Snorri's Prose Edda

The Prose Edda is a manual of Old Norse poetry and myth written around 1220 by Snorri Sturluson (1179 to 1241), an Icelandic chieftain, lawspeaker and historian. It has four parts: a prologue, the Gylfaginning ('Deluding of Gylfi'), the Skaldskaparmal ('Poetic Diction'), and the Hattatal ('List of Verse Forms'). It was meant to help young poets understand the older skaldic verse, with its dense metaphors called kennings, that drew on pagan myths that were fading from memory after Iceland's conversion to Christianity in about 1000.¹²

In the Gylfaginning, a king named Gylfi, disguised, questions three figures about the gods and hears the story of the world: the creation from the primeval void, the ash tree Yggdrasil, Odin's sacrifice, Thor and the giants, the death of Baldr through Loki's trick, and Ragnarok, the doom of the gods. Snorri, who was Christian, framed the gods as people from Troy and Asia, a way of treating them without endorsing them. His own life ended violently: in 1241, he was killed on orders of King Haakon IV of Norway after years of intrigue between the king and Icelandic chiefs. The Prose Edda is the main source for Norse myth, along with the Poetic Edda poems found in a manuscript of the 13th century.¹²