The art of skaldic poetry remained vigorous in Iceland during the thirteenth and at least the first part of the fourteenth century. There is also good evidence for the continuing knowledge of, and interest in, poetry in eddic measures, not least the production of the compilation of divine and heroic poems in the Codex Regius of the Elder Edda from about 1270–80. By the middle of the fourteenth century, however, rímur, long narrative poems derived from prose sources, usually sagas, and influenced by European metrical romances, had begun to take the place of skaldic poetry, though skaldic compositions of a religious nature, especially in the hrynhenda measure popularised by the poem Lilja (‘Lily’, discussed below) still had imitators into the sixteenth century (Jón Helgason 1936–8; Jón Ãorkelsson 1888). Although rímur were a distinctive, new poetic kind, they were influenced both in form and in diction by eddic and skaldic poetry. They carried on some of the medieval poetic techniques of traditional Icelandic poetry from the fifteenth century until the nineteenth, so, in a certain sense, one can say that Icelandic poetry displays a continuous, though changing, tradition from the Middle Ages into modern times. Dance songs and ballads are also likely to have been influential in shaping late medieval and early modern Icelandic tastes in poetry, though most of our evidence for Icelandic ballads comes from after the Middle Ages (Vésteinn Ólason 1982).

The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were the great ages for the first recording of medieval Icelandic literature. It is believed that most sagas were written down in this period and the major part of the corpus of Old Norse poetry was embedded in sagas and other works such as the poetic treatises. As we have seen in earlier chapters, a good deal of this poetry was ascribed to poets who lived before the end of the twelfth century, but we only know it because later historians and authors of treatises on poetics considered it valuable, for reasons that have already been discussed.