WHAT IS THE POETIC EDDA?
Even if the poems of the so-called Edda were not so significant and intrinsically so valuable, the long series of scholarly struggles which have been going on over them for the better part of three centuries would in itself give them a peculiar interest. Their history is strangely mysterious. We do not know who composed them, or when or where they were composed; we are by no means sure who collected them or when he did so; finally, we are not absolutely certain as to what an “Edda” is, and the best guess at the meaning of the word renders its application to this collection of poems more or less misleading.
A brief review of the chief facts in the history of the Poetic Edda will explain why this uncertainty has persisted. Preserved in various manuscripts of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries is a prose work consisting of a very extensive collection of mythological stories, an explanation of the important figures and tropes of Norse poetic diction,—the poetry of the Icelandic and Norwegian skalds was appallingly complex in this respect,—and a treatise on metrics. This work, clearly a handbook for poets, was commonly known as the “Edda” of Snorri Sturluson, for at the head of the copy of it in the Uppsalabok, a manuscript written presumably some fifty or sixty years after Snorri’s death, which was in 1241, we find: “This book is called Edda, which Snorri Sturluson composed.” This work, well known as the Prose Edda, Snorri’s Edda or the [[xiv]]Younger Edda, has recently been made available to readers of English in the admirable translation by Arthur G. Brodeur, published by the American-Scandinavian Foundation in 1916.
Icelandic tradition, however, persisted in ascribing either this Edda or one resembling it to Snorri’s much earlier compatriot, Sæmund the Wise (1056–1133). When, early in the seventeenth century, the learned Arngrimur Jonsson proved to everyone’s satisfaction that Snorri and nobody else must have been responsible for the work in question, the next thing to determine was what, if anything, Sæmund had done of the same kind. The nature of Snorri’s book gave a clue. In the mythological stories related a number of poems were quoted, and as these and other poems were to all appearances Snorri’s chief sources of information, it was assumed that Sæmund must have written or compiled a verse Edda—whatever an “Edda” might be—on which Snorri’s work was largely based.
So matters stood when, in 1643, Brynjolfur Sveinsson, Bishop of Skalholt, discovered a manuscript, clearly written as early as 1300, containing twenty-nine poems, complete or fragmentary, and some of them with the very lines and stanzas used by Snorri. Great was the joy of the scholars, for here, of course, must be at least a part of the long-sought Edda of Sæmund the Wise. Thus the good bishop promptly labeled his find, and as Sæmund’s Edda, the Elder Edda or the Poetic Edda it has been known to this day.
This precious manuscript, now in the Royal Library in Copenhagen, and known as the Codex Regius (R2365), has been the basis for all published editions of the Eddic poems. A few poems of similar character found elsewhere [[xv]]have subsequently been added to the collection, until now most editions include, as in this translation, a total of thirty-four. A shorter manuscript now in the Arnamagnæan collection in Copenhagen (AM748), contains fragmentary or complete versions of six of the poems in the Codex Regius, and one other, Baldrs Draumar, not found in that collection. Four other poems (Rigsthula, Hyndluljoth, Grougaldr and Fjolsvinnsmol, the last two here combined under the title of Svipdagsmol), from various manuscripts, so closely resemble in subject-matter and style the poems in the Codex Regius that they have been included by most editors in the collection. Finally, Snorri’s Edda contains one complete poem, the Grottasongr, which many editors have added to the poetic collection; it is, however, not included in this translation, as an admirable English version of it is available in Mr. Brodeur’s rendering of Snorri’s work.
From all this it is evident that the Poetic Edda, as we now know it, is no definite and plainly limited work, but rather a more or less haphazard collection of separate poems, dealing either with Norse mythology or with hero-cycles unrelated to the traditional history of greater Scandinavia or Iceland. How many other similar poems, now lost, may have existed in such collections as were current in Iceland in the later twelfth and thirteenth centuries we cannot know, though it is evident that some poems of this type are missing. We can say only that thirty-four poems have been preserved, twenty-nine of them in a single manuscript collection, which differ considerably in subject-matter and style from all the rest of extant Old Norse poetry, and these we group together as the Poetic Edda. [[xvi]]
But what does the word “Edda” mean? Various guesses have been made. An early assumption was that the word somehow meant “Poetics,” which fitted Snorri’s treatise to a nicety, but which, in addition to the lack of philological evidence to support this interpretation, could by no stretch of scholarly subtlety be made appropriate to the collection of poems. Jacob Grimm ingeniously identified the word with the word “edda” used in one of the poems, the Rigsthula, where, rather conjecturally, it means “great-grandmother.” The word exists in this sense nowhere else in Norse literature, and Grimm’s suggestion of “Tales of a Grandmother,” though at one time it found wide acceptance, was grotesquely inappropriate to either the prose or the verse work.
At last Eirikr Magnusson hit on what appears the likeliest solution of the puzzle: that “Edda” is simply the genitive form of the proper name “Oddi.” Oddi was a settlement in the southwest of Iceland, certainly the home of Snorri Sturluson for many years, and, traditionally at least, also the home of Sæmund the Wise. That Snorri’s work should have been called “The Book of Oddi” is altogether reasonable, for such a method of naming books was common—witness the “Book of the Flat Island” and other early manuscripts. That Sæmund may also have written or compiled another “Oddi-Book” is perfectly possible, and that tradition should have said he did so is entirely natural.
It is, however, an open question whether or not Sæmund had anything to do with making the collection, or any part of it, now known as the Poetic Edda, for of course the seventeenth-century assignment of the work to him is negligible. [[xvii]]We can say only that he may have made some such compilation, for he was a diligent student of Icelandic tradition and history, and was famed throughout the North for his learning. But otherwise no trace of his works survives, and as he was educated in Paris, it is probable that he wrote rather in Latin than in the vernacular.
All that is reasonably certain is that by the middle or last of the twelfth century there existed in Iceland one or more written collections of Old Norse mythological and heroic poems, that the Codex Regius, a copy made a hundred years or so later, represents at least a considerable part of one of these, and that the collection of thirty-four poems which we now know as the Poetic or Elder Edda is practically all that has come down to us of Old Norse poetry of this type. Anything more is largely guesswork, and both the name of the compiler and the meaning of the title “Edda” are conjectural.