The Book That Saved the Norse Gods

Sometime around 1220, in Iceland, a scholar, lawspeaker, and historian named Snorri Sturluson set to work on what he likely imagined as a practical manual. Icelandic poets of his day still composed in the old alliterative verse forms, thick with kennings — riddling compound phrases like 'whale-road' for the sea — that only made sense if you knew the myths behind them. Snorri's book was meant to teach that craft. What resulted, however, became something far larger: the fullest surviving account of Norse mythology in existence.

The work came to be called the Prose Edda, or Snorri's Edda, to distinguish it from a separate collection of anonymous mythological poems known as the Poetic Edda. Snorri drew on versions of those very poems, along with a wide range of other sources, weaving them into a structured whole. Where the Poetic Edda offers fragments of verse, Snorri's Edda offers narrative and explanation, making it the closest thing we have to a guidebook to the gods, giants, and cosmology of the North Germanic peoples.

The book is built from four distinct parts. The Prologue offers a euhemerized account of the Norse gods, treating them as legendary human figures rather than divine beings. Gylfaginning, roughly 20,000 words long, unfolds in a question-and-answer format that lays out the core myths — creation, the gods, and the eventual end of the world. Skáldskaparmál, the longest section at some 50,000 words, continues this dialogue style while cataloguing kennings and heiti, the poetic substitutions skalds relied on. Finally, Háttatal, another 20,000 words, turns to the technical composition of skaldic verse itself.

No single original manuscript of the Prose Edda survives. Instead, seven manuscripts remain, dating from roughly 1300 to 1600 — six from the medieval period and one from the 1600s. The four principal ones are known as Codex Regius, Codex Wormianus, Codex Trajectinus, and Codex Upsaliensis, alongside three smaller fragments. Each differs from the others in notable ways, a fact that has proven valuable to researchers piecing together how the text evolved, even as it complicates efforts to reconstruct exactly what Snorri originally wrote.

The question of authorship is more tangled than it might seem. The attribution to Snorri rests largely on a passage found in Codex Upsaliensis, an early 14th-century manuscript. But since every surviving manuscript was copied more than fifty years after Snorri's death, and since they differ considerably from one another, scholars have long debated how much of the text as we have it is truly his. Sections of Skáldskaparmál in particular show signs of later interpolation, and even parts of the Prologue and Gylfaginning have been questioned. Still, since the Renaissance scholar Arngrímur Jónsson affirmed Snorri's authorship in the late 1500s and early 1600s, it has generally been accepted.