Poetic Edda

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.

The Codex Regius, catalogued as GKS 2365 4to, was written in Iceland around 1270 by a single scribe copying from at least one older exemplar. Nothing is known of it for the next four centuries. In 1643 it was in the hands of Brynjolfur Sveinsson, bishop of Skalholt, a collector of old Icelandic books, who sent it to the king of Denmark in 1662, hence the name, the King's Book. It stayed in Copenhagen until the twentieth century.

By the time Brynjolfur had it, a gathering of eight leaves was already missing from the heroic section. The loss falls in the Sigurd cycle and removes what would have been the central account of Sigurd's dealings with Brynhild and his death. Its content has to be inferred from the prose Volsunga saga, whose compiler evidently had the missing poems in front of him, and this lacuna is the reason a modern edition of the heroic material runs partly on paraphrase.

Brynjolfur believed the collection was compiled by Saemundr Sigfusson the Learned, an Icelandic priest who died in 1133 and about whom a great deal of legend accumulated. There is no evidence for this whatever, but the attribution stuck, and older editions and translations are titled Saemundar Edda or the Elder Edda accordingly. Both names are now known to be wrong, Saemundr had nothing to do with it, and "Edda" was Snorri's word for his own book, borrowed for this one by association.

The manuscript returned to Iceland on 21 April 1971, carried by ship under naval escort and met by crowds at the quayside in Reykjavik. It is held at the Arni Magnusson Institute.

Nobody thinks the poems were composed in 1270. The scribe was copying, the language contains archaic forms, and several poems are quoted or presupposed by writers working earlier. Beyond that the dating is contested in a way that has not resolved in a century and a half of argument.

The traditional position, still defended, places much of the mythological material in the pagan period before Iceland's conversion around the year 1000, some of it composed in Norway before the settlement, and treats the poems as oral compositions transmitted with relative fidelity. Linguistic arguments have been used to support this, notably the behaviour of certain lost consonants that affect the metre.

The sceptical position holds that oral transmission does not preserve wording, that the poems as written down are the product of thirteenth-century Christian Iceland whatever their raw material, and that apparently pagan content is no guarantee of pagan date, Icelanders remained interested in the old gods long after they stopped worshipping them, and antiquarian composition is possible. Some scholars have argued for specific poems, Voluspa among them, being influenced by Christian eschatology; others regard the resemblances as coincidental or as evidence in the other direction.

The honest summary is that individual poems must be dated individually, that the evidence available, metre, vocabulary, allusions in datable skaldic verse, is thin and admits of more than one reading, and that no consensus exists. What is not in doubt is that a modern reader meets this material through the filter of Christian scribes writing at least two and a half centuries after the conversion.