The mythological group opens with Voluspa, in which a seeress addresses Odin and delivers the whole arc of the world from its making to Ragnarok and what comes after. It is the foundation text for almost everything popularly known about Norse cosmology, and it is also compressed, allusive and hard, assuming a listener who already knows the stories it gestures at.
Havamal is different again: a long, uneven assembly of practical advice, proverbs, warnings about hospitality and drink and the treachery of women, followed by Odin's account of hanging nine nights on the windswept tree to win the runes. Grimnismal and Vafthrudnismal are both wisdom contests in which Odin, disguised, extracts or delivers cosmological information, the names of the halls, the rivers, the parts of the world made from the giant Ymir, and both function as verse catalogues of lore. Others include Lokasenna, in which Loki insults every god in turn at a feast, and Thrymskvida, a comic poem in which Thor recovers his hammer dressed as a bride.
The heroic poems shift register entirely. They follow Helgi, then Sigurd, the dragon Fafnir, Brynhild, Gudrun and the destruction of the Burgundian kings, and they share their material with the German Nibelungenlied and with the Icelandic Volsunga saga. The verse is alliterative and stanzaic, in metres named fornyrdislag, a terse narrative measure, and ljodahattr, used for speech and wisdom, with malahattr in some heroic poems. There is no rhyme and no fixed syllable count; the line is held together by stressed alliterating syllables.