The Prose Edda
A Swedish king walks into the hall of the Æsir under a false name and is answered by three figures seated one above another: how the world was cut from a giant's body, what the ash tree at its centre holds, how a wolf came to be bound, and what is due to happen when the bond gives. Around that frame Snorri set the stories behind the kennings — the theft of the mead of poetry, the making of the hammer, the wager with a giant — as a working handbook for young poets at a moment when the old craft was going out of use. Nearly everything known in prose about Norse myth comes from this book, written by a Christian chieftain about gods nobody had worshipped for two centuries.
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Lineage
- shares sources with ↑ The Poetic Edda
Attributes
Closest analogues
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- 40% · 10 shared