Snorri's Edda was a landmark work in the history of Icelandic poetry. Not only did it look back to the poetry of the classical period, the Viking Age and the twelfth century, and present both a compendium of the best poetry from the past, as Snorri saw it, together with a definitive handbook on how to interpret it, but it offered instruction in verse composition to young poets of Snorri's own age, the first decades of the thirteenth century. Snorri himself put theory into practice with his own compositions, and so initiated the last period of the skaldic art in Iceland, which was to be one in which the art of poetry became more academic than it had been in previous centuries. We may characterise the skaldic verse of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as technically experimental and very accomplished, but often postmodern in its reinvention of earlier genres such as the encomium. Although both Snorri and his nephews, Óláfr and Sturla þórõarson, composed praise-poems in honour of Norwegian rulers, their literary activity was conducted through a written medium, as we have seen with Háttatal. Sturla, for example, composed a good deal of verse about King Hákon Hákonarson, whom he had never met, for quotation within Hákonar saga Hákonarsonar (‘Saga of Hákon Hákonarson’), which he wrote as the king's official biographer. Such circumstances are very different from the presumed oral preservation of skaldic praise poetry from the Viking Age which was inserted as quotation into later written sagas.

Parallel to the development of a more self-conscious academic poetic practice in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Iceland, we find continued activity in the composition of grammatical handbooks, which are more clearly indebted to learned models than Snorri's Edda is. This chapter focuses on the two most significant grammatical works of this period, both of which deal centrally with poetics. They are the so-called Third and Fourth Grammatical Treatises. Each shows the influence of Snorri’s earlier work, but at the same time is more modern both in its awareness of foreign treatises on poetics and in the authors’ selection of poetic examples to illustrate Norse poetic practice.