Hi, I'm Old Norse specialist Dr. Jackson Crawford.
I teach Norse mythology at the University of Colorado Boulder,
previously UC Berkeley and UCLA for many years.
Anyone who studies Norse mythology is going to run across the Poetic or Elder Edda at some point.
This book is our most important source for Norse myths and in this video
I just want to explain a little bit about why that is.
The manuscripts on which the
bulk of the poems that we call the Poetic Edda are
preserved is called the Codex Regius or in Icelandic Konungsbók : either way it means Kings book.
And this manuscript was written down at about the 1270s AD in Iceland.
However the poems themselves are
older than that manuscript.
For one thing we can tell that the manuscript itself is a copy from an older manuscript.
If you think about the way that
language changes from generation to generation.
Just consider the fact that in
1940's US English (just listen to a World War two radio broadcast)
you hear people say things like 'hwat' and 'hwether' and 'hwen'.
But today most people say what, whether and when. That's a change that's happened in about 70 years.
Well there were similar changes going on in Icelandic in the 1200s.
And we can see that the person copying the manuscript (the codex Regius) is
mostly
replacing those earlier forms with the current forms of the 1270s
but is occasionally, probably getting bored with the job or just tired
and forgets to change it and will occasionally write the older form
that he's seeing in the manuscript that he's copying from.
And so those copying errors give us a hint that the
actual manuscript the Codex Regius is copied from, the original manuscript,
dates from perhaps about 1200 about 70 years earlier.
Although interestingly the poem Hávamál the very famous
compilation of Odin's wisdom
was probably copied from a different manuscript than the rest of the Poetic Edda was copied from.
There's an interesting story in there somewhere that's lost to us.
But again the poems themselves are probably even older than that.
There are certain linguistic characteristics
that just don't work in the 1200s if you're trying to write good Old Norse poetry.
Old Norse poetry doesn't use rhyme like traditional Modern English poetry does.
If you think about traditional Modern English poetry you're looking at something like :
Roses are red violets are blue
Inside I'm dead and so are you, right? But Old Norse poetry
outside of the very complicated Skaldic school, which isn't what the poetic Edda is written in,
uses alliteration not rhyme, so, the ten terrible Tyrannosauruses on Tuesday principal.
Well
the
alliteration sometimes doesn't work if the language
that you're speaking is 1200s Icelandic. So for instance in the earliest lines of
the poem Þrymskviða in which Thor loses his hammer and has to dress up like a bride to go get it back.
The the first couple lines are «Reiðr var þá Ving-þorr / er hann vaknaði».
That means ‘‘Thor was angry when he woke up’’.
Well notice already, it's not saying ‘‘Thor’’ It's saying ‘‘Ving-Thor’’.
There are a lot of name extensions that you can do for any of the gods to
make their names alliterate with other words in the line. Here Thor has been
been granted this optional name extension Ving so that it can alliterate with a V but there's one more V
missing. If this is going to be good Old Norse poetry we clearly need another V. This is not there.
Well if you change «Reiðr», that very first word angry to «Vreiðr» with a V as
one might be tempted to do based on the English cognate
which has a W there and Ws in English are typically Vs in Old Norse.
Or you might look at the fact that in Danish the word is «Vred» which has a V. That's ‘‘angry’’.
Or you might look at the fact that in earlier Icelandic
that word had a V.
So you get Vreiðr and then that suggests that of course this poem was composed
at a time in Icelandic probably before about the year
1000 when that V was still there.
Now that's interesting because it suggests that these poems when passed down orally
in such a way that people
actually haven't changed them even when the poetry
ceased to work and that gives us great confidence that these poems are
much older than the manuscript that they're written on.
So many of the poems about the gods like Þrymskviða about Thor getting his hammer back
Vǫluspá about the beginning and
destruction of the world
or Hávamál about Odin's wisdom seem today from about the 900s while some of the heroic poems
probably were composed in the centuries just before the Codex Regius was written down but
some of the heroic poems are also some of the oldest. Atlakviða
about the death of Atilla or Atli and Hamðismál about the death of Guðrun's sons are
probably the oldest two poems in the Poetic Edda probably dating from about the 800s AD.
So thanks to linguistics and to an understanding of Norse poetry we do think that these poems are good sources
for the beliefs of
Scandinavians before their conversion to Christianity which in Iceland traditionally happened in the year 1000.
So even though it may be popular on the Internet to claim that the Poetic Edda is
not a good source because of when it was written.
The question isn't when it was written but when those poems were composed.
Let me also point out that there's another book called the Prose Edda.
Often the Poetic Edda is called Elder Edda because the material in it is
so much older than the material in the Prose Edda which is called the Younger Edda also.
The Prose Edda is the work of one author,
unlike the Poetic Edda which is a compilation of poems from many different places and times.
That one author of the Prose Edda is Snorri Sturluson,
an Icelandic chieftain who was born in 1178 or 1179 and died in 1241.
Snorri in his Prose Edda wrote down all of the myths that he knew about the gods and
(there's a chickadee who landed right next to me) and
he did so in such a way to make them as cohesive as he could.
He
was a Christian and of course in medieval Christianity there was a
well-formulated
series of
beliefs about how the world had come to be and about the life of Jesus
and etc and he wanted to do the same thing
for pre-christian religion although what he found in the poems of the poetic Edda
which he knew, was not one cohesive story about a story that contradicted itself
because these stories varied from place to place and time to time and and poet to poet.
So Snorri kind of makes things too cohesive for the stories to actually be as valuable because
unlike the Poetic Edda, which is a recording of old lore,
the Prose Edda is kind of a
recomposition of old lore.
Nonetheless there are a lot of stories
we would not know if Snorri hadn't written them down and so he is also very valuable.
But I would have to say if I
could choose one of those two books to have survived I would definitely have chosen the Poetic Edda.
There are many translations of both books available.
For the Prose Edda I recommend the translation by Anthony Faulkes
For the Poetic Edda my own translation
(which has been available since 2015) is the first by a scholar
of the Old Norse language that also presents the text in a readable modern English.
So I hope that if you're curious about these books that you'll check them out at first hand for yourself.
And from beautiful frozen Wyoming, I'm wishing you all the best.