Gripla - 01.01.1977, Page 41

EDDA
37
in Latin. When he came to devise a title for his book, it is far from
improbable that he might coin 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 about vernacular poetry; and a diminutive
because it was customary for authors, especially when publishing a new
kind of work, to assume at least the appearance of humility.
Such an etymology of the name Edda is in fact the oldest extant, and
was proposed by the priest Magnús Ólafsson in his preface to his ver-
sion of Snorra Edda which he compiled in 1609: ‘Edda dregst af orði
latinsku edo, i.e. ég yrki eður dikta’.17 Although this is not the com-
monest meaning of edo, which more often means ‘publish’, the word is
often used with reference to poetry, and it would not have required very
profound learning in Latin to coin the word Edda from it. The first two
lines of Ovid’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 be taken to mean simply ‘compose’. Note also Quintilian, Institu-
tio 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
parallel way from a Latin verb of the same type as edo, with the
connection between the Icelandic and Latin words (which cannot be
doubted) actually made explicit 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 Þóra questioned
Sigmundr about his religious education at the hands of Þrándr í Gotu.
He said he had learned ‘Pater noster ok kredduna’. This ‘kredda’ turns
11 See Edda Islandorum, ed. P. H. Resen, Havniæ 1665, A lr.
18 Cf. Árni Magnússon’s comment: ‘Magni Olai, viri alias eruditissimi, senten-
tia, de Edda ab edo derivanda, refutari non eget’ (‘Vita Sæmundi Multiscii’, p. xxii,
in Edda Sœmundar hinns Fróða I, Hafniæ 1787). This view is repeated by Jón
Olafsson of Grunnavík in Egerton 642 (see note 15 above).