Snorri Sturluson

• 1. Introduction

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  Snorri Sturluson died in a cellar. Seventy men had ridden to his house at Reykholt in the autumn of 1241, achieving complete surprise. He fled underground, and there, in the dark, two men argued over who would strike the killing blow. Snorri's last words, recorded and still quoted, were "Eigi skal hǫggva" -- "Do not strike" -- spoken twice. He was ignored.

  The man killed that night was not a soldier. He was a poet, a lawyer, and the most powerful chieftain in Iceland -- a man who had twice served as lawspeaker of the Althing, who had been knighted by a Norwegian king, who had written what may be the single most important surviving account of Norse mythology. He was also a schemer, a philanderer, a coward on at least one battlefield, and a man who had disobeyed a royal order with a phrase -- "út vil ek," I will go home -- that became proverbial in Iceland. His assassins claimed to act for the King of Norway. The king later insisted that if Snorri had submitted, he would have been spared. The question of whether that was true has never been settled.

  What drove a medieval Iceland's leading intellectual to such a violent end? And why do his books still shape how we understand the Norse world?

• 2. Raised at Oddi

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  Snorri was born in 1179 at Hvammr, a member of the Sturlungar clan, one of the most powerful families in the Icelandic Commonwealth. His father was Sturla Þórðarson, known as Hvamm-Sturla. The circumstances that shaped Snorri's mind began not with his birth but with a lawsuit and a knife.

  Hvamm-Sturla was in the midst of a legal dispute with a priest and chieftain named Páll Sölvason. During negotiations, Páll's wife Þorbjörg Bjarnardóttir lunged at Sturla with a blade, saying she meant to make him like his one-eyed hero Odin. Bystanders deflected the blow to his cheek. The resulting settlement would have ruined Páll, but a man named Jón Loftsson intervened at the Althing to reduce the judgment. His compensation to Sturla: he would take Snorri into his household and educate him.

  His father died in 1183. His mother, left as his guardian, squandered Snorri's share of the inheritance. Jón Loftsson died in 1197. Two years later, in 1199, the two families arranged a marriage between Snorri and Herdís, the daughter of Bersi Vermundarson. Through her father, Snorri inherited an estate at Borg and a chieftainship -- the first rung of a long climb toward power.

• 3. The Poet and the Parliament

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  At Borg, Snorri and Herdís spent four years together and had at least two children, Hallbera and Jón. By 1206, the marriage had broken down under the weight of his affairs with other women, and Snorri settled alone at Reykholt as manager of an estate. He made improvements there that still survive in some form, including an outdoor bath fed by a hot spring.

  He had already become known as a poet and a lawyer when, in 1215, he was elected lawspeaker of the Althing -- the only public office of the Icelandic Commonwealth and one that carried enormous prestige. He held the position until 1218, when he sailed to Norway at the personal invitation of the Norwegian crown.

  In Norway he met the teenage King Hákon Hákonarson and his co-regent, Jarl Skúli. He spent the winter as the jarl's guest. They gave him gifts, including the ship he had sailed on, and he wrote poetry in return. The king had territorial ambitions in Iceland: if the Althing voted for union with Norway, and if Snorri could guide that vote, the arrangement would benefit both men. Hákon made Snorri a skutilsvein, a senior honorific roughly equivalent to knighthood, and received an oath of loyalty.

  In the summer of 1219, Snorri met the Swedish lawspeaker Eskil Magnusson and his wife Kristina Nilsdotter Blake in Skara. Both were connected to royalty. The conversations there likely deepened Snorri's understanding of Swedish dynastic history, material that would later feed his writing.

  He returned to Iceland in 1220, and by 1222 he held the lawspeaker position again. He would keep it until 1232. His re-election rested entirely on his fame as a poet. In 1224 he married Hallveig Ormsdottir, born around 1199 and a granddaughter of his own foster-father Jón Loftsson, now a wealthy widow with two young sons. They signed a contract of joint property ownership. Snorri was the most powerful chieftain in Iceland from 1224 to 1230.

• 4. Feuds and Failures

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  The other chiefs of Iceland had no interest in seeing Snorri hand their island to a foreign king. His own family was among his sharpest opponents. His nephew Sturla Sighvatsson married Sólveig, the daughter of the recently dead Sæmundur, in 1223, a match Snorri had wanted for himself. The slight sharpened the rivalry already built into the Sturlungar clan.

  Snorri's response was to plan a pre-emptive military strike against his brother Sighvatur and his nephew Sturla. He raised two armed parties, one under his nephew Böðvar Þórðarson and one under his son Órækja. Then, on the eve of battle, he dismissed both forces and offered terms instead. Historians have debated whether this was strategic posturing or genuine incapacity -- Snorri seemed to grasp, in the source's phrase, that "only resolute, saga-like actions could achieve his objective," but he could not carry them out.

  Sighvatur and Sturla drove him into the countryside with a force of 1,000 men. Snorri sought refuge among other goðar while Órækja conducted guerrilla fighting in the fjords of western Iceland. King Haakon IV attempted to defuse the situation by inviting Iceland's chieftains to a peace conference in Norway, but Sighvatur recognized it as a trap. Snorri apparently did not.

  Órækja was captured by Sturla during what was supposed to be a peace negotiation. Snorri's cousin Þorleifur Þórðarson arrived with 800 men to help him but was abandoned by Snorri himself on the battlefield after a dispute over who was in command. In 1237, Snorri traveled to Norway again, this time not as an honored guest but as a man with few options left.

• 5. The Final Defiance

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  Norway's politics had grown more dangerous since Snorri's first visit. King Haakon IV had spent years managing civil war and rival claimants. The feud between the king and Jarl Skúli was moving toward open conflict. When Snorri arrived, the king judged him unreliable. Skúli, seeking allies, gave Snorri the jarl title to bind his loyalty.

  In August 1238, while Snorri remained in Norway, the Battle of Örlygsstaðir was fought in Iceland. Sighvatur and four of his sons -- Sturla, Markús, Kolbeinn, and Þórður Krókur -- were killed by the forces of Gissur Þorvaldsson and Kolbein the Young. Two of the sons were executed after the battle. Snorri, Órækja, and Þorleifur asked permission to go home. The king refused, citing Snorri's honorary rank as the legal basis for ordering him to stay.

  Snorri went home anyway. His stated reason, preserved in the Sturlunga saga -- "út vil ek," I want to go out -- became a phrase Icelanders still use. He returned in 1239. By then, Skúli had declared himself king; Haakon defeated and killed him in 1240. With that threat gone, Haakon turned his full attention to Iceland. He sent a secret letter to Gissur Þorvaldsson ordering him to kill or capture Snorri, and invited Gissur into the unionist movement.

  Hallveig died of natural causes. When her family quarreled over the inheritance, her sons Klaeing and Orm went to their uncle Gissur for help. Gissur produced the king's letter at a meeting. One of the brothers, Orm, refused to act on it. Not long after, Snorri received a message in cipher runes warning him of the plot. He could not read them.

  Gissur led seventy men to Reykholt in autumn 1241. Snorri fled to the cellar. He said "Do not strike" twice, and Símon knútur ordered the blow anyway. The king later claimed Snorri would have survived if he had surrendered. The argument itself showed how thoroughly Haakon had extended his reach into Icelandic affairs. In 1262, the Althing voted to ratify union with Norway. By 1662, the Icelanders had formally accepted hereditary monarchy.

• 6. The Books He Left Behind

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  Snorri's most enduring contribution is not political. He is believed to have authored or compiled the Prose Edda, the primary surviving source for Norse mythology and for the rules of alliterative verse used by the skalds. He also wrote or compiled Heimskringla, a history of the Norse kings that begins with the legendary Ynglinga saga and carries forward through early medieval Scandinavian history. For reasons of style and method, scholars also commonly attribute Egil's Saga to him.

  The scope of what those books preserved is difficult to overstate. The historian Halvdan Koht described Snorri's historical writing as surpassing anything else the Middle Ages left in the same field. The historian Gwyn Jones, writing from a more critical angle, noted that Snorri was "never servile to fact." Both assessments are fair. Snorri wrote with purpose -- his histories could and did serve the political interests of Norwegian kings claiming ancient authority over wide territories. In the mid-19th century, Heimskringla played a direct role in shaping Norwegian national identity during the period of romantic nationalism.

  His work also provided one of the earliest written accounts of the discovery of Vinland. The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges and his partner María Kodama translated the Gylfaginning section of the Prose Edda into Spanish and wrote a biographical prologue about Snorri. Carl Sagan used a line from the Edda -- "Nine worlds I remember" -- as an epigraph to a chapter in his 1980 book Cosmos.

  In Iceland, Snorri has been filtered through the politics of the 20th century. When Iceland sought to sever ties with Denmark, Snorri's complicated loyalties to Norway made him an awkward figure. Scholars have noted that he and other Icelanders of his era are sometimes judged using concepts -- sovereignty, independence, nationhood -- that did not exist as political categories in his lifetime.

  The Snorrastofa Cultural and Research Centre at Reykholt opened on the 6th of September 1988, with ceremonies attended by Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, President of Iceland, and King Olav V of Norway. A statue by the sculptor Gustav Vigeland, donated by the Norwegian government and unveiled in 1947, stands at Reykholt. A copy was unveiled in Bergen in 1948. A street in Oslo, Snorres gate in the St. Hanshaugen district, was named for him in 1896. He also appears on an Icelandic commemorative stamp from 1941 and on a set of six Norwegian stamps from the same year, each featuring illustrations from Heimskringla drawn by the Norwegian artist Harald Damsleth.