The background to Snorri and his Edda

Snorri Sturluson's Edda (or The Prose Edda or The Younger Edda) is without doubt the most important Old Norse contribution to medieval Scandinavian poetics and arguably one of the most interesting and original theoretical works of the Western Middle Ages considered as a whole. It differs from the other extant Icelandic grammatical works in that it deals not only with Old Norse poetic diction and metrics, but also with the conceptual background to traditional eddic and skaldic poetry. In order to achieve the latter goal, it includes a coherent exposition of Norse mythology and a statement about the place pre-Christian lore should have in Christian Icelanders’ world vision. Its date of composition is not precisely known but is probably c.1221–5; the oldest manuscript that contains it (Codex Upsaliensis) ascribes its compilation to Snorri Sturluson (1179–1241), a member of a powerful Icelandic family who was deeply involved in Icelandic and Norwegian politics.

Who was Snorri Sturluson? We are lucky that we know more about this man than about most other medieval Icelanders, largely thanks to the information supplied about him by his nephew Sturla þórõarson, in whose brilliant Íslendinga saga, the main work in the samtíõarsaga (‘contemporary saga’) Sturlunga saga, he appears as a character. Snorri was born into a family, the Sturlungar, who were to be among the most powerful in Iceland during the politically troubled and often violent half-century from 1200 to 1262–4, when Iceland surrendered its political independence to Norway, and became a dependency of its parent society. This period is in fact named after the Sturlung family, as we often refer to it today as Sturlungaöld, ‘the age of the Sturlungs’. Snorri, like most male members of his family, was deeply involved in the political manoeuvres of that time, and in fact met his death because of them. On 22 September 1241 a force of seventy men hostile to Snorri, led by his estranged son-in-law Gizurr Ãorvaldsson, attacked his farm at Reykjaholt. They found Snorri hiding in the cellar and, despite his twice-repeated desperate plea eigi skal hǫggva, ‘don't strike’, they killed him there.