Short answers, pulled from the story.
The true origin of the word Edda remains a puzzle for modern scholars with at least five competing hypotheses. One theory suggests the word means great-grandmother while another traces it to óðr meaning poetry itself. A third hypothesis from 1895 argues the name derived from Oddi where Snorri Sturluson received his education.
Brynjólfur Sveinsson the Bishop of Skálholt discovered the oldest surviving collection of Old Norse poems in 1643. The book written somewhere in the thirteenth century had been lost for centuries before its sudden appearance that year. He took possession of the document after it had been missing since its creation.
Icelandic scholar Snorri Sturluson wrote a manual on poetics around the year 1220 that would become known as the Prose Edda. This text served a practical purpose for poets who needed to understand complex alliterative verse forms. It also explained mythological allusions hidden within kennings used throughout skaldic poetry.
The volume sat in the Royal Library in Copenhagen for three hundred years before returning to Iceland in 1971. Brynjólfur Sveinsson sent the manuscript as a gift to King Christian IV of Denmark which explains why it bears the title Royal Book. Ownership records show how political shifts affected the location of these cultural treasures.
The book opens with a prologue followed by three distinct sections including Gylfaginning Skáldskaparmál and Háttatal. Gylfaginning details the creation and eventual destruction of the Norse mythical world while Skáldskaparmál presents a dialogue between Bragi and ægir. Háttatal demonstrates specific verse forms employed in Norse mythology.