Description

Saemund Sigfusson lived in Iceland. He was credited with The Elder Eddas which is a collection of poems. The poems themselves date in all probability from the Tenth and Eleventh centuries, and are many of them only fragments of longer heroic chants now otherwise entirely lost. It is evident that they were collected from oral tradition; and the fact that the same story is occasionally repeated, in varied form, and that some of the poems prove that the present collection is only a gathering made early in the middle ages, long after the composition of the pieces, and in no critical spirit. Snorre Sturleson, was the writer of Younger Edda or Snorri's Edda, which is an Icelandic manual of poetics which contains many stories from Norse mythology. Its purpose was to enable Icelandic poets and readers to understand the subtleties of alliterative verse, and to grasp the meaning behind the many kennings that were used in skaldic poetry. It consists of seven manuscripts, dating from around 1300 to around 1600, which have independent textual value.