Snorri Sturluson: The Man Who Wrote Down the Norse Gods

Who Snorri Sturluson actually was

He was born in 1179 at Hvammur in western Iceland, son of a minor and famously combative chieftain. When he was three, a family dispute was settled by sending him to be fostered at Oddi in the south, in the household of Jón Loftsson — then the most influential man in the country.

That matters more than any other single fact about him. Oddi was not a farm with a library; it was a school. Jón's grandfather Sæmundr fróði had studied in continental Europe, and the family ran a centre of learning where a boy picked up Latin schooling alongside genealogy, law and inherited poetry.

What followed was a political career before a literary one. He married an heiress in 1199, took over the estate at Borg and its chieftaincy in 1202, and accumulated further chieftaincies until he was among the wealthiest men in Iceland. He was elected lawspeaker of the Althing — the presiding office of the Icelandic assembly — in 1215, held it to 1218, and held it again from 1222 into the early 1230s.

Between those two terms he spent two years in Norway at the court of the young King Hákon Hákonarson and the powerful Jarl Skúli, and came home in 1220 with a court title and, his Icelandic contemporaries believed, an understanding about bringing Iceland under Norwegian rule. Whether he promised that has been argued over ever since. What is not in dispute is that twenty years later the argument killed him.

Reykholt: power base, writing house, crime scene

In 1206 Snorri moved to Reykholt, and the place became the engine of everything that followed. It sat at a crossroads, it was defensible, and it was a church centre — which in thirteenth-century Iceland meant a small institution: priests, income, and, crucially, literate men who could write.

That last point is easy to skip. Producing a book in medieval Iceland meant calves, scraped skins, ink and months of a trained scribe's time — an expensive process available only to the very rich. Snorri's authorship is inseparable from his wealth: he could commission writing at a scale almost nobody else could.

Reykholt is also where he died. On a second stay in Norway from 1237 he grew close to Jarl Skúli, by then in open competition with Hákon for the throne; Skúli was killed in May 1240. When the king summoned Snorri to answer for himself and Snorri refused to go, Hákon's Icelandic allies acted. In the autumn of 1241 Gissur Þorvaldsson — Snorri's own former son-in-law — came to Reykholt with a large armed party and had him killed in the cellar passage of his own house. Tradition gives his last words as Eigi skal höggva, "do not strike."

One thing at Reykholt survives from his lifetime: Snorralaug, the circular stone-lined geothermal pool fed by a nearby hot spring — among the oldest preserved structures in Iceland, and the closest anyone gets to standing in a room with him.

The Prose Edda is a textbook, not a bible

This is the single most useful thing to understand about the book.

Skaldic poetry — the elaborate court verse Icelanders made their living from — ran on kennings: riddling substitutions where "Kvasir's blood" means poetry and "Sif's hair" means gold. Each depends on the audience knowing a story, and by Snorri's time the poets were Christian and the stories were fading, so the technical apparatus of the national art form was going out of reach. The Prose Edda is the fix, and the order of its four parts gives the game away:

Part	What it does
Prologue	Explains the gods as humans from Troy who migrated north and were mistaken for divinities
Gylfaginning ("the tricking of Gylfi")	A framed question-and-answer session delivering the mythology as narrative, creation to Ragnarök
Skáldskaparmál ("the language of poetry")	The reference section: which kenning means what, with the stories behind them
Háttatal ("list of verse forms")	A praise poem for King Hákon and Jarl Skúli demonstrating one metre after another, with commentary

Background, reference, technique. It is a craft manual, and the mythology is in it because a working poet needed it the way a musician needs scales.

The frame is worth noticing too. A Swedish king travels in disguise as Gangleri and questions three figures called High, Just-as-High and Third; they answer at length, and at the end the hall vanishes, because the whole thing was an illusion staged to deceive him. Snorri tells you inside the text that what you just read is a trick.

Heimskringla and the sentence "I had this book written"

Heimskringla is the other great work attached to his name: a history of the kings of Norway from the legendary Ynglinga saga down to 1184, with a long life of St Óláf at its centre. It is impressive history-writing, and it states a method — Snorri preferred skaldic verse composed for the ruler in question, on the reasonable grounds that a poet praising a king to his face could not invent his victories outright.

But one sentence in a preface keeps drawing historians back: ek lét rita — "I had this book written." Snorrastofa, the research centre at Reykholt, reads this as a sign that he directed and edited rather than physically wrote — less a lone author at a desk than the head of a workshop, commissioning, dictating, revising, deciding what went in.

It is also where much detail about pre-Christian custom survives. In the saga of Hákon the Good, Snorri reports that the king made it law that Yule begin when Christians held their feast, where before it had started at midwinter night and run three nights. If you have read that Yule was "moved" onto Christmas, that claim comes from Snorri — a Christian writer, three hundred years after the fact.

Three reasons to read Snorri carefully

The gap. Iceland adopted Christianity around the year 1000; Snorri wrote in the 1220s and 1230s. Whatever he knew of pre-Christian practice reached him across two centuries of transmission in a society that had officially left it behind. He is a thirteenth-century voice telling us about the ninth.

The frame. Explaining the gods as migrating Trojan nobility is euhemerism, after the Greek writer Euhemerus, and medieval Christian scholars used it constantly: it let you handle pagan material without endorsing it. The translator Anthony Faulkes argued that avoiding the charge of endangering Christian orthodoxy was probably a main motive for the Prologue and for the framing device itself. The safety wrapper is part of the book.

The purpose. A handbook wants a tidy, teachable system; living religion is not tidy. Where Snorri gives a neat genealogy or a clean sequence of events, some of that order may be his, imposed on material that reached him in fragments. And where he is the only source for a story — often — there is nothing to check him against.

Which manuscripts actually name him

Here is the detail that surprises most readers. The Prose Edda survives in four main manuscripts, and only one says Snorri wrote it.

Manuscript	Date	Note
Codex Upsaliensis (DG 11), Uppsala	First quarter of the 14th c.	Oldest; shorter text; the only one naming Snorri
Codex Regius (GKS 2367 4to), Reykjavík	First half of the 14th c.	Fullest text; basis for most modern editions; returned from Denmark in 1985
Codex Wormianus (AM 242 fol), Copenhagen	Mid-14th c.	In the Arnamagnæan collection
Codex Trajectinus (MS 1374), Utrecht	c. 1600	Copy of a lost 13th-century manuscript

All four were written after Snorri was dead, the earliest by some seventy years, and none is his own copy. The attribution of Heimskringla is weaker still: the medieval manuscripts do not name him, and the connection rests on later tradition and on how the work is written. Egils saga is often argued to be his too; that argument is stylistic and unproven.

None of this makes "Snorri" a fiction. It means the honest formulation is the work associated with Snorri Sturluson — and that a book produced in a workshop at Reykholt may not have a single author in the sense we use the word.

How Snorri reached the English-speaking world

Most people meeting Norse mythology in English today are meeting Snorri at three or four removes. In 1835 Jacob Grimm published Deutsche Mythologie, a vast reconstruction of Germanic belief leaning heavily on the Eddas. Richard Wagner was carrying Grimm's book in 1843, and the Ring des Nibelungen he built over the next decades drew its mythological material chiefly from the Völsunga saga, the Poetic Edda and Snorri. The Ring premiered in 1876 and Norse myth became internationally fashionable in a way it had not been for six hundred years; nearly every later popular version inherits its shape from that moment rather than from the manuscripts.

So much of what circulates as "Norse mythology" is nineteenth-century staging of thirteenth-century Icelandic craft literature. And because Snorri is the gateway, his material gets quoted by people with very different projects — practitioners rebuilding a devotional life, novelists, political movements shopping for an ancestral past. Quoting him is not the same as having read what kind of book he wrote. That is our view, stated as a view.

What this means if you work with Norse material

Not that you should put it down — that the honest version is more interesting than the flattened one.

1. Say where something comes from. "Snorri says," "the Poetic Edda says" and "modern practice does" are three different claims. Keeping them apart costs nothing and makes everything else you say more trustworthy.
2. Check whether he stands alone. Where a story also appears in the Poetic Edda, or in verse Snorri quotes but did not compose, you are on firmer ground. Where he is the only witness, say so — and treat tidiness as a warning sign, because neat lists may be the handbook talking.
3. Separate devotion from history. A practice can matter without being ancient. "Does this mean something to me" and "is this attested in the year 1000" are different questions and do not need to be forced into one answer.

Frequently asked questions

Did Snorri Sturluson believe in the Norse gods?

There is no evidence that he did. Iceland had been Christian for two centuries when he wrote, he held authority over church estates and was close to two bishops, and his Prologue explains the gods as human beings who were wrongly worshipped. He was preserving a literary inheritance, not professing a faith.

What is the difference between the Prose Edda and the Poetic Edda?

The Prose Edda is Snorri's thirteenth-century handbook, in prose with verse quoted inside it. The Poetic Edda is a separate anonymous collection of mythological and heroic poems, preserved mainly in one manuscript and generally older in the material it carries. Snorri quotes poems of that kind, which is why his work can be partly cross-checked.

Did Snorri really write Heimskringla and Egils saga?

Neither attribution is stated in the medieval manuscripts. Heimskringla has been credited to him since the sixteenth century and the attribution is widely accepted, but it rests on tradition and internal evidence, not a signature. The case for Egils saga is stylistic and unresolved.

Why was Snorri Sturluson killed?

For political reasons, in the civil-war decades Icelanders call the Sturlung Age. He had allied himself with Jarl Skúli, who challenged King Hákon Hákonarson for the Norwegian throne and was killed in 1240. Snorri then defied the king's order and sailed home. In the autumn of 1241 Hákon's Icelandic allies, led by Snorri's former son-in-law Gissur Þorvaldsson, came to Reykholt and killed him.

What does the word "Edda" mean?

Nobody knows. The three explanations most often proposed are "great-grandmother," a derivation from Oddi (where Snorri was raised), and a link to Old Norse óðr, "poetry," which would make it roughly "poetics." The last fits the content best; none is proven.

Sources

• Snorrastofa, Reykholt — "Snorri Sturluson," biographical essay by Óskar Guðmundsson — Oddi, estates, the Norway journeys, the killing, ek lét rita
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Snorri Sturluson" — dates, lawspeaker terms, Reykholt from 1206, scope of Heimskringla
• Utrecht University Special Collections — the Codex Trajectinus of the Prose Edda — dating and the lost thirteenth-century exemplar
• Anthony Faulkes (trans.), Edda — Snorri Sturluson, Everyman, 1995 — Faulkes on the Prologue and Christian orthodoxy
• Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, Hákonar saga góða ch. 13 — Samuel Laing's translation at Wikisource
• Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies — custodian of Codex Regius since 1985
• Sturla Þórðarson, Íslendinga saga, in Sturlunga saga — the contemporary account, by his nephew
• Jacob Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie, 1835; Elizabeth Magee, Richard Wagner and the Nibelungs, Oxford University Press, 1990
• Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages — edited corpus of the verse Snorri quotes

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