In order to thoroughly comprehend the Odinic mythology it is necessary to make a careful study of the history, literature, languages and dialects of the Teutonic races and of their popular life in all its various manifestations.
The chief depositories of the Norse mythology are the Elder or Sæmund’s Edda (poetry) and the Younger or Snorre’s Edda (prose). In Icelandic Edda means great-grandmother, and some think this appellation refers to the ancient origin of the myths it contains. Others connect it with the Indian Veda and the Norse vide (Swedish veta, to know).
I. The Elder Edda.
This work was evidently collected from the mouths of the people in the same manner as Homer’s Iliad, and there is a similar uncertainty in regard to who put it in writing. It has generally been supposed that the songs of the Elder Edda were collected by Sæmund the Wise (born 1056, died 1133), but Sophus Bugge and N. M. Petersen, both eminent Icelandic scholars, have made it seem quite probable that it was not put in writing before the year 1240. This is not the place for a discussion of this difficult question, and the reader is referred to Sophus Bugge’s Introduction to Sæmundar Edda and to Petersen’s History of Northern Literature, if he wishes to investigate this subject. There are thirty-nine poems in the Elder Edda, and we have here to look at their contents. Like the most of the Icelandic poetry, these poems do not distinguish themselves, as does the poetry of Greece and Rome, by a metrical system based on quantity, but have an arrangement of their own in common with the poetry of the other old Gothic nations, the Anglo-Saxons, etc. This system consists chiefly in the number of long syllables and in alliteration. The songs are divided into strophes commonly containing eight verses or lines. These strophes are usually divided into two halves, and each of these halves again into two parts, which form a fourth part of the whole strophe, and contain two verses belonging together and united by alliteration.
The alliteration (letter rhyme) is the most essential element in Icelandic versification. It is found in all kinds of verse and in every age, the Icelanders still using it; and its nature is this, that in the two lines belonging together, three words occur beginning with the same letter, two of which must be in the first line and the third in the beginning of the second. The third and last of these is called the chief letter (höfuðstafr, head-stave), because it is regarded as ruling over the two others which depend on it and have the name sub-letters (studlar, supporters). All rhyme-letters must be found in accented syllables, and no more words in the two lines should begin with the same letter—at least no chief word, which takes the accent on the first syllable. This principle is illustrated by the following first half of the seventh strophe of Völuspá, the oldest song in the Elder Edda:
Tefldu í túni,
Teitir váru;
Var þeim vettugis
Vant ór gulli.
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