ANTHONY FAULKESEDDATHE word ‘Edda’ is found as the name of a book in two medieval
manuscripts. Uppsala University Library DG 11, written about 1300, has
the heading ‘Bók ﬂessi heitir Edda’.1 The words that follow in thismanuscript (‘hana hefir saman setta Snorri Sturlu sonr’) indicate that the
scribe meant the name to apply to the work he was copying rather than to
the manuscript. AM 757 4to, written about 1400, contains parts of
Skáldskaparmál and other material, but neither Gylfaginning nor Háttatal.
In this manuscript one of the extracts from Skáldskaparmál is introducedwith the words ‘svá segir í bók ﬂeirri sem Edda heitir at . . .’2 What follows
was not derived from the Uppsala manuscript. A few lines later 757 refers
to the contents of the prologue to Snorra Edda with the words ‘svá sem
skrifat finnz í fyrsta capitula greindrar bókar’, and again the reference is
not to the text of the Uppsala manuscript.
The name ‘Edda’ also appears in sixteenth- to seventeenth-century
marginalia in the Codex Regius of Snorra Edda (Gks 2367 4to), and aseventeenth-century hand has added the heading ‘Bókin Edda er ﬂetta’ in
Utrecht University Library MS no. 1374 (the text in this manuscript was
written about the end of the sixteenth century, but is thought to have been
copied directly from a thirteenth-century manuscript).3 The earliest mentionof the name of the work outside manuscripts that contain it seems to bethat in the late sixteenth-century Oddverjaannáll, which has under thereport of Snorri Sturluson’s death in 1241 the words ‘hann samsetti Edduog margar a›rar fræ›ibækur íslenzkar sögur’.4 In the seventeenth century
the work is commonly referred to by this name, though the title ‘Skálda’

1 Edda Snorra Sturlusonar, Hafniæ 1848-87, II 250. The spelling of Icelandic

quotations in this article is normalised.
2 Ibid. II 532.
3 Edda Snorra Sturlusonar, ed. Finnur Jónsson, København 1931, pp. iv and vi.
4 Oddaannálar og Oddverjaannáll, ed. Eiríkur ﬁormó›sson and Gu›rún Ása
Grímsdóttir, Reykjavík 2003, p. 146.

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is sometimes found; but this is most often applied to Skáldskaparmál or
the Grammatical Treatises on their own.5
The word ‘Edda’ is found in two other contexts in medieval Icelandic;
in both cases it appears in the text in manuscripts that contain Snorra
Edda. Rígsﬂula is preserved only in AM 242 fol. (Codex Wormianus),
written in the middle of the fourteenth century, though the poem itself
may be much older. In this poem Edda is the name of the woman onwhom Rígr begot the race of thralls.6 Since the poem goes on to tell how
Rígr begot free men on Amma (‘grandmother’) and noblemen on Mó›ir(‘mother’), it would seem that the poet took Edda to mean ‘greatgrandmother’ (and Ái, the name of her husband, to mean ‘greatgrandfather’). Secondly, edda appears in some manuscripts of Skáldskaparmál among the heiti for woman.7 The Utrecht manuscript, AM 748 I 4to(written in the early fourteenth century), and AM 757 4to read ‘heitir okmó›ir, amma, ﬂri›ja edda’. AM 748 II 4to (written about 1400) does nothave the first four words, the Codex Regius does not have the first three,
and the sentence is entirely lacking in the Uppsala manuscript and Codex
Wormianus (the quotation in Gu›mundur Andrésson’s dictionary, ‘Mó›ir
heitir ei›a, amma ƒnnur, edda en ﬂri›ja’, is unreliable;8 it is possible that
he took it from a part of Codex Wormianus that is now lost, but the words
are not in Magnús Ólafsson’s Edda, which reproduces a lot of the material
from that manuscript). In the account of the descriptions of man in
Skáldskaparmál, it is stated that one may describe a man as someone’s‘fƒ›ur e›a afa; ái er hinn ﬂri›i’ (thus the Codex Regius and the Utrecht
manuscript; AM 748 I and II both have ‘heitir’ instead of ‘er’; 757 omits
the last three words, and in Codex Wormianus and the Uppsala manuscriptái begins the list of heiti for son).9 Thus it is likely (in spite of theunsatisfactory preservation of these passages) that the compiler of this
5 See Edda Snorra Sturlusonar 1848–87, III iv; Edda Snorra Sturlusonar 1931,
p. iv; Ole Worm’s Correspondence with Icelanders, ed. Jakob Benediktsson,
Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana VII, Copenhagen 1948, pp. 10/3 and 42/25–6; JónÓlafsson of Grunnavík in British Library MS Egerton 642, fol. 13.
6 Edda, ed. G. Neckel and H. Kuhn, I, Heidelberg 1962, p. 280.
7 Edda Snorra Sturlusonar 1931, p. 190.
8 Lexicon Islandicum, ed. P. H. Resen, Havniae 1683, p. 57. Resen prints eina
for ei›a, but the manuscript copy of the dictionary (Junius 120 in the Bodleian
Library, Oxford) has eida.
9 Edda Snorra Sturlusonar 1931, p. 188; Edda Snorra Sturlusonar, Codex
Wormianus, ed. Finnur Jónsson, København og Kristiania 1924, p. 104. Ái appears
also in the ﬂula of heiti for man in Edda Snorra Sturlusonar 1931, p. 199.

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3

part of Skáldskaparmál understood ái and edda to be words for greatgrandfather and great-grandmother, though it may be that he only knew
the words from Rígsﬂula and there is no independent confirmation of themeaning of either word in other sources. None of the texts that have theword edda as a heiti for woman indicates any connection with the nameof the book, and this may mean that the name was only applied to it later,or that there was not felt to be any etymological connection between the
two usages. Edda is used as a personal name in Bósa saga (probably written
in the fourteenth century) without there being any association either with
the name of the book or with the words in Skáldskaparmál and Rígsﬂula.10
In medieval Iceland, therefore, Edda could be used as a personal namein stories of legendary times, and also as a common noun meaning greatgrandmother, though neither usage seems to have had very wide currency.
By the end of the thirteenth century it had also come to be used as thename of Snorri Sturluson’s treatise on poetics. Then in poems from thefourteenth century and later phrases such as ‘reglur eddu’, ‘eddu list’ areused, and appear quite frequently.11 In the first phrase edda could stillmean Snorri’s treatise, but in the second it must mean ‘poetry’ or ‘poetics’in general. It is clear that for these writers, edda meant ‘ars poetica’, andwhen it was used as the name of Snorri’s book must have been understoodto relate principally to Skáldskaparmál and Háttatal, which are accountsof poetic diction and metre, rather than to the mythology of Gylfaginning.12
10 Fornaldar sögur Nordrlanda, ed. C. C. Rafn, Kaupmannahöfn 1829–30, III

208.
11 Arngrímur ábóti Brandsson, Gu›mundar kvæ›i (1345), verse 2: ‘Rædda ek

lítt vi› reglur eddu’ (Den norsk-islandske Skjaldedigtning, ed. Finnur Jónsson,
København og Kristiania 1912–15, A II 348); Árni ábóti Jónsson, Gu›mundardrápa (fourteenth century), verse 78: ‘Yfirmeisturum mun eddu listar allstir›r sjá
hró›r vir›ast’ (Skjaldedigtning A II 429); Eysteinn Ásgrímsson (died 1361), Lilja
verse 97: ‘Eigi er gløggt ﬂó at eddu regla undan hljóti at víkja stundum’ (Skjaldedigtning A II 394); Hallr prestr, Nikulásdrápa verse 4: ‘Skil vegligra(r) eddlu (sic)reglu’ (Íslenzk mi›aldakvæ›i II, ed. Jón Helgason, Kaupmannahöfn 1938, p. 418).
There are many further examples from rímur in Corpus Poeticum Boreale, ed. G.
Vigfusson and F. York Powell, Oxford 1883, II 560-61 (see also I xxvi–xxvii).
12 If it is correct that in the Middle Ages edda was understood to mean ‘ars
poetica’, the application of the name to the collection of poems in GkS 2365 4toafter its rediscovery by scholars about 1643 is clearly as inappropriate semanticallyas it is historically, and the customary modern distinction of eddic or eddaic poetryfrom scaldic is also unfortunate, since the term edd(a)ic ought properly to refer tothe sort of poetry dealt with in Snorra Edda; and the word skáld in Old Icelandic
meant ‘poet’without any restriction based on style or subject-matter. But it is a

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There are many Icelandic books that have acquired nicknames; someoriginally related to particular manuscripts and were later applied to theworks they contain. Examples are Gr‡la, Syrpa, Rímbegla, Grágás,Hungrvaka, Njála, Grettla, Landnáma, Hulda, Hrokkinskinna, Morkinskinna, Vatnshyrna.13 They originate from various periods, and as is thenature of nicknames, the meaning of some appears transparent, others are
obscure; some of them, like Edda, are in the form of feminine diminutives.
Often they must have been applied as the result of some now forgotten
anecdote or remote association of ideas that it is now only possible toguess at. The name Edda may be of this last kind. Many attempts havebeen made to explain it from the seventeenth century onwards, but none
is without difficulty. Explanations have been of two kinds, either that thename of the book is a special use of the word edda meaning greatgrandmother, or that it is a homonym of that word, derived from a different
root and coined in the thirteenth century specifically to apply to Snorri’s
work. Nowadays it is generally assumed that there is some association
with the word edda meaning great-grandmother, since it is at least certainthat this word existed, though the nature of the association has never beensatisfactorily explained; the ancient traditional lore the book contains ishardly such as a great-grandmother might be expected to tell of, since
there is no association in Icelandic culture between old women and scaldic
verse, unless the reference is to some of the traditional tales in Gylfaginning.14
But in the Middle Ages (and later) it was Skáldskaparmál that was mostoften copied and adapted, and it was this part of the work that was evidently
considered the most important (it is also the longest part). The name of
the work ought to apply primarily to that. The other etymologies that havein modern times been thought possible are derivation from the place-nameforlorn task to try to correct an error of nomenclature however conducive to
confusion when it has been hallowed by three centuries of usage, and no one has
been able to suggest an alternative title for the collection of poems in GkS 2365
4to that has any hope of acceptance.
13 Björn of Skar›sá, in ‘Nockorar malsgreinar um ﬂat hva›an bokinn Edda hefr
sitt heiti’ (preserved in Sth. Papp. fol. nr 38, foll. 100 f. and elsewhere), lists thenames Skálda, Rímbegla, Hungrvaka, Rómferla, Grænspjalda ‘og a›rar fleiri’.
14 My attention has been drawn to the title ‘Ribe Oldemoder (Avia Ripensis)’,which was given to a ‘Samling af Adkomster, Indtægtsangivelser og kirkeligeVedtægter for Ribe Domkapitel og Bispestol, nedskrevet 1290–1518’ (see B.
Erichsen and A. Krarup, Dansk Historisk Bibliografi I, København 1918–21, p.
636, no. 11195); but this does not seem to be any more than an interesting thoughinsignificant coincidence.

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5

Oddi, where Snorri received his early education, and derivation from theword ó›r ‘poetry’.15 It requires some ingenuity to explain why a book
written long after the author left Oddi should be called ‘the book of Oddi’(though there is a parallel in the similar misnomer ‘Laufás Edda’).
Derivation from ó›r at least gives a plausible semantic development, buteven if it were accepted that the phonological development were possible,
it would have had to have taken place gradually. It is unlikely that theword edda could have been coined in the thirteenth century on the basisof ó›r, and it does not seem likely that edda in the sense ‘poetics’ existed
in the preliterary period.
Snorri’s Edda is the first book of its kind extant from medieval Scandinavia, and it is unlikely that it had any predecessors either written or oralthat dealt theoretically with the art of scaldic poetry (the twelfth-century
Háttalykill and the ﬂulur can scarcely be said to do this). Until it was
written, therefore, there would have been no Norse word to describe it,though as soon as it was written one would be required; Icelanders were
not in the habit of giving their books foreign titles.16 It is probable that
Snorri (and his first audience) knew at least a little Latin, and most of thetreatises that could have inspired him to write his were in Latin. When hecame to devise a title for his book, it is far from improbable that he mightcoin a word that had the form of an Icelandic feminine diminutive but
was derived from a Latin word that had to do with composing poetry. He
might choose a Latin root because his work was a learned one and had
Latin models; an Icelandic form because he wrote in the vernacular aboutvernacular poetry; and a diminutive because it was customary for authors,
especially when publishing a new kind of work, to assume at least theappearance of humility.
Such an etymology of the name Edda is in fact the oldest extant, andwas proposed by the priest Magnús Ólafsson in his preface to his versionof Snorra Edda which he compiled in 1609: ‘Edda dregst af or›i latinsku
edo, i.e. ég yrki e›ur dikta’.17 Although this is not the commonest meaningof edo, which more often means ‘publish’, the word is frequently used
15 All three etymologies are old ones (like the one defended below), and werealready discussed by Jón Ólafsson of Grunnavík in British Library MS Egerton
642 (written 1735), fol. 13.
16 Ari, however, seems to have entitled his only extant work Libellus Islandorum(see Íslendingabók, Landnámabók, ed. Jakob Benediktsson, Reykjavík 1968, p. 4).
In the present context, though, it is interesting that Ari used the diminutive form
libellus.
17 See Edda Islandorum, ed. P. H. Resen, Havniæ 1665 A1r.

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with reference to poetry, and it would not have required very profoundlearning in Latin to coin the word Edda from it. The first two lines ofOvid’s Amores read:Arma gravi numero violentaque bella parabam
edere, materia conveniente modis.

Here the word might well be understood to mean ‘compose (poetry) about’,‘treat in verse’, and in Tristia 2, 541 (carminaque edideram) it could betaken to mean simply ‘compose’. Cf. Martial, Epigrams I, 91, lines 1–2.
Note also Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 9, 4, 74, where the word is used
to distinguish what a poet wrote (edidit) from a later emendation.
This derivation would remain entirely unconvincing, however,18 if there
were not another Icelandic abstract noun formed in an exactly parallelway from a Latin verb of the same type as edo, with the connection between
the Icelandic and Latin words (which cannot be doubted) actually madeexplicit in a medieval Icelandic text that was certainly known to Snorri.
Færeyinga saga, which was one of Snorri’s sources in Heimskringla, tells
an amusing story of how ﬁóra questioned Sigmundr about his religious
education at the hands of ﬁrándr í Gƒtu. He said he had learned ‘Pater
noster ok kredduna’. This ‘kredda’ turns out to be a version of a widespread
popular prayer, but not a very exact account of the Christian faith. ‘ﬁykki
mér engi mynd á, segir hon (i.e. ﬁóra), á kredo.’ ﬁrandr’s defence is that
there are many variants of the faith that have equal validity: ‘eru margar
kreddur, ok er slíkt, segir hann, eigi á eina lund rétt.’19
From this anecdote it is apparent, not only that the modern Icelandic
word kredda, which means ‘superstition, illogically held belief’ is ahypocoristic form of the Latin word credo as used substantivally to mean‘affirmation of faith’, but that this derivation was known and understoodin thirteenth-century Iceland.20 This parallel makes it possible to imagine
Snorri, or one of his small circle of interested friends who must haveconstituted the first readership of his book, coining the word edda from18 Cf. Árni Magnússon’s comment: ‘Magni Olai, viri alias eruditissimi, sententia,

de Edda ab edo derivanda, refutari non eget’ (‘Vita Sæmundi Multiscii’, p. xxii, in
Edda Sæmudar hinns Fró›a I, Hafniæ 1787). This view is repeated by Jón Ólafssonof Grunnavík in Egerton 642 (see note 15 above).
19 Færeyinga saga, ed. Ólafur Halldórsson, Reykjavík 1967, pp. 110–11; Flateyjarbók, Christiania 1860–68, II 400–401.
20 Kredda probably came into Icelandic via the Old English loan-word creda,
but this makes no difference to the present argument, since it is the ultimate
etymology of the word and the fact that this was known that is significant.

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7

edo in conscious imitation of the word kredda, which he knew was derived
from credo, as a half-humorous description of his treatise, thus implyingthat the Edda stood in a similar relation to Latin artes poeticae as ﬁrándr’s
kredda to the official credo. There may also at the same time have been anawareness of the pun on the other word edda, which might have beentaken to reflect the fact that the treatise dealt with a kind of poetry that in
the thirteenth century must have been thought by many rather oldfashioned.
*

*

*

*

Not until I had written the above did I see Stefán Karlsson’s lively defenceof the same etymology of edda on very much the same lines as mine in‘Eddukredda’, Bríarí á sextugsafmæli Halldórs Halldórssonar 13. julí
1971, pp. 25–33, published in a single typewritten copy in Reykjavík inthat year.21 The main difference in his argument is that he takes edda to be
derived from edo in the sense ‘edit, compile, relate’ with reference
principally to Snorri’s activity in compiling Gylfaginning. It seems to me
that edda (as a title) must have had the sense ‘ars poetica’ from the
beginning, and that it can only be derived from edo if that verb was taken
to mean ‘compose (poetry)’. Nevertheless, the fact that two people have
independently come to revive this etymology is itself a testimony to its
plausibility, and I hope that scholars will reconsider it and perhaps add it
to the list of possible or likely explanations of the word edda; though nodoubt on this as on other subjects it is probable that each will continue tostand by his own kredda.

Originally published in Gripla II, Reykjavík 1977, pp. 32–39. Now slightly revised.

21 I have incorporated some corrections and additional remarks suggested by

Stefán Karlsson in comments on what I had written, which were offered in asplendid spirit of academic detachment.