Title: The British Edda Author: Laurence Austine Waddell (1854-1938)
Publisher: Chapman & Hall Ltd.
Printing Year: 1930 First Edition, Signed by the Author
Details/Condition: Bound in its original light blue cloth boards with gilt embossing, this antique text is a scarce signed first edition of this literary history title. The author's inscription is at the top of the title page and is addressed to Laurence Longwill, dated 31/5/30. The work is illustrated with many photographs, maps and drawings, including several fold-out illustrations.
Waddell was a British explorer, collector in Tibet, and author. He traveled extensively in India throughout the 1890s (including Sikkim and areas on the borders of Nepal and Tibet) and wrote about the Tibetan Buddhist religious practices he observed there. Stationed with the British army in Darjeeling, Waddell learned the Tibetan language and even visited Tibet several times secretly, in disguise. He was the cultural consultant on Colonel Sir Francis Edward Younghusband's 1903-1904 expedition, and was considered alongside Sir Charles Bell as one of the foremost authorities on Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism. In his later works he tries to synthesize Western and Near Eastern cultures, proposing among other things an Aryan (i.e., Indo-European) origin of the alphabet and the appearance of Indo-European myth figures in ancient Near Eastern mythologies. The foundation of his argument was what he saw as a persistence of cult practices, religious symbols, mythological stories and figures, and god and hero names (based on etymology) throughout Western and Near Eastern civilizations.
In The British Edda, Waddell reconstructed the Old Icelandic Poetic "Edda" under the notion that the text was very ancient and actually British. His pursuit was apparent in the subtitle: "The great epic poem of the ancient Britons of the exploits of King Thor, Arthur, or Adam and his knights in establishing civilization reforming Eden & capturing the Holy Grail about 3380-3350 B.C. Reconstructed for first time from the medieval Mss. By Babylonian, Hittite, Egyptian, Trojan & Gothic keys and done literally into English." For this he used the language and art of Indo-European and Semitic peoples, and drew lines through mythologies connecting ancient gods and stories to those in the medieval manuscripts of the Edda.
The volume shows some external age/wear concentrated at the extremities, and is solidly bound with bright pages and library markings. The book measures approximately 6" x 8.75" and contains 331 pages. Shipping cost (within the U.S.) for this lot will be: $5.50
