Almost everything we know about the Norse gods we owe to two books from medieval Iceland. A look at the sources – and their limits.
When we tell of Odin, Yggdrasil or Ragnarök today, we almost always draw on the same source: the Edda. Yet strictly speaking ‘the Edda’ does not exist – there are two different works that bear this name.
The Poetic Edda (also Elder or Verse Edda) is a collection of songs about gods and heroes. It survives chiefly in a single manuscript, the Codex Regius, written down in Iceland around 1270. For centuries it was thought lost, until the Icelandic bishop Brynjólfur Sveinsson rediscovered it in 1643. Without this one volume, songs such as the Völuspá (the seeress’s prophecy) or the Hávamál (the sayings of the High One) would probably have been lost forever.
The Prose Edda (Younger Edda) comes from the Icelandic scholar and chieftain Snorri Sturluson and was written around 1220. It was meant as a handbook for poets: in it Snorri explained the old images and kennings of skaldic verse and, to do so, summarised the myths systematically. Much of what we know today as a coherent narrative was first ordered this way by Snorri.
Both works were written down in the 13th century – that is, roughly two hundred years after the end of the actual Viking Age, and in an Iceland that had long been Christian. The songs themselves are older and were handed down orally, but we see the pagan world of the gods through the pen of Christian scribes. Some of it is surely faithfully preserved, other parts reinterpreted or added. Serious engagement with the mythology therefore always means knowing where a detail comes from.
“Cattle die, and kinsmen die, and so one dies oneself; but a noble name will never die for the one who earns good renown.”Hávamál 76, translation after Henry Adams Bellows (public domain)
This very idea – that the word outlasts the person – carried these songs across the centuries. In our Library you will find the most important public-domain editions of the Edda to read for free.