The first English translation of Olga A. Smirnitskaya’s influential 1994 Russian work on Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse studies.

In 1994, Moscow State University professor Olga A. Smirnitskaya published a significant work in the field of Old Germanic Philology entitled The Verse and Language of Old Germanic Poetry (Стих и язык древнегерманской поэзии). The book was lauded as one of the most important contributions from the Russian school of Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse studies to the worldwide scholarship in that field. It covers the emergence and evolution of Old Germanic verse forms from the earliest runic inscriptions to the pinnacles achieved in Old English Beowulf and Old Norse skaldic poetry. This translation is a fundamental piece of scholarship that will be in great demand by non-Russian-speaking scholars working in the fields of Old English and Old Norse language and literature all over the world, as well as by wider scholarly audiences involved in any aspect of studies of Old Germanic languages and literature, especially poetry and meters.

Olga A. Smirnitskaya is a Soviet and Russian linguist and translator. She earned her PhD in Philology in 1988 from Lomonosov Moscow State University where she later served as Professor in the Department of Germanic Linguistics in the Faculty of Philology from 1991 to 2020. She has published extensively in the fields of comparative historical Germanic Linguistics, runology, history of the English Language, and comparative versification, as well as significant translations of The Younger Edda, Old Icelandic sagas, and skaldic poems in Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla. Ilya V. Sverdlov is a scholar and translator of Old English and Old Norse. He has taught courses at Moscow State Lomonosov University, the University of Nottingham, the University of Leeds, the University of Hull, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. As a former student of Olga A. Smirnitskaya, he brings a unique perspective to the translation of her 1994 book.