Prose Edda

The Prologue is a short euhemerising frame that derives the Norse gods from human beings: the Aesir are men from Troy, Odin a migrating king whose descendants ruled the north and came to be worshipped in error. It sets the whole work inside a Christian account of how idolatry arose.

Gylfaginning, "the tricking of Gylfi", is the mythological narrative. A Swedish king comes to the hall of the Aesir and questions three figures on thrones about the origin and end of the world. Their answers run from the void of Ginnungagap and the killing of the giant Ymir through the making of humans, the world tree Yggdrasil, the halls of the gods, the binding of Fenrir and Loki, the death of Baldr, told at length and with genuine literary skill, and Ragnarok and the renewed world. The frame closes by revealing that the hall and the three questioners were an illusion.

Skaldskaparmal, "the language of poetry", is the technical core and the longest part. It catalogues kennings, the compressed metaphorical substitutions that skaldic verse runs on, gold as Sif's hair, poetry as Odin's drink, the sea as Ymir's blood, and explains each by giving the myth that licenses it, quoting hundreds of verses from named earlier poets. Several stories survive only here, embedded as explanations, including the theft of Idunn's apples and the origin of the mead of poetry.

Hattatal, "the enumeration of metres", is a poem of Snorri's own composition in praise of King Hakon and Earl Skuli, running through something over a hundred verse forms with commentary, and demonstrating each metre by being written in it.

Snorri Sturluson was born in 1179, fostered at Oddi, the leading centre of learning in Iceland, and made rich by marriage and richer by litigation. He was lawspeaker of the Althing twice, from 1215 to 1218 and again from 1222 to 1231, the highest office the Icelandic commonwealth had. He visited Norway in 1218 and became a retainer of the young King Hakon Hakonarson and Earl Skuli, and accepted, at least nominally, a commission to bring Iceland under Norwegian rule.

He did not deliver it, and Iceland's factional violence in the following decades entangled him thoroughly. He was on the losing side more than once, fled to Norway again in 1237, returned against the king's express prohibition, and in September 1241 was killed in the cellar of his house at Reykholt by men acting on Hakon's authority. Iceland lost its independence to Norway less than twenty-five years later.

He is also credited with Heimskringla, the history of the kings of Norway, and by many scholars with Egils saga, though that attribution is not certain. That combination matters for reading the Edda: Snorri was not a priest or a mythographer but a historian, a working poet and a political operator, writing about the old gods for reasons that included professional utility, aristocratic patronage and an evident personal delight in the material. The book is dedicated to teaching craft, and its longest section is a reference list.

The context is also worth naming. Skaldic poetry was going out of fashion, displaced by imported continental verse forms and by the fact that its imagery had become unintelligible to audiences who no longer knew the myths. Snorri wrote to arrest that decline, and the whole book is best read as a conservation effort by a man who could see the tradition he had trained in being forgotten.

Here is the difficulty. Snorri was a Christian, writing more than two centuries after Iceland's conversion around the year 1000, for readers who had never sacrificed to Odin. He never saw the religion he describes being practised. His sources were older poems, some of which survive independently and some of which do not, and whatever oral tradition still circulated.

The Prologue's derivation of the gods from Troy is not an accident or a fig leaf; it is a standard medieval move, and versions of it recur inside Gylfaginning and Skaldskaparmal. This raises the question of how far Snorri's whole presentation is shaped by a learned Christian framework, a coherent creation, an ordered pantheon with departments, a linear history ending in destruction and renewal, imposed on material that was originally neither coherent nor systematic.

Positions differ sharply. At one end, scholars treat Gylfaginning as a broadly reliable digest of genuine tradition, on the grounds that where it can be checked against the Poetic Edda and skaldic verse it usually checks out. At the other, it is read as a substantially literary construction in which Snorri harmonised inconsistent sources, filled gaps, and let Christian eschatology colour Ragnarok and Christian narrative shape the death of Baldr. Most working scholarship sits between, accepting the outline while treating uncorroborated detail with caution and being especially wary where Snorri is unusually tidy.

The practical consequence is large. The neat family tree of the Aesir, the nine worlds, the roster of Odin's possessions, the sequence of Ragnarok as popular retellings give it: much of that is Snorri's arrangement, and it should be attributed to him rather than to a pagan Scandinavia that left no theological writing of its own.