Gripla - 01.01.1977, Qupperneq 36

ANTHONY FAULKES
EDDA
The 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 þessi heitir Edda’.1 The words that follow in this
manuscript (‘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 Hátta-
tal. In this manuscript one of the extracts from Skáldskaparmál is in-
troduced with the words ‘svá segir í bók þeirri 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 a
seventeenth-century hand has added the heading ‘Bókin Edda er þetta’
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 mention of the name of the work outside manuscripts that con-
tain it seems to be that in the late sixteenth-century Oddverja Annáll,
which has under the report of Snorri Sturluson’s death in 1241 the
words ‘hann samsetti Eddu og margar aðrar fræðibækur íslenzkar sög-
ur’.4 In the seventeenth century the work is commonly referred to by
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, Kpbenhavn 1931, pp. iv and vi.
4 Islandske Annaler indtil 1578, ed. G. Storm, Christiania 1888, p. 481.