Snorri Sturluson
Icelandic historian, poet, politician and chieftain (1179–1241), a member of the powerful Sturlung family, who lived amid the cultural splendour and violent intrigue of the medieval Icelandic Commonwealth, a turbulent period known precisely as 'the Age of the Sturlungs' for his family's central role in the conflicts that eventually led to Iceland's submission to the Norwegian crown. A man of great political ambition and wealth, he served twice as 'lawspeaker' (lögsögumaður), the most prestigious office of the Althing, the Icelandic legislative assembly regarded as one of the oldest parliaments in the world, and maintained complex, ultimately fatal relations with the Norwegian crown, which he initially served as an intermediary in Iceland but which, suspecting his disloyalty, ordered his assassination, carried out by former sons-in-law of his in his own home at Reykholt in 1241. Beyond politics, Snorri is remembered above all as the author — or at least the principal compiler and editor — of two works fundamental to the preservation of Norse mythology and literature: the Prose Edda, a manual for poets written with the explicit aim of preserving the techniques of traditional skaldic poetry and the mythological stories that formed its background, and which, together with the anonymous Poetic Edda, constitutes the most important and systematic surviving source on pre-Christian Norse mythology — Odin, Thor, Loki, Ragnarök and the cosmology of the nine worlds. His other great work, the Heimskringla, is a monumental history of the kings of Norway from legendary times to the twelfth century, written with vivid narrative prose and a critical eye toward evaluating sources remarkable for its era, making it one of the most valuable and readable chronicles of the entire Norse Middle Ages.