The Edda, Volume 1

The Edda, Volume 1

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Title: The Edda, Vol. 1 The Divine Mythology of the North, Popular
Studies in Mythology, Romance, and Folklore, No. 12
Author: Winifred Faraday
Release Date: July 23, 2004 [EBook #13007]
Language: English
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Popular Studies in Mythology, Romance, and Folklore, No. 12

The Edda
I
The Divine Mythology of the North
By
Winifred Faraday, M.A.

Published by David Nutt, at the Sign of the Phoenix, Long Acre,

London 1902

Author's Note
Some explanation is needed of the form of spelling I have adopted in
transcribing Norse proper names. The spirants thorn and eth are
represented by th and d, as being more familiar to readers unacquainted
with the original. Marks of vowel-length are in all cases omitted. The
inflexional _-r_ of the nominative singular masculine is also omitted,
whether it appears as _-r_ or is assimilated to a preceding consonant (as
in Odinn, Eysteinn, Heindall, Egill) in the Norse form, with the single
exception of the name Tyr, where I use the form which has become
conventional in English.
Manchester, December 1901.

The Edda: I. The Divine Mythology of the North
The Icelandic Eddas are the only vernacular record of Germanic
heathendom as it developed during the four centuries which in England
saw the destruction of nearly all traces of the heathen system. The
so-called Elder Edda is a collection of some thirty poems, mythic and
heroic in substance, interspersed with short pieces of prose, which
survives in a thirteenth-century MS., known as the Codex Regius,
discovered in Iceland in 1642; to these are added other poems of
similar character from other sources. The Younger Edda is a prose
paraphrase of, and commentary on, these poems and others which are
lost, together with a treatise on metre, written by the historian Snorri
Sturluson about 1220.
This use of the word Edda is incorrect and unhistorical, though
convenient and sanctioned by the use of several centuries. It was early
used as a general term for the rules and materials for versemaking, and
applied in this sense to Snorri's work. When the poems on which his
paraphrase is founded were discovered, Icelandic scholars by a
misunderstanding applied the name to them also; and as they attributed
the collection quite arbitrarily to the historian Saemund (1056-1133), it
was long known as Saemundar Edda, a name now generally discarded
in favour of the less misleading titles of Elder or Poetic Edda. From its
application to this collection, the word derives a more extended use, (1)
as a general term for Norse mythology; (2) as a convenient name to

distinguish the simpler style of these anonymous narrative poems from
the elaborate formality of the Skalds.
The poems of the Edda are certainly older than the MS., although the
old opinion as to their high antiquity is untenable. The majority
probably date from the tenth century in their present form; this dating
does not necessitate the ascription of the shape in which the legends are
presented, still less of their substance, to that period. With regard to the
place of their composition opinions vary widely, Norway, the British
Isles and Greenland having all found champions; but the evidence is
rather questionable, and I incline to leave them to the country which
has preserved them. They are possibly of popular origin; this, together
with their epic or narrative character, would account for the striking
absence from them of some of the chief characteristics of Skaldic
poetry: the obscuring of the sense by the elaborate interlacing of
sentences and the extensive use of kennings or mythological synonyms,
and the complication of the metre by such expedients as the
conjunction of end-rhyme with alliteration. Eddie verse is governed
solely by the latter, and the strophic arrangement is simple, only two
forms occurring: (1) couplets of alliterative short lines; (2) six-line
strophes, consisting of a couplet followed by a single short line, the
whole repeated.
Roughly speaking, the first two-fifths of the MS. is mythological, the
rest heroic. I propose to observe this distinction, and to deal in this
study with the stories of the Gods. In this connexion, Snorri's Edda and
the mythical Ynglinga Saga may also be considered, but as both were
compiled a couple of centuries or more after the introduction of
Christianity into Iceland, it is uncertain