Poetic Edda
Collection of Old Norse poems on mythological and heroic themes, of anonymous authorship and collective composition over several centuries — probably between the ninth and thirteenth centuries — preserved mainly in a single thirteenth-century Icelandic manuscript known as the Codex Regius, rediscovered in 1643 by the Icelandic bishop Brynjólfur Sveinsson, who mistakenly attributed the work to the sage Sæmundr the Learned, an error that gave rise to the alternative name 'Sæmundr's Edda'. The term 'Edda' itself is of uncertain origin, probably related to the Old Norse word for 'great-grandmother' or perhaps derived from the place name Oddi, where Snorri Sturluson studied, author of the so-called 'Prose Edda', a distinct but closely related work that quotes and comments on many of the same poems. The collection is traditionally divided into two major sections: the mythological poems, which include the Völuspá ('The Seeress's Prophecy'), an epic vision of the creation and final destruction of the Norse cosmos at Ragnarök narrated by a resurrected seeress; the Hávamál ('Sayings of the High One'), a collection of maxims of practical and ethical wisdom attributed to Odin; and other poems about gods such as Thor and Loki; and the heroic poems, which recount the legends of the Völsungs and their tragic saga of love, betrayal and revenge revolving around the dragon Fafnir, the hero Sigurd and the valkyrie Brynhild — narrative material sharing roots with the Germanic Nibelungenlied and which centuries later would directly inspire Richard Wagner's opera cycle The Ring of the Nibelung. The Poetic Edda, together with the Prose Edda, constitutes the most important primary source for all preserved Norse mythology, and its influence extends from modern fantasy literature — especially J.R.R. Tolkien, a professor of Old Norse who deeply absorbed its imagery — to the often distorted appropriation of Norse aesthetics in contemporary popular culture.