Table Of ContentThe Uppsala Edda
Snorri Sturluson
T he Uppsala Edda
DG 11 4to
E dited with introduction and notes by
Heimir Pálsson
Translated by
Anthony Faulkes
VIKING SOCIETY FOR NORTHERN RESEARCH
uNIVERSITY COllEGE lONDON
2012
© Heimir Pálsson 2012
ISBN 978-0-903521-85-7
Printed by Short Run Press limited, Exeter
Contents
Preface ...................................................................................................vii
Introduction ...........................................................................................xi
1 Snorri Sturluson................................................................................xi
1.1 From Oddi to Reykjaholt ...........................................................xi
1.2 The trip to Norway and return home (1218–20) ......................xix
1.3 Back to Norway (1237) ..........................................................xxiv
1.4 The wrong horse backed .........................................................xxv
1.5 ‘Do not strike!’ .......................................................................xxvi
2 Manuscripts ...................................................................................xxx
2.1 DG 11 4to ................................................................................xxx
2.2 Paper copies .........................................................................xxxiv
2.3 Manuscript relations ................................................................xlii
3 How did the text of the Edda come into being? ............................xliv
3.1 Myths ......................................................................................xliv
3.1.1 Summary..............................................................................lv
3.2 The language of poetry .............................................................lvi
3.2.1 Summary............................................................................lxv
4 One work or more than one? ........................................................lxvii
5 The DG 11 4to collection ............................................................lxxiv
5.1 Overview ...............................................................................lxxiv
5.2 Skáldatal ................................................................................lxxv
5.3 Ættartala Sturlunga .............................................................lxxvii
5.4 Lƒgsƒgumannatal ...............................................................lxxviii
5.5 Skáldskaparmál ......................................................................lxxx
5.6 Háttalykillinn— second grammatical treatise .......................lxxxi
5.7 list of stanzas ......................................................................lxxxii
5.8 Háttatal ...............................................................................lxxxvi
6 Headings and marginal notes ........................................................xcii
7 Empty space and additional material ............................................xcv
8 Grammar and prosody .......................................................................c
9 Summary ......................................................................................cxvi
10 Other editions of DG 11 4to ........................................................cxx
11 This edition ...............................................................................cxxiv
Index of Manuscripts ..................................................................cxxvii
Bibliographical References ......................................................cxxviii
uppsala Edda .........................................................................................1
Chapter Headings .................................................................................2
Prologue ...............................................................................................6
Gylfaginning .......................................................................................10
Skáldatal ...........................................................................................100
Genealogy of the Sturlungs ..............................................................118
list of lawspeakers .........................................................................120
Skáldskaparmál ................................................................................124
Second Grammatical Treatise ...........................................................250
Háttatal .............................................................................................260
Index of Names .................................................................................308
Illustrations
Man with a sword ...................................................................................118
Female dancer (1) ..................................................................................118
Man with a stick .....................................................................................119
Female dancer (2) ..................................................................................119
Two dancers ...........................................................................................120
Man riding a horse .................................................................................121
Gangleri and the Three Kings ................................................................122
Circular diagram ....................................................................................252
Rectangular diagram ..............................................................................253
Preface
A quarter of a century has passed since the then textbook editor at Mál og
Menning, Sigurður Svavarsson, asked me to undertake a school edition of
Snorri’s Edda. I was not particularly familiar with the Edda, but was grateful
for the confidence shown in me and decided to produce a printed text closer
to the manuscript than most. I borrowed a word-processor (as we called
desktop computers then) from the printers at Oddi, had an intensive course
in how to use it from the typesetter Hafsteinn, who expressed a sensible
attitude to it by saying: ‘Take it home with you and give me a ring when
you get stuck.’ It was actually thought such a novelty that a photographer
from the Sunday newspaper was sent to my house to take a picture of it all.
It went better than might have been expected. I did indeed, like many
others, make the great mistake of trusting blindly Finnur Jónsson’s text of
1931, and in fact I had been given that by the publishers to start me off.
Although I was able to take account of Anne Holtsmark and Jón Helgason
1953 too, my text would not have satisfied the demands of modern textual
criticism. When a new edition was issued in 2003, I had the help of Bragi
Halldórsson with the text, and besides there had been some progress in
readers’ editions of medieval texts with the publication of the Sagas of
Icelanders by Svart á hvítu. In both my editions I was fixed in my view that
the Edda ought to lie on the students’ desks as a whole. Skáldskaparmál and
Háttatal had to be included. It was not acceptable to print just Gylfaginning
and stories from Skáldskaparmál. In the later edition the þulur were added
too, though it is disputed where they belong.
It was only when I became lektor in uppsala for the second time, in 2004,
that I realised that there were many unsolved problems in the history of the
Edda. This was after I had got to know the facsimile and transcription of the
text of the uppsala Edda, or DG 11 4to, published by Grape and Thorell.
During the years 1973–1976 Olof Thorell and I were colleagues in Old
Norse studies at uppsala university, and he was in fact my head. We never
spoke together of Snorri’s Edda, and yet it was precisely during these years
that he was engaged on the final stages of his major work, making the word
list and putting the finishing touches to his literal transcription of the text
that had been published in facsimile by Anders Grape in 1962.
In 1929 the Swedish parliament had decided to give the Icelanders a
gift in celebration of the millenium of the Alþingi in 1930 in the form of a
facsimile of a major Icelandic manuscript in a Swedish library. It can be
deduced from Tönnes Kleberg’s introductory remarks to the 1962 edition
(pp. 1–2) that there had been some debate about the choice of manuscript
for the gift, and it may be supposed that the Stockholm Homily Book had
viii Preface
been a competing candidate along with the uppsala Edda. It was the latter
that triumphed, and the form in which it was produced turned out to be, as
far as I am aware, a completely isolated experiment. The photographs were
taken with equipment that had proved itself with, among other things, the
publication of the Codex Argenteus in facsimile in 1927. But then this book
was printed on vellum! A single copy was prepared which is now preserved
in the National/university library of Iceland.
It had been decided to provide copies of the photographs on paper for all the
major libraries in Sweden, and at the same time as the vellum copy was made,
500 copies were printed on paper, and the majority of these were deposited
in the university library in uppsala Carolina Rediviva ‘för att användas
som bytesmaterial, varigenom en spridning till viktigare forskningscentra
garanterades’ (to be used as exchanges by means of which dissemination to
more important centres of research would be guaranteed), writes Kleberg
in 1962. It has always been assumed that all these copies lay unbound and
unpublished in the library from the time the vellum copy was made until
they were used in Grape’s edition of 1962.
But this is not so. It was due to chance that the present writer and his wife,
Dr Eva Aniansson, who works in the Swedish Academy, discovered that
there was in the Nobel library a bound copy on paper of the 1930 national
gift with the same preface as the copy in the National library of Iceland.
From the day-books of the bookbinder Gustav Hedberg, preserved in the
Royal library in Stockholm, it appears that in 1930, besides the copy that
was printed on vellum and sent to Iceland, eighteen vellum bound copies
of the uppsala Edda printed on paper were made. At the time of writing the
investigation is not finished, but what we know so far is that there is one
copy in each of the following libraries: the Nobel library, the Royal library
in Stockholm, the university library in uppsala, the university library in
lund, the National Parliament library; two are preserved in the library of
the Vetenskaps akademi in Stockholm, and besides these we know of one
copy in private ownership in Iceland.1 This makes altogether eight of the
eighteen bound copies on paper that were made. They all have the same
binding and the same preface as the one on vellum that was sent to Iceland.
The full edition that had been envisaged, according to Kleberg in the
1962 edition, was to include a transcription of the text, an exhaustive
paleographical description and commentary, and the history of the
manuscript. It was obviously going to be a long time before all this work
could be completed, which was presumably why the 18 copies were bound
1 It is in itself amusing that this copy was given to one of three Icelanders born in
1930 that were given the name Úlfljótur.
Preface ix
for immediate distribution in 1930, as a stopgap. In fact the work was not
completed and published fully until 1977, when the second volume, with
Thorell’s research, appeared.
When I began my research on DG 11 4to in 2005, I sought help from my
professor and colleague Henrik Williams, and eventually, with the help of
lasse Mårtensson and Daniel Sävborg, we got financial support from the
Research Council during the years 2008 to 2011and were able to launch
an investigation into the manuscript DG 11 4to (cf. Williams 2007). Maja
Bäckvall and Jonathan Pettersson subsequently joined the project team.
Part of the results of the team’s research and of my discussions with my
colleagues appears in this book.
I have spent most of my time over the last five years in study of the text
of DG 11 4to. It has been most helpful to have lasse Mårtensson, an expert
in paleography, at my side, and his observations on the manuscript have
been invaluable for the research that I have carried out on the text. Together
we have tried to get as close to the scribe and redactor as possible (we are
unsure whether these were the same man, and maybe it is not important to
decide). We have certainly felt conscious that his legacy was entrusted to
us, as Jón Helgason has expressed it, and both of us have felt that he had
been unjustly judged by previous scholars.
The normalised spelling of this edition of the text of DG 11 4to follows
to a certain extent the pattern in Íslensk fornrit. Yet Norrøn ordbok 2004
has been followed in the spelling of middle voice endings (-st, not -sk), to
make it easier for foreign users.
Verses and poems are a particular problem in an edition such as this. I have
chosen to reproduce what the manuscript has as closely as possible, without
emendation. On the other hand I indicate in the notes the corrections that
I consider reasonable or unavoidable, while trying to take account of what
is on offer elsewhere. It is absolutely certain that a scribe at the beginning
of the fourteenth century would not have understood all the verses that are
quoted. But he would of course have had certain ideas about the text and
must have realised that it was often just a question of giving an example of
a kenning, however it fitted in.
Hereafter, the material is dealt with from all possible points of view. In the
first section the authorship is discussed and a particular look is taken at what
may conceivably explain the selection and treatment of the material in the
Edda. In the second section the manuscript DG 11 4to is described and its
special position among the manuscripts of the Edda is analysed. The theories
of scholars about the relationships between the manuscripts are discussed.
In the third section the chief aim is to show how the compilation of material
