinating, but most would say utterly eccentric account of ancient history, which, for example, places both Thor and King Arthur in Eden, and suggests that the votive stone bowl of the Sumerian King Udu ("the bowl of Utu") was the "Holy Grail" sought by Arthur, etc. etc. A bit of light overall shelf-wear, a few faint marks to cloth, corners bumped and lightly chafed, spine ends bruised and rubbed, pages darkened and foxed, pages lightly toned with some very light scattered foxing, text unmarked. Overall a tight, clean better than VG copy (no dust jacket). Item #66244

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