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A medieval Icelandic handbook that gathers the old Norse myths, from the world's icy beginning to its fiery end, mainly so that poets could keep using their inherited imagery without believing in the gods.
Mind Map
Core Message
Snorri writes as a Christian who does not believe the Norse gods are real. He sets down the myths so that young poets can still understand the inherited stock of poetic images, while warning his readers not to take the tales as religious truth.
A framing introduction recasts the asas as wise wandering people out of Asia and Troy whose deeds were exaggerated until later generations mistook them for gods. The Afterwords openly map Thor onto Hektor and Asgard onto the city of Priam.
Told as questions put to three enthroned figures, the central myths run from a cold and empty Ginungagap, through the making of earth from the giant Ymer, to Ragnarok, when wolves swallow the sun and Surt burns everything, after which a green earth rises again.
The later parts treat verse as a teachable skill. They catalog the figures of skaldic diction, above all the kenning, the descriptive substitute name, so a learner can both compose in the old manner and decode what older poets meant.
Summary
The Prose Edda is a 13th-century Icelandic guide to the native poetry and mythology of the North, attributed to the chieftain and historian Snorri Sturluson. This English version opens with a Foreword in Snorri's own voice that is unmistakably Christian: it begins with Almighty God, Adam and Eve, Noah, and the tower of Babel, then explains how scattered peoples lost the name of their Maker and came to honor mighty ancestors as gods.
On that footing the longest narrative section, The Fooling of Gylfe, can tell the heathen stories without endorsing them. King Gylfe travels in disguise to Asgard and questions three figures seated one above the other, Har, Jafnhar, and Thride. His questions march through the whole mythology: the highest god and his many names, the creation of the world out of ice and fire, the making of the first man, the world tree, the chief gods and goddesses, the binding of the wolf, and the death of Balder.
The climax of that section is Ragnarok, the doom of the gods. A long savage winter and wars among kindred give way to wolves devouring the sun and moon, the loosing of the Fenris-wolf and the Midgard-serpent, and Surt riding from the south with fire. The gods fall in a last battle on the plain Vigrid and the world burns and sinks, after which the text promises a fresh green earth and surviving gods, a return rather than a pure ending.
Two shorter parts shift from myth to poetics. Brage's Talk has the god of poetry answer a visitor's questions and retell tales such as Idun's apples and Thor's encounter with the giant Hrungner. The extracts from the Poetical Diction, or Skaldskaparmal, then treat verse as a discipline, distinguishing kinds of poetic language and explaining the kenning, the descriptive byname that stands in for a plain word and carries a thread of story with it.
Holding the work together are the Afterwords, which return to the Foreword's argument with surprising boldness. They line the gods up against figures from the Trojan war, calling Thor a version of Hektor and the burning of Troy the flame of Surt, and they instruct young skalds to keep the old imagery alive while refusing to believe in heathen gods. The book is therefore two things at once: a rich storehouse of Norse myth and a careful guide to using that myth as craft rather than creed.
Key Concepts
The framing material treats the Norse gods as real historical people, wanderers out of Asia and Troy, whose deeds grew in the telling until they were worshiped as divine.
It lets a Christian author preserve heathen stories in good conscience and shapes how the whole book asks to be read: as history bent into legend, not as living faith.
The cosmos begins in the gap between frozen Niflheim and burning Muspelheim, is built from the body of the giant Ymer, and is destroyed at Ragnarok, after which a new green earth rises.
This arc gives the scattered myths a single shape and shows a worldview in which even the end of the gods is followed by a beginning.
A kenning is a descriptive substitute name, such as calling poetry Odin's drink, formed by joining a base word to a reference drawn from myth or story.
It is the engine of skaldic verse and the reason the myths had to be remembered: without the stories, the poetry becomes unreadable.
Mental Models
Much of the book proceeds as a traveler putting blunt questions to seated authorities, who answer in turn and quote older verse as evidence.
It models how to draw out a body of knowledge by asking first questions plainly and letting each answer open the next, rather than expecting a single tidy lecture.
Snorri values the myths less as belief than as raw material a poet must master to compose and to understand the verse of others.
It offers a way to hold inherited culture at arm's length: you can study and use a tradition's images skillfully without taking on its claims.
By wrapping the tales inside a Christian introduction and afterword, the book signals throughout that the reader stands outside the stories looking in.
It shows how a frame can let you transmit material you do not endorse, naming your stance up front so the content is preserved without being preached.
Selected Quotes
This is Ragnarok, the twilight of the gods.
Then was he with the frost-giants.
There are three sorts of poetic diction.
Source
Source text: Project Gutenberg edition of The Younger Edda, also called Snorre's Edda, or The Prose Edda, translated by Rasmus B. Anderson.
HTML text: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/18947/pg18947.txt
Project Gutenberg states this ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever.
Composed in Iceland in the early 13th century (commonly dated around 1220); this page uses the Rasmus B. Anderson English translation published by Project Gutenberg.