Edda

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The Edda is not one book but two, written in Iceland within a few decades of each other in the thirteenth century, and between them the chief reason anything detailed is known of the old Norse gods. They share a name whose meaning was already uncertain to the people who used it. One is a collection of poems; the other is a prose handbook written to explain such poems and the lore behind them. Neither was composed as scripture. Both became, by default, the closest thing the tradition has to one.

The Prose Edda — sometimes the Younger Edda — was the work of Snorri Sturluson, an Icelandic chieftain, lawspeaker, and historian, written around 1220. Its purpose was technical: to teach young poets the craft of skaldic verse, which leaned heavily on compressed mythological allusion and could not be read at all by anyone who had forgotten the stories. To teach the allusions Snorri had to retell the myths, and so a manual of poetics became the single most coherent surviving account of Norse cosmology — the world-tree, the shaping of the worlds, the death of Baldr, the doom of the gods at Ragnarök. He wrote as a Christian, two centuries after Iceland’s conversion, and frames the old gods in places as misremembered men or as a delusion; how much that framing distorts what he reports is a question scholarship has never fully settled.

The Poetic Edda — the Elder Edda — is a different kind of thing: an anonymous gathering of Old Norse poems, mythological and heroic, preserved chiefly in a single Icelandic manuscript, the Codex Regius, written down around 1270. The poems themselves are older than their writing, carried orally, and some likely reach back to the pagan period. They include the Völuspá, in which a seeress recounts the making and ending of the world, and the Hávamál, a body of proverbial and gnomic counsel attributed to Odin. The name Edda was attached to this collection only later, borrowed from Snorri’s book; the medieval manuscript carries no such title.

The relation between the two is therefore the reverse of what the shared name suggests. Snorri’s Edda came first and quotes the older poems; the poetic collection was named after it afterward. For the modern reader the two function as a pair, and almost every retelling of Norse myth descends from one or both. What they preserve is real and indispensable, and also partial: written by and for Christians, late, Icelandic, and filtered through the needs of poets rather than the practice of a living cult. What the worshippers of these gods actually believed, and how they worshipped, has to be read back through texts composed once the worship had ended.

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