The Prose Edda Read online

  THE PROSE EDDA

  SNORRI STURLUSON (1179–1241) was born in western Iceland, the son of an upstart Icelandic chieftain. In the early thirteenth century, Snorri rose to become Iceland’s richest and, for a time, its most powerful leader. Twice he was elected law-speaker at the Althing, Iceland’s national assembly, and twice he went abroad to visit Norwegian royalty. An ambitious and sometimes ruthless leader, Snorri was also a man of learning, with deep interests in the myth, poetry and history of the Viking Age. He has long been assumed to be the author of some of medieval Iceland’s greatest works, including the Prose Edda and Heimskringla, the latter a saga history of the kings of Norway.

  JESSE BYOCK is Professor of Old Norse and Medieval Scandinavian Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Professor at UCLA’s Cotsen Institute of Archaeology. A specialist in North Atlantic and Viking Studies, he directs the Mosfell Archaeological Project in Iceland. Prof. Byock received his Ph.D. from Harvard University after studying in Iceland, Sweden and France. His books and translations include Viking Age Iceland, Medieval Iceland: Society, Sagas, and Power, Feud in the Icelandic Saga, The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki and The Saga of the Volsungs: The Norse Epic of Sigurd the Dragon Slayer.

  SNORRI STURLUSON

  The Prose Edda

  Norse Mythology

  Translated with an Introduction and Notes by

  JESSE L. BYOCK

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

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  First published in Penguin Classics 2005

  1

  Copyright © Jesse Byock, 2005

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the translator has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject

  to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

  re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s

  prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in

  which it is published and without a similar condition including this

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  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  Further Reading

  Note on the Translation

  Map: The Geographical World of the Edda

  THE PROSE EDDA

  PROLOGUE

  GYLFAGINNING (THE DELUDING OF GYLFI)

  SKALDSKAPARMAL (POETIC DICTION)

  Mythic and Legendary Tales

  Poetic References from Skaldskaparmal (Translated by Russell Poole)

  Appendices

  1: The Norse Cosmos and the World Tree

  2: The Language of the Skalds: Kennings and Heiti

  3: Eddic Poems Used as Sources in Gylfaginning

  Genealogical Tables

  Notes

  Glossary of Names

  Acknowledgements

  First, I want to thank Russell Poole, who translated the section Poetic References from Skaldskaparmal. His knowledge of kennings and poetic language was an important contribution to this volume. Much of this translation was done in Iceland where Kristján Jóhann Jónsson, Eysteinn Björnsson, Aðalsteinn Davíðsson, Ingunn ásdísardóttir, Gísli Sigurðsson, Peter Foote and Paul Taylor generously read parts of the manuscript and made many comments. Vésteinn Ólason also graciously offered his time and the resources of the árni Magnússon Manuscript Institute. Robert Guillemette turned his artistry to the World Tree. Efrain Kristal, the authority on Jorges Luis Borges who translated the Edda into Spanish, offered many valuable insights. My editor at Penguin Classics, Laura Barber, deserves credit for making this book more succinct. I am fortunate for the assistance of my talented students at the University of California, Brian O’Camb, David Lassen and Natalie Operstein. I greatly appreciated the support of the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and especially thank Deborah Kennel and Karen Burgess. The Fulbright Commission, The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the UCLA Academic Senate all helped bring this project to fruition.

  I wish to dedicate this volume to Franz Bäuml, Albert Lord,

  Richard Tomasson and Eugen Weber, teachers

  from whom I learned.

  Introduction

  The Prose Edda is Scandinavia’s best-known work of literature and the most extensive source for Norse mythology. In straight-forward prose interspersed with ancient verse, the Edda recounts the Norse creation epic and the subsequent struggles of the gods, giants, dwarves and elves in that universe. Woven throughout is the gods’ tragic realization that the future holds one final cataclysmic battle, Ragnarok, when the world will be destroyed. The Edda also tells heroic stories about legendary warriors and their kin, stories which incorporate shards of ancient memory. The powerful supernatural tales and heroic lore captured in the Edda have influenced modern culture, inspiring most notably Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle and J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. The Edda also influenced poets W. H. Auden and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the fabulist Jorge Luis Borges, and a host of writers and artists in other genres, including fantasy, comic books and film.

  Over the centuries the Prose Edda has been known as the Younger Edda, Snorri’s Edda, and simply the Edda. Many of the stories contained in the Prose Edda have counterparts in ancient verse known as eddic poetry – anonymous poems collected and written down in a separate work called the Poetic Edda around the same time that the Prose Edda was compiled in the thirteenth century. In many instances the Prose Edda incorporates stanzas of eddic poems directly into its prose, citing these verses as sources.

  The Prose Edda also adopts stanzas and references from another group of poems, called skaldic poetry. The two forms of poetry, eddic and skaldic, are closely related, and most skalds, as Old Norse poets were called, could work in either form. The major differences between the two are that skaldic poetry employs more intricate word choices and metres than does eddic poetry, and that skaldic poems, unlike eddic poems, are frequently attributed to individual skalds who composed them.

  Both the Eddas – poetry and prose – were written in Iceland during the thirteenth century, and they are based in large part on the oral tradition that stemmed from the earlier Viking Age. This era, from roughly 800 to 1100, was a time when Scandinavian seafarers explored, raided and settled distant lands, including the previously uninhabited Iceland. Old Norse was the language spoken throughout Scandinavia during the Viking period, and the two Eddas were written in Old Icelandic, a branch of Old Norse that had changed little from the time Iceland was settled in the late 800s. The Eddas, l
ike Iceland’s sagas, were written in the native language and they were meant to be read aloud, enabling a single manuscript to speak to many, literate and non-literate alike. The content of the Eddas did not go through an intermediate stage of being written and transmitted in Latin, the language of the Church, as did most other non-Icelandic writings from the Middle Ages that give information about Norse myth and legend. For example, the Prose Edda differs from the Gesta Danorum (History of the Danes), which was written in Latin around the year 1200 by the Danish cleric Saxo Grammaticus for Denmark’s archbishop and was strongly influenced by his classical learning.

  Geographical and political circumstances help to explain why the Prose Edda and the Poetic Edda were written in the form they were in medieval Iceland. This was an immigrant society formed by colonists from many parts of the Viking world, but especially from Norway and from Norse colonies in the British Isles. In a frontier setting on the far northern edge of the habitable world, the Icelanders held fast to the cultural memories brought by the early settlers, which provided them with a sense of common origin and helped bind them into a cohesive cultural group. Additionally, the Icelanders made the transition from their traditional religious beliefs to Christianity in a manner distinctly different from the contemporaneous conversion in the Norwegian mother culture. There, Christian missionary kings forcefully uprooted the belief in the old gods. The Icelanders, rather than shedding blood among themselves as did the Norwegians, peacefully accepted the new religion through a political compromise in the year 1000 at their annual national assembly, the Althing. This collective decision sanctioned a gradual transition to the new belief system. The old forms of worship faded within a few decades of the conversion, but the Icelanders continued long afterwards to value stories from the pagan times as a cultural heritage rather than a creed.

  Despite the Icelanders’ attachment to the Old Scandinavian past, thirteenth-century Icelanders often followed mainland Scandinavia in adopting elements of continental European culture. Many new tastes reached Iceland, especially via Norway, and among the imports came new forms of poetic expression including rhymed verse, sung dances (precursors of the ballad), French romances and Christian religious narratives, which competed with traditional eddic and skaldic poetry. In response to the new trends, the Edda was written as a handbook for those aspiring Icelandic skalds who wanted to master the traditional forms of verse and the older stories essential to the imagery of Old Norse poetry. Rather than reconstructing cultic practices of the old religion, which had ceased two centuries earlier, the Edda concentrates on what was still known at the time of its composition: myths, legends and the use of traditional poetic diction. It is evident that the one or more authors who compiled the Edda wanted to continue knowledge of Old Scandinavian poetry and the culture that surrounded it.

  Even though the Edda relies heavily on native traditions, a good argument can be made that it also shows awareness of two Latin literary genres of the Middle Ages: writings about mythology and about language and poetics. Some scholars propose that Latin treatises may have influenced those parts of the text that treat technical poetic terminology and systems of poetic classification. Further, almost everyone agrees that the writer of the Edda knew at least something of the ideas current in the general Latin learning of the Middle Ages, whether or not he himself knew Latin.

  The Title Edda and the Question of Authorship

  The origin of the use of the word edda as a title is elusive. In thirteenth-century Icelandic, the term edda meant ‘great-grandmother’, which would have been a fitting title for a compilation of traditional stories, but we will never know for sure how the name came to be applied. The original thirteenth-century manuscript is long lost, and it is not known whether the word edda was even its title. The name edda first appears in the surviving fourteenth-century manuscripts as a subtitle, referring to only a part of the compilation. Two related terms, edduregla and eddulist, referring to the rules and the art of poetry, also appear in fourteenth-century manuscripts. From these terms and their usage, we infer that the word edda had become associated with traditional verse, and by late medieval times the Edda was regarded in Iceland as the authoritative handbook for training poets in traditional verse forms.

  It has long been assumed that the learned and quarrelsome Icelandic chieftain Snorri Sturluson is the author of the Edda. The main evidence for Snorri’s authorship is the following short passage from the Codex Upsaliensis, an early fourteenth-century Icelandic manuscript containing the Edda:

  This book is called Edda. Snorri Sturluson compiled [literally, assembled] it in the way that it is arranged here. First it tells about the Æsir [the gods] and Ymir [the primordial giant], then comes the poetic diction section with the poetic names of many things and lastly a poem called the List of Meters which Snorri composed about King Hakon and Duke Skuli.1

  This passage outlines the main contents of the Edda, and although Snorri is named as the compiler of the work, it is not clear from the passage whether Snorri is the author of more than the List of Metres. The other main manuscripts of the Edda are also ambiguous about Snorri’s connection to the work; nevertheless, the mentions of Snorri in the manuscripts have greatly influenced Snorri’s acceptance as the author of the entire work.

  But who was Snorri? He was the son of Sturla, an upstart chieftain from western Iceland, whose sons and grandchildren lent the family name of Sturlung (the descendants of Sturla) to the Sturlung Age, a turbulent time in the history of Iceland in the first half of the thirteenth century. Born in 1178 or 1179, Snorri was two years old when his life took an unexpected turn. Jon Loptsson, Iceland’s most powerful and cultured leader, offered to raise Snorri in order to settle a feud. It was unusual for a child to be fostered in this way by a man of a higher social status than his father, so Snorri’s father saw this offer as a sign of respect. Snorri spent the next sixteen years at Oddi, Jon Loptsson’s estate and an important centre of learning in medieval Iceland. When he left Oddi, Snorri married one of the wealthiest women in Iceland and soon became a prominent chieftain. In 1215, and again in 1222, Snorri was elected the Althing’s law-speaker, the highest official position in the Old Icelandic Free State. As a sign of his status, Snorri built at the site of the Althing an unusually large turf building, where he and his men lived during the two-week period of the assembly, and it is instructive that this thirteenth-century Christian chieftain named this residence Valhalla, after the hall of the chief Norse god Odin.

  Snorri was extremely ambitious and his life was full of disputes and enemies. To increase his prestige and power at home, he sailed to Norway two times, where he made ill-advised alliances with conflicting factions within the Norwegian royal family. In the 1230s the number and reach of Snorri’s enemies in Iceland and Norway grew dangerously. He had married his daughters to rising Icelandic chieftains, but the marriages ended and the alliances failed. In the year 1241, two of Snorri’s former sons-in-law, recruited by the Norwegian king, who was extending his power to Iceland, attacked and surprised Snorri at his estate at Reykjaholt in western Iceland. They found him hiding in his cellar and killed him.

  Snorri is mentioned in many thirteenth-century Icelandic writings, and they allow us to know more about him than about most other individuals in medieval Europe. Still, we can only guess at some aspects of Snorri’s life, including the extent of his writings. The books that tradition attributes to him, the History of the Kings of Norway (Heimskringla) and the Prose Edda, indicate that he spent time gathering information for his future writings during his travels in Scandinavia. The opening section of Heimskringla, which covers the earliest mythic and legendary period, is called the Saga of the Ynglings. Like the Edda, this work tells ancient stories, and intersperses its prose with eddic and skaldic verses. However, the stories of the two works are often distinguished by differences of fact and detail.

  The Parts of the Edda

  The Edda is divided into four parts. It begins with a short Prologue, a self-standi
ng unit that differs significantly from the rest of the Edda in sentence structure, subject matter and the kind of genealogical information it gives. In a Norse culture that was in the process of absorbing elements of classical learning, the Prologue attempts to elevate the status of the Edda by equating Norse stories with those from the Graeco-Roman tradition. It also tries to make the Edda’s stories more palatable to medieval Christians by harmonizing Norse beliefs with Christian concepts. The Prologue may have been part of the original text, or some or all of it may have been added later.

  The second and main section is known as Gylfaginning and is the core of the Edda. No one can learn about Scandinavian mythology without it, since it is our best source for the story of the creation, the struggles of the gods, and the events leading to the destruction of the universe. The text of Gylfaginning is remarkably similar in all the important manuscripts of the Edda. Gylfaginning means the ‘deluding [ginning] of Gylfi’, a reference not to the stories that King Gylfi of Sweden learns from the Æsir, but to Gylfi’s realization that he was the victim of an elaborate optical illusion.

  Gylfaginning is written entirely as a dialogue between Gylfi and three formidable god-like figures who are at the centre of the deception. Gylfi disguises himself as a traveller named Gangleri, a name meaning ‘strider’, ‘walker’, or ‘wanderer’, and journeys to visit the Æsir. This mysterious people is said to be newly arrived in the North, and Gangleri seeks to discover the source of their power. In the Æsir’s majestic but illusory hall, Gangleri/Gylfi meets three manifestations of Odin: High, Just-as-High and Third. These strange, lordly individuals sit on thrones one above the other. Gangleri questions them and, story by story, they reveal what they know.