ABSTRACT
In early manhood Snorri Sturluson (1179-1241) began to collect poetic and mythological material and to write this up in drafts which eventually became the Prose Edda or Snorra Edda, a three-section handbook for Skaldic poets. Stories about the Norse gods form the core of Gylfaginning ‘The Beguiling of Gylfi ’. Skáldskaparmál ‘The Language of Poetry’ follows on. This treatise is a brilliant and comprehensive discussion of kennings, the intricate metaphoric tropes often drawn from the old mythology, citing examples of poems by many named skalds. The fi nal section is a long poem called the Háttatal ‘List of Verse Forms’. This is a catalogue of over 100 metrical verse forms composed by Snorri himself, in praise of King Hákon Hákonarson of Norway (ruled 1217-63) and the latter’s enemy and father-in-law, Earl Skúli (died 1240). The Beguiling of Gylfi and The Language of Poetry were intended to provide aspiring poets in Iceland with the knowledge to compose mythological poems of their own. The Beguiling of Gylfi tells most of the Norse myths in prose form, within a story in which King Gylfi of Sweden, disguised as ‘Gangleri’, sets out to discover the magic of a mysterious race of beings called the Æsir, who had once been worshipped as gods. A welcoming committee of three beings called Hár ‘High’, Jafnhár ‘Just-as-High’ and Þriði ‘Third’ tells the disguised Gylfi , responding to his questions, everything he needs to know from the creation of the Norse cosmos to its violent end in Ragnarlk. To help him write this, Snorri quoted some poems from a collection in his keeping. In The Language of Poetry, probably written earlier than The Beguiling of Gylfi , Snorri sets out to explain the working of the Skaldic kenning upon which Old Norse-Icelandic court poetry was based. Skaldic poetry differs from ‘Eddic’ in consisting of largely occasional verse produced in complex metres by poets whose names survive. In his Edda, Snorri quotes an abundance of pre-Christian stanzas in The Language of Poetry, from which much has been ascertained one way or another about the religion of his heathen ancestors in Iceland and Norway.
