Gripla - 01.01.1977, Page 42

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GRIPLA
out to be a version of a widespread popular prayer, but not a very
exact account of the Christian faith. ‘Þykki mér engi mynd á, segir hon
(i.e. Þóra), á kredo.’ Þrándr’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 a
hypocoristic form of the Latin word credo as used substantivally to
mean ‘affirmation of faith’, but that this derivation was known and
understood in thirteenth-century Iceland.20 This parallel makes it pos-
sible to imagine Snorri, or one of his small circle of interested friends
who must have constituted the first readership of his book, coining the
word edda from edo in conscious imitation of the word kredda, which
he knew was derived from credo, as a half-humorous description of the
treatise, thus implying that the Edda stood in a similar relation to Latin
artes poeticæ as Þrándr’s kredda to the official credo. There may also
at the same time have been an awareness of the pun on the other word
edda, which might have been taken 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 old-fashioned.
* * * *
Not until I had written the above did I see Stefán Karlsson’s lively de-
fence of the same etymology of edda on very much the same lines as
mine in ‘Eddukredda’, Bríarí á sextugsafmœli Halldórs Halldórssonar
13. júlí 1971, pp. 25-33, published in a single typewritten copy in
Reykjavík in that 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.
19 Fœreyinga saga, ed. Ólafur Halldórsson, Reykjavík 1967, pp. 110-111; Flat-
eyjarbók, Christiania 1860-68, II 400^101.
20 Kredda probably came into Icelandic via the Old English loan-word creda,
but this ntakes no difference to the present argument, since it is the ultimate etymo-
logy of the word and the fact that this was known that is significant.
21 I have incorporated some corrections and additional remarks suggested by
Stefán Karlsson in comments on what I had written, which were offered in a
splendid spirit of academic detachment.