The Edda is not one book but the name shared by two medieval Icelandic works: the Prose Edda, a handbook for poets written by Snorri Sturluson around 1220–1225, and the Poetic Edda, a collection of anonymous poems about gods and heroes preserved mainly in a single manuscript from about 1270, the Codex Regius. Nearly everything we tell about Odin, Thor, Yggdrasil and Ragnarök comes from these two sources. Here you will learn what they contain, how the manuscripts survived, what the word “Edda” may mean, and how to read them yourself today.
Picture this: the whole surviving knowledge of a religion practised for centuries from Norway to Iceland, hanging on a few bundles of calfskin. No pagan scripture, no priest's sermon, no prayer book. The Vikings did not write their myths down – they told them, sang them and at most hinted at them in runes. The writing came later, in thirteenth-century Iceland, among Christians. That we know who Odin was, why Thor carries a hammer and how the world ends at Ragnarök, we owe above all to two works that share one puzzling name: Edda.
We engrave motifs from these texts every week in our workshop. So we want to be straight with you about where they come from – and where the record gets thin.
When people say “the Edda”, they mean one of two quite different things. The Prose Edda, also called the Snorra Edda or Younger Edda, has a known author: the Icelandic scholar, poet and politician Snorri Sturluson (1179–1241). It is a manual of poetics written in prose, with verses quoted throughout. Only this work was called “Edda” in the Middle Ages.
The Poetic Edda, also known as the Elder Edda or Sæmundar Edda, is a collection of poems with no named authors. It contains lays about the gods and about heroes such as Sigurd, Brynhild and Gudrun. This collection only acquired the name “Edda” in the seventeenth century, thanks to a scholarly mistake we will come to shortly.
Both works come from Iceland, both from the thirteenth century, and both were written down by Christians – some two hundred years after Iceland accepted Christianity around the year 1000. Keep that in mind whenever you read about Norse mythology: what we call “Viking myths” we know almost entirely in the form recorded by Icelandic Christians long after the Viking Age had ended.
The honest answer: nobody knows for certain. Scholars have argued about it since the seventeenth century, and four explanations keep coming back.
1. “Great-grandmother”. Old Norse really does have a word edda with this meaning. In the eddic poem Rígsþula, which tells how the social ranks came to be, the oldest couple are called Ái and Edda, great-grandfather and great-grandmother. The god Ríg stays in their house, and Edda later gives birth to the ancestor of the thralls. The word also appears in a list of kinship terms in Snorri's Skáldskaparmál. A “great-grandmother's book” is a charming idea – but an odd title for a learned textbook.
2. “The book of Oddi”. Snorri grew up at Oddi in southern Iceland, one of the country's great centres of learning. “Edda” would then mean something like “the Oddi book”. The English editor Anthony Faulkes considered this unlikely both linguistically and historically, and it is now generally rejected.
3. From óðr, “poetry, inspiration”. The same root appears in Odin's name and in Óðrerir, the vessel of the mead of poetry. The meaning would fit a book about poetry, but such a new coinage in the thirteenth century is hard to justify.
4. A loan from Latin. Latin edo means “I compose, I publish”. Icelandic formed kredda (“article of belief”) from Latin credo in exactly the same way. “Edda” would then mean something like “poetics”. Many specialists now find this the most convincing explanation, though it remains unproven.
Snorri Sturluson was no cloistered monk. He was one of the richest and most powerful men in Iceland, more than once lawspeaker at the Althing, a court poet to Norwegian rulers and a hard-nosed politician who was killed at his farm of Reykholt in 1241. After his stay in Norway in 1218–1220 he wrote the Edda, probably around 1220–1225. His purpose was practical. Young poets were to master the old skaldic art, whose imagery made no sense unless you knew the pagan myths behind it.
The Prose Edda has four parts:
Snorri was a brilliant storyteller and a systematiser. Out of scattered poems and skaldic verses he built a coherent world picture. Much of what feels like “the” Norse mythology today – the tidy arrangement of the nine worlds, for instance – is that neat only in his telling. Where he quotes older poems, we can check him. Where he stands alone, we cannot tell whether he preserved old tradition, combined it or invented. Thor's visit to Útgarða-Loki is one of the tales known only from his pen.
Snorri was aware of the tension. In Skáldskaparmál he remarks, in effect, that Christians should not believe in these gods, but should know the stories in order to understand the old poetry. For him the myths were cultural knowledge, not a creed.
Snorri's own manuscript is lost. What survives are copies from the fourteenth century onward, some of them strikingly different from one another. Four count as the main witnesses:
Codex Regius of the Prose Edda (GKS 2367 4to): first half of the fourteenth century, the most complete version and the basis of most editions and translations. GKS stands for Gammel kongelig samling, the Old Royal Collection in Copenhagen; “4to” means quarto format. Do not confuse it with the Codex Regius of the Poetic Edda – both are “King's Books” because both were kept in the Danish Royal Library.
Codex Upsaliensis (DG 11 4to): first quarter of the fourteenth century, now in Uppsala University Library. The Uppsala Edda offers an idiosyncratic, partly shorter text, contains the famous opening sentence naming Snorri, and has a drawing of Gangleri standing before the three enthroned figures. Some scholars think its version is closer to an early draft; others see it as a later abridgement. The question is still open.
Codex Wormianus (AM 242 fol): mid-fourteenth century, named after the Danish antiquarian Ole Worm, who owned it in the seventeenth century. It is kept in Copenhagen. Alongside the Edda it contains grammatical treatises – and, at the end, the only surviving copy of Rígsþula, the poem in which the great-grandmother Edda appears.
Codex Trajectinus (Utrecht, MS 1374): a paper manuscript of around 1600 that copies a lost exemplar from the second half of the thirteenth century – a young copy of a very old original.
Now for the real treasure. The Poetic Edda stands or falls with one manuscript: the Codex Regius, in Icelandic Konungsbók, shelfmark GKS 2365 4to. A scribe wrote it in Iceland in the 1270s, probably from older written exemplars from the first half of the thirteenth century that are now lost. Forty-five vellum leaves survive. There were once more: in the middle of the Sigurd section a whole gathering of eight leaves is missing – the so-called “great lacuna” after Sigrdrífumál. What stood there can only be reconstructed indirectly from the prose of the Völsunga saga.
Without this unassuming little book we would have only fragments of the Völuspá, and poems such as Hávamál, Lokasenna and Þrymskviða would be lost altogether.
Where the Codex Regius spent its first centuries, nobody knows. It surfaces in 1643, when it came into the hands of Brynjólfur Sveinsson, the learned Bishop of Skálholt. He attributed the collection to Sæmundr fróði, “Sæmund the Learned” (1056–1133), a priest and scholar associated with Oddi – as if this were the older source from which Snorri had drawn.
We now know there is no evidence that Sæmund had anything to do with it, and the manuscript was written some 140 years after his death. Yet the name Sæmundar Edda and the label “Elder Edda” stuck – a scholar's error that became a brand name.
In 1662 Brynjólfur sent the codex as a gift to King Frederick III of Denmark. Hence the name Codex Regius, the “Royal Book”. For roughly three centuries it remained in the Royal Library in Copenhagen.
The Codex Regius is carefully arranged: mythological poems first, then heroic poems, roughly following the story of the Völsung family. Short prose passages link some of the poems.
Mythological poems (in manuscript order):
Heroic poems: First come the three Helgi lays (Helgakviða Hundingsbana I, Helgakviða Hjörvarðssonar, Helgakviða Hundingsbana II). Then the great Sigurd and Niflung cycle: Frá dauða Sinfjötla (a prose piece), Grípisspá, Reginsmál, Fáfnismál, Sigrdrífumál, then the lacuna, then Brot af Sigurðarkviðu, Guðrúnarkviða I, Sigurðarkviða in skamma, Helreið Brynhildar, Dráp Niflunga, Guðrúnarkviða II and III, Oddrúnargrátr, Atlakviða and Atlamál in grœnlenzku. The collection closes with Guðrúnarhvöt and Hamðismál, about Gudrun's sons and the Gothic king Jörmunrekk.
The heroic poems reach deep into the Migration Period: behind Atli stands Attila the Hun (died 453), behind Gunnar the Burgundian king Gundahar, whose kingdom fell in 436/437. Read more in our posts on Sigurd, Brynhild and the Nibelungs and on the historical Burgundians. It is the same material as the German Nibelungenlied, told in a harder, Northern key.
In a wider sense, the Poetic Edda also includes poems in the same style that survive elsewhere.
AM 748 I a 4to is a fragment of six vellum leaves from the early fourteenth century, now in the Arnamagnæan Institute in Copenhagen. It contains Grímnismál and Hymiskviða in full, parts of Skírnismál, Hárbarðsljóð and Vafþrúðnismál, and the beginning of the prose introduction to Völundarkviða. Above all it is the only source for Baldrs draumar (“Baldr's Dreams”), in which Odin rides to the underworld to question a dead seeress about his son's fate. It also proves that a second, independent collection of eddic poems once existed.
Völuspá also survives in Hauksbók, a large compilation of around 1300, with a markedly different stanza order. Hyndluljóð, with the embedded “Short Völuspá”, is found in the enormous late-fourteenth-century Flateyjarbók. Rígsþula survives only in Codex Wormianus, and Grottasöngr (the song of the giantesses at the magic mill) in manuscripts of the Prose Edda. Further eddic stanzas are scattered through the sagas; Andreas Heusler and Wilhelm Ranisch collected them in 1903 as Eddica minora.
When the individual poems were composed is one of the great open questions in Old Norse studies. The manuscript only gives the latest possible date. The earliest sometimes follows from content: a poem about Attila cannot predate the fifth century, and Atlamál in grœnlenzku (“the Greenlandic Lay of Atli”) cannot predate the settlement of Greenland around 985 – if its title is right.
Between those limits, specialists argue with several tools:
The Norwegian philologist Bjarne Fidjestøl examined these methods critically in The Dating of Eddic Poetry (1999) and showed how shaky many apparently solid criteria are. Roughly speaking, many scholars consider some poems, such as Atlakviða and Hamðismál, comparatively old, perhaps ninth or tenth century. Others, such as Grípisspá, read like late summaries from the twelfth or thirteenth century. Some poems are layered in themselves – Hávamál is generally seen as a compilation of several originally separate parts. Treat any precise date for an individual poem with caution, however confidently it is stated.
| Poetic Edda | Prose Edda (Snorra Edda) | |
|---|---|---|
| Form | alliterative poems, a few prose links | prose with quoted stanzas |
| Author | anonymous, many poets over generations | Snorri Sturluson |
| Date | poems: 9th–13th c. (disputed); manuscript: c. 1270 | c. 1220–1225; manuscripts from the 14th c. |
| Main manuscript | Codex Regius, GKS 2365 4to | Codex Regius, GKS 2367 4to |
| Purpose | poetry, entertainment, tradition | textbook for skalds |
| Called “Edda” | only since the 17th c. | already in the Middle Ages |
In practice: the poems are the older voice – often dark, abrupt, full of allusions. Snorri is the explainer who smooths over the gaps. Read them side by side and you soon see how much order he brought in.
For centuries the most important Icelandic manuscripts lay in Copenhagen – partly in the Royal Library, partly in the collection of the Icelandic scholar Árni Magnússon (1663–1730), who gathered vellum books from Iceland and bequeathed them to the University of Copenhagen. After long debate, the Danish parliament decided in 1965 to transfer a large part of this Icelandic cultural heritage; the treaty took effect in 1971.
On 21 April 1971 the moment came: the two most precious items, the Codex Regius of the Poetic Edda and Flateyjarbók, arrived in Reykjavík. Because nobody wanted to trust such cargo to an aeroplane, they travelled by sea under military escort, aboard the Danish naval vessel Vædderen. Further consignments followed over decades: 1,666 manuscripts from the Arnamagnæan Collection plus charters and copies, and 141 manuscripts from the Royal Library. The last two volumes were handed over in June 1997. Part of the collection, including the fragment AM 748 I a 4to and Codex Wormianus, remained in Copenhagen.
Today the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies in Reykjavík keeps the Codex Regius. The institute now has its own building on the university campus, fittingly named Edda. In the exhibition World in Words the Codex Regius is shown in the original at times, alongside other great manuscripts such as Flateyjarbók and Hauksbók.
Karl Simrock (1851): the Bonn Germanist produced the most influential German translation of the nineteenth century, solemn in tone and faithful to the alliteration. It is in the public domain.
Hugo Gering (1892): a philologically more exact German version with notes, also in the public domain.
Henry Adams Bellows (1923): The Poetic Edda, the classic public-domain English translation, with detailed notes on every poem. This is how he renders the famous stanza on lasting fame:
Cattle die, and kinsmen die,
And so one dies one's self;
But a noble name will never die,
If good renown one gets.Hávamál, st. 77 in Bellows' numbering (st. 76 in most editions), translated by Henry Adams Bellows (public domain)
For the Prose Edda there is the public-domain English translation by Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur (1916).
There are also modern, copyrighted translations that reflect current scholarship – in English those by Carolyn Larrington and Andy Orchard, and Anthony Faulkes for the Prose Edda; in German those by Felix Genzmer and Arnulf Krause. For serious study you will want one of these annotated editions.
A few tips so the Edda does not end up back on the shelf after twenty pages:
Start with Snorri. Gylfaginning is accessible, entertaining and gives you the big picture – creation, gods, the end of the world. After that you will recognise the characters in the poems.
Then Völuspá. It is short, powerful and the backbone of the whole mythology. You can read it on our site: Völuspá in full. Read it twice; nobody gets it all the first time.
Hávamál in small doses. It is a collection of sayings, not a novel. Our bilingual Hávamál sets the Old Norse text beside a translation, and our Hávamál verse finder lets you look up stanzas on themes like friendship, hospitality or reputation.
Then the heroic poems. A good way in is Sigrdrífumál, where the awakened valkyrie teaches Sigurd rune lore.
Check the reference. Whenever you see an “Edda quote”, ask: which poem, which stanza, which translation? Plenty of “Viking wisdom” circulating online appears in no manuscript. And stanza numbering varies between editions, as the Bellows citation above shows.
And: the Edda is not a Bible. For what people in the Viking Age actually believed, you combine it with runic inscriptions, picture stones, place names, skaldic verse and archaeology. For comparison, the Sagas of Icelanders, the other great prose works of the same century, are well worth your time.
One more reason to make the effort: without the Edda there would be no modern Odin. Richard Wagner drew heavily on it for his Ring cycle, and J. R. R. Tolkien took the names of his dwarves – and the name Gandalf – almost straight from the dwarf list in Völuspá (more in Tolkien and the Edda).
What is the Edda in simple terms? The Edda is the name of two works from medieval Iceland: the Poetic Edda, a collection of old poems about gods and heroes, and the Prose Edda, a handbook for poets by Snorri Sturluson. Together they are the main source for Norse mythology.
What is the difference between the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda? The Poetic Edda consists of anonymous poems, preserved mainly in the Codex Regius of about 1270. The Prose Edda was written by Snorri Sturluson around 1220–1225 as a handbook that retells the myths in prose and explains poetic language.
What does the word Edda mean? Nobody knows for sure. Suggestions include “great-grandmother”, a derivation from the farm of Oddi, from óðr (“poetry”), or from Latin edo (“I compose”); many scholars favour the last, in the sense of “poetics”.
Who wrote the Edda? Snorri Sturluson wrote the Prose Edda. The poems of the Poetic Edda are anonymous and were shaped by many poets over generations; the old attribution to Sæmund the Learned is a mistake.
Where is the Codex Regius today? The Codex Regius of the Poetic Edda (GKS 2365 4to) has been back in Iceland since 1971, at the Árni Magnússon Institute in Reykjavík, where it is displayed at times.
Which Edda translation should I read? For free reading, Bellows (1923) for the poems and Brodeur (1916) for the Prose Edda are both public domain. For study, choose a modern annotated translation.
For courage. For remembrance. For legends that live on.
He was warrior and poet, killer and grave-robber, farmer and man skilled in magic – and probably the greatest skald of …
Read more →They are the chosen of the fallen: warriors who died in battle and were carried by the Valkyries to Valhalla. The …
Read more →His byname sounds like a reproach: Eyvindr skáldaspillir, „the plagiarist“ (or „spoiler of poets"). It probably means …
Read more →No being do the gods of the North fear like Fenrir, the wolf. They rear him themselves, they bind him by cunning – and …
Read more →