The Poetic and the Prose Edda as sources to Old Norse Paganism

• published: 04 Sep 2010
• views: 11152

My book "THE SEED OF YGGDRASILL" - with a lot more of this stuff in it - has been published in 2013 and is getting increasingly available as well! Look it up on Amazon (Authors name is Maria Kvilhaug). My website is http://freya.theladyofthelabyrinth.com. I talk about the major sources into Old Norse myths - the Poetic Edda that was hidden throughout 400 years on Iceland before it surfaced in 1643 AD, and the Prose Edda that was written by Snorri Sturlusson in 1225 AD in an attempt to preserve the old Norse style of poetry. Other written sources are the Icelandic sagas, bardic poems and Saxo Grammaticus´s work Gesta Danorum in Latin. I discuss the various approaches to these sources and their reliability as sources into Old Norse paganism, and whether the Poetic Edda was a random collection of poems or a planned and coherent book telling one story through many poems. (For a long time, it was common to believe that the Poetic Edda was a random collection of older and newer poems or versions of poems, put together by one or more learned monks in the 12th century. Several poems are so complicated that scholars believe they present a jumble of different poems almost randomly put together. Lately, however, it has been suggested by some that the Poetic Edda -- especially the poems about the gods -- do fit together as if the collection of poems was meant as a book -- complete in itself. Through an extensive analysis of the divine poems in relation to each other, historian of literature May-Britt Berg claims that the entire collection fits together as if it was meant as one history carrying the same theme. Berg concludes that the Poetic Edda must be a work of the 13th century written by one author basing himself on imagery of the past mythology yet creating a whole new and different universe, inspired, mainly, by the poetic fashion of medieval, Christian Mystic traditions. This suggestion has provoked other scholars who believe that the poems are more deeply rooted in Paganism. I agree with Berg in one point only: I too believe that the poems of the Edda are, if not written by the same author, put together in order to make one complete book. I believe they were put together by an editor or group of editors that knew what they were doing, editors who, regardless of their faith, held a profound knowledge of old Pagan mythology and what it really meant on some level. They put poetry -- what I believe must be genuinely and essentially Pagan poetry -- together in an order and a fashion that would convey the entire teaching of Pagan Mysteries -- and yet hide it to those uninitiated.)