Snorri Sturluson
Life and political world
Snorri Sturluson (1179–1241) was an Icelandic chieftain, poet, and writer whose political influence and literary work developed together. Fostered at Oddi, he grew up within a centre of learning and powerful family connections. Marriage, property, and alliances helped establish his standing. Reykholt became an important base, with the resources and learned community that could support the making and circulation of books.
Snorri served as lawspeaker at the Icelandic assembly and travelled to Norway, where his relations with King Hákon and Earl Skúli drew him into a wider struggle for power. Those connections became dangerous as conflict intensified. He was killed at Reykholt in 1241. His career belongs to a Christian medieval society deeply engaged with an older Scandinavian inheritance, rather than to the pre-Christian world described in many of the stories associated with his name.
Preserving a poetic inheritance
The Prose Edda brings mythological narrative into relation with the craft of poetry. Understanding an allusive expression may require knowing a story about a god, a conflict, or an object. Preservation therefore has a practical literary purpose: inherited stories make inherited poetic language intelligible.
This is not an untouched transcript of a single ancient belief system. The act of arranging, explaining, and framing the material belongs to a later intellectual world. The distance between that world and the traditions it preserves is part of what readers encounter, including in an English translation whose explanatory terms introduce another layer.
The Edda and the kings’ histories
The Younger Edda, also called the Prose Edda, offers a different kind of book from the collection generally called the Poetic Edda. The similar names should not erase the difference between a prose work about stories and poetic practice and an anthology of older poems. Within the prose work, changes of form can mark changes of purpose.
Heimskringla, traditionally attributed to Snorri, gathers narratives of Norwegian kings. Genealogy, conflict, speeches, and quoted verse give rulers a place within a longer historical order. Its stories can be compelling narratives while also serving as arguments about legitimate power and the character of leadership. Medieval authorship and transmission are more complex than the image of a solitary modern novelist suggests.
Reading the medieval works
When a myth appears, ask what the surrounding passage needs it to explain. Its function may be poetic, genealogical, or argumentative as well as narrative. That question makes the work’s organisation easier to understand without draining the story of its imaginative force.
In the kings’ histories, distinguish the events being described from the evidence or reported speech used to support the account. A quoted poem and a prose explanation do different kinds of work. Notice also how loyalty is presented: the writer who knew political alliances at close range gives readers much more than a sequence of battles.