Prose Edda

• 1. Introduction

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  The Prose Edda is a book from early 13th-century Iceland that contains the fullest account of Norse mythology available to modern readers. It was written or at least compiled around 1220 by a man named Snorri Sturluson, a scholar, lawspeaker, and historian. What is remarkable is not just what this book preserved, but why it was written in the first place. Snorri was not composing a mythology. He was writing a textbook, a practical guide for poets who needed to understand the intricate craft of Old Norse verse. Who was Snorri Sturluson, and why did a poet's manual end up becoming the single most important source for Norse myth? What kept this book alive through centuries of manuscript copying, and why do the copies contradict each other in ways that still puzzle scholars today?

• 2. A Manual for Poets

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  Skaldic poetry, the elevated verse form of medieval Scandinavia, depended on kennings: compressed, allusive phrases that substituted for plain nouns. A skilled poet needed to know that the sea could be called "Ægir's field" or that gold carried names rooted in mythological stories. Without that knowledge, a reader or composer of skaldic verse was simply lost. The Prose Edda appears to have functioned similarly to a contemporary textbook, with the explicit goal of helping Icelandic poets and readers grasp the subtleties of allusive verse. Snorri divided the work into four sections to cover this range of knowledge. The Prologue offered a euhemerized account of the Norse gods. Gylfaginning, meaning "the tricking of Gylfi" in Old Icelandic, ran to approximately 20,000 words and covered the creation and destruction of the world of the Norse gods in a question-and-answer format. Skáldskaparmál, meaning "the language of poetry," extended to approximately 50,000 words and moved through a dialogue between the sea-giant Ægir and the skaldic god Bragi, delivering systematic lists of kennings for people, places, and things, along with a treatment of heiti, the non-periphrastic poetic words for familiar objects, such as "steed" for "horse." The final section, Háttatal, meaning "list of verse-forms," drew primarily on Snorri's own compositions to illustrate the types of verse available to Old Norse poets. Snorri took a prescriptive approach in Háttatal as well as a descriptive one, systematizing the material and explicitly noting that older poets had not always followed his own rules.

• 3. The Name's Uncertain Roots

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  Anthony Faulkes, in his English translation of the Prose Edda, noted that the etymology of the word "Edda" remains unresolved, with many competing hypotheses and little agreement among scholars. One popular theory connects the name to Oddi, a town in southern Iceland where Snorri was raised, suggesting the title might mean "book of Oddi." Faulkes himself rejected this as unlikely on both linguistic and historical grounds, pointing out that Snorri was no longer living at Oddi when he composed the work. A second possibility links the word to óðr, an Old Norse term meaning "poetry or inspiration." This is plausible in terms of meaning, but Faulkes argued that Edda could not plausibly have been coined from óðr in the 13th century, since such a shift would have had to develop gradually and the sense of Edda as "poetics" is unlikely to have existed in the preliterary period. A third suggestion connects the word to the Latin edo, meaning "I write," on the analogy of kredda, meaning "belief," which demonstrably derives from the Latin credo. Under this reading, Edda would translate as something like "Poetic Art," and this is reportedly the meaning the word carried in the medieval period. The word Edda also independently appears in the text of Skáldskaparmál itself as a noun meaning "great-grandparent," and it shows up in eddic poetry and other medieval Icelandic texts in the same sense. Scholars have not settled on any single explanation, and the question of how a 13th-century handbook came to carry this particular name remains open.

• 4. The Author Behind the Text

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  Snorri Sturluson's authorship rests substantially on a passage from Codex Upsaliensis, an early 14th-century manuscript, which directly names him. The renaissance scholar Arngrímur Jónsson, who lived from 1568 to 1648, upheld this attribution, and since his time it has generally been accepted without serious challenge. The complication is that all surviving manuscripts were written more than half a century after Snorri's death, and they differ from each other considerably, making it unlikely that any of them preserves the text exactly as he left it. Faulkes, summarizing the state of scholarly debate, noted that the manuscripts leave unclear whether Snorri is the sole author of the whole work or merely the compiler and the confirmed author of Háttatal. Several passages in Skáldskaparmál in particular have been identified as probable later interpolations, and that section shows evidence of various kinds of revision across different manuscripts. Some scholars have argued that the Prologue and parts of Gylfaginning may not be by Snorri at all, at least not in the forms in which they have survived. The attribution of Háttatal to Snorri is on the firmest ground, since the section is composed in the first person using his own verse. Whatever precise share of the work he originally composed, the mention of his name in the manuscripts has driven the widespread acceptance of Snorri as the work's primary author.

• 5. Seven Manuscripts, Seven Voices

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  Six copies of the Prose Edda survive from the medieval period, with a seventh dating to the 1600s. No single manuscript is complete, and each one differs from the others in notable ways, giving researchers what scholars describe as independent textual value for analysis. The four principal manuscripts carry names that trace their modern custodians. Codex Upsaliensis, catalogued as DG 11, is held at the University of Uppsala library in Sweden and dates from the first quarter of the 14th century. It is the source of variants found nowhere else, including the very name Gylfaginning. Codex Regius, catalogued as GKS 2367 4°, is held at the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies in Reykjavík and dates from the first half of the 14th century. Scholars regard it as the most comprehensive of the four and the closest to an original manuscript, which is why it serves as the basis for most modern editions and translations. Its name comes from its long residence in the Royal Library of Denmark. Between 1973 and 1997, hundreds of ancient Icelandic manuscripts were returned from Denmark to Iceland; the Codex Regius made that journey in 1985. Codex Wormianus, held in the Arnamagnæan Manuscript Collection in Copenhagen, dates from the mid-14th century. Codex Trajectinus, held at the University of Utrecht library in the Netherlands, was written around 1600 as a copy of a manuscript originally made in the second half of the 13th century. The Prose Edda remained largely unknown outside Iceland until the publication of the Edda Islandorum in 1665.

• 6. Myth as Theological Compromise

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  The Prologue to the Prose Edda presents the Norse gods in a way that a Christian reader of the 13th century could accept. Rather than treating Odin, Thor, and the rest as genuine divine beings, the Prologue recasts them as human Trojan warriors who departed Troy after the city fell. This origin story parallels the account found in Virgil's Aeneid, where displaced Trojans become the founders of new civilizations. By treating the Norse gods as legendary human ancestors who were later misremembered as deities, Snorri employed a technique known as euhemerism, allowing him to preserve the mythological material without appearing to endorse pagan belief. Gylfaginning then follows with the full cosmological narrative: the creation and eventual destruction of the world inhabited by those gods, interspersed with quotations from eddic poetry. Skáldskaparmál brings the sea-figure Ægir into dialogue with Bragi, interweaving mythological stories with the practical question of how those stories generated the kennings that poets were still using centuries later. The Uppsala Edda, preserved in a distinct manuscript known as DG 13, diverges so sharply from the other early versions that scholars have debated whether it represents an early draft by Snorri or a later abridgement. A separate short adaptation, known as Litla Skálda and described as "a concise manual of kenning-making," survives alongside Snorra Edda in two manuscripts. Scholars disagree on whether Litla Skálda is a corrupt reduction of Snorri's text or a parallel composition distinct enough to stand on its own.

• 7. How the Prose Edda Reached the World

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  Jesse Byock produced an English translation of the Prose Edda in 2006. Anthony Faulkes published his translation in 1987, with a second edition in 1995. Jean Young's translation appeared in 1954, and Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur's dates to 1916. A Blackwell translation of the Prose Edda from 1847 formed the basis of a later compilation. Many of these translations are partial, reflecting the book's structure: the technical demands of Háttatal lead translators to exclude it frequently, and the Old Norse thesaurus sections of Skáldskaparmál are often abridged. One English translation is based strictly on the Codex Upsaliensis and presents both the Old Norse text and an English version side by side. A version was also made available through Project Gutenberg using a 1901 edition. The text attracted scholarly attention in other languages as well, with translations appearing in multiple volumes beginning in the mid-19th century. Faulkes's translation remains one of the most widely cited scholarly editions in English, and his commentary on the naming problem and authorship questions continues to anchor academic discussion of the text. The manuscript known as Codex Regius, now housed in Reykjavík after its 1985 return from Denmark, remains the authoritative base for editors and translators working on the Prose Edda today.