understand mythological references in early skaldic verse is to follow the lead of the
major medieval Scandinavian mythographers, of whom Snorri Sturluson is the
pre-eminent authority.
Snorri composed his Edda (‘Poetics’) during the 1220 s. It is a unique creation, not
only in Old Icelandic literature, but within medieval European literature as a whole
(Clunies Ross 1987 ). Although it exists in somewhat different versions in several
medieval manuscripts, its general purpose seems clear: it is a treatise on both Old Norse
mythology and poetics. The reason for linking the two subjects is precisely because
traditional Old Norse poetry was predicated upon a knowledge of mythology. Young
poets of Snorri’s day needed a refresher course in mythology and the second part of the
Edda, named Gylfaginning (‘The Deception of Gylfi’), gave them an ordered overview
of the major topics of Norse myth, beginning with the creation of the world and
concluding with its ending at Ragnaro ̨k. Snorri quotes a number of important
mythological poems in the common Germanic alliterative (or ‘Eddic’) verse form in
Gylfaginning; it is difficult to determine the age of this poetry, but some at least is
probably as old as the Viking Age, although it did not enter the written record until the
thirteenth century or later.
Throughout Snorri’s cohesive mythological exposition, something probably never
before attempted in Scandinavia, there are echoes of Christian belief and eschatology,
but, though his view of the old myths is qualified, it is never polemical. The fullest
manuscripts of the Edda have a Preface to Gylfaginning, in which Scandinavian paganism
is placed within the Christian intellectual tradition (Dronke and Dronke 1977 ; Faulkes
1983 ), as something to be explained both as a natural religion that grasped many of the
fundamental tenets of Christianity and as euhemerised history, in which the gods of the
Scandinavians were to be understood as clever and powerful humans, who colonised
Scandinavia from Troy and taught the indigenous people of the area their language,
religion and poetry.
A near contemporary of Snorri, the Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus, followed a
different path by completely historicising, and possibly also allegorising ( Johannesson
1978 ), Old Norse myths in the first part of his Gesta Danorum, a Latin work first
published in 1514 but probably completed by the second decade of the thirteenth
century. This history of Denmark in sixteen books is introduced by a lengthy section
dealing with the Danes before the birth of Christ, while Books 5 – 8 cover the period
down to the establishment of the Christian Church in Denmark. Books 9 and 10 enter
the historical Viking Age. Saxo, by his own admission, was dependent on the men of
Iceland for a good deal of his legendary and mythic material, and a number of his sources
were almost certainly Old Norse poems that he had learnt from Icelanders and turned
into Latin hexameters (Friis-Jensen 1987 ).
The Old Icelandic fornaldarsögur (‘sagas of ancient time’) are an indigenous kind of
historicised Norse myth and legend (Ármann Jakobsson et al. 2003 ). Although none in
their present form can be older than c. 1200 , and many are probably much younger, they
tell of the events and personages of prehistory, and thus of the Viking Age and earlier,
in a pronouncedly mythological mode (Torfi H. Tulinius 2002 ) and they incorporate
poetry, much in Eddic verse forms, and some of it probably at least as old as the Viking
Age, into their prose.
–– chapter 16 ( 4 ): The creation of Old Norse mythology––