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The Poetic Edda on Iceland

The > Poetic Edda > What Is The Poetic Edda?

attestation: The passage describes the location Iceland.

"Preserved in various manuscripts of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries is a prose work consisting of a very extensive collection of mythological stories, an explanation of the important figures and tropes of Norse poetic diction,—the poetry of the Icelandic and Norwegian skalds was appallingly complex in this respect,—and a treatise on metrics."
attestation: The passage describes the location Iceland.

"From all this it is evident that the Poetic Edda, as we now know it, is no definite and plainly limited work, but rather a more or less haphazard collection of separate poems, dealing either with Norse mythology or with hero-cycles unrelated to the traditional history of greater Scandinavia or Iceland."
attestation: The passage describes the location Iceland.

"We can say only that he may have made some such compilation, for he was a diligent student of Icelandic tradition and history, and was famed throughout the North for his learning."

attestation: The passage describes the location Iceland.

"Some scholars claim nearly all the Eddic poems for these "Western Isles," in sharp distinction from Iceland; their arguments are commented on in the introductory note to the Rigsthula."

attestation: The passage describes the location Iceland.

"Of all the migrations, however, the most important were those to Iceland."
attestation: The passage describes the location Iceland.

"The greatest in volume is made up of the sagas: narratives mainly in prose, ranging all the way from authentic history of the Norwegian kings and the early Icelandic settlements to fairy-tales."

attestation: The passage describes the location Iceland.

"It seems likely, then, that the Voluspo was the work of a poet living chiefly in Iceland, though possibly in the "Western Isles," in the middle of the tenth century, a vigorous believer in the old gods, and yet with an imagination active enough to be touched by the vague tales of a different religion emanating from his neighbor Celts."
attestation: The passage describes the location Iceland.

"This fact in itself would suffice to indicate that the Rigsthula was not composed in Iceland, where for centuries kings were regarded with profound disapproval."

attestation: The passage describes the location Iceland.

"Sundry striking parallels between the diction of the Völundarkvitha and that of the Weland passage in Deor's Lament make it distinctly probable that a Saxon song on this subject had found its way to Scandinavia or Iceland."
attestation: The passage describes violence or death involving Iceland.

"Many generations afterwards, when Iceland's literary period had arrived, some zealous scribe committed to writing such poems or fragments of poems as he knew, piecing them together and annotating them on the basis of information which had reached him through other channels."

attestation: The ordeal by boiling water followed the introduction of Christianity to Iceland around the year 1000

"the stanza clearly points to the time when the ordeal by boiling water was still regarded as a foreign institution, and when a southern king (i.e., a Christian from some earlier-converted region) was necessary to consecrate the kettle used in the test. The ordeal by boiling water followed closely the introduction of Christianity, which took place around the year 1000."

attestation: The passage describes the location Iceland.

"The internal evidence, particularly in the case of the Atlamol, points likewise to an origin remote from Iceland, Norway, and the "Western Isles"; and the two poems are sufficiently alike so that, despite the efforts of Finnur Jonsson and others to separate them, assigning one to Greenland and the other to Norway or elsewhere, it seems probable that the manuscript statement is correct in both instances, and that the two Atli poems did actually originate in Greenland."