15 FEBRUARY 1930, Page 31

Anything may be anything else, according to Dr. L. A.

Waddell, whose specialized studies " have enabled him to solve the problems of the Edda, which our ignorant scholars have hitherto misinterpreted. The British Edda (Chapman and Hall, 21s.) is as good a title for his learned disquisition as any other, though it might just as well have been called The Sumerian Edda or The Indian Edda. In fact, The Indian Edda would have accorded better with Dr. Waddell's state- ment that Edda is Veda and Thor is Indra. But then Thor is also Adam and Ar-thur (obviously) and St. George of Cappa- docia and St. Andrew (as Eindri is both Indra and Andrew) and a host of other people. " He was the traditional founder of the world's civilization, and was-afterwards deified by the ' Suunerians . . . . and his date was e. 3380 n.c." The one thing that the Edda apparently is not is Icelandic, so we were all wrong. Dr. Waddell has an amazing fund of curious learning, but he would inspire us with more confidence in its accuracy if his philological pyrotechnics and his astonishing conjectures (so confidently affirmed) were supported by the requisite evidence. At present they are not, and frankly they are hardly credible.