The Prose Edda: Snorri Sturluson's Norse Mythology Explained

By Thalira Wisdom | Updated March 2026

Snorri Sturluson: Who Wrote the Prose Edda?

Snorri Sturluson (1179-1241) was one of the most remarkable figures of medieval Scandinavia. He was an Icelandic chieftain from a powerful family, twice elected Lawspeaker of the Althing (Iceland's parliament), a prolific historian (he wrote the Heimskringla, the great saga of the Norse kings), and an accomplished skaldic poet. He was also, eventually, an assassination target killed in his own home at age 62 by agents of the Norwegian king he had once served.

Snorri wrote the Prose Edda around 1220 CE, approximately two hundred years after Iceland's formal conversion to Christianity in 1000 CE. His purpose was explicitly practical: he wanted to provide a handbook for young skalds (court poets) who needed to understand the mythological kennings and allusions that permeated Old Norse poetry but were becoming incomprehensible to younger audiences who had grown up Christian. If you did not know the story of how Odin obtained the mead of poetry, you could not understand poems that described it. The myths were dying as living cultural knowledge, and the poetry would die with them.

The question of Snorri's exact role as author versus compiler is genuinely debated among scholars. The surviving manuscripts (none earlier than the mid-13th century, after his death) differ significantly from each other. Anthony Faulkes, who produced the standard modern English translation, argues that Snorri was a genuine author who shaped and in some cases invented mythological details, not merely a transcriber. John Lindow, in Norse Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs (2001), takes a more cautious view, treating Snorri as a sophisticated but culturally situated interpreter of older material.

What is not debated is the magnitude of what Snorri preserved. Without the Prose Edda, our knowledge of Norse cosmology would be fragmentary, derived from scattered verses in the Poetic Edda, runic inscriptions, and passing references in Latin chronicles. The Prose Edda gives us the narrative framework: the beginning, the structure, and the end of the Norse universe.

The Structure of the Prose Edda

The Prose Edda as it has come down to us consists of a Prologue and three main sections. The Prologue is a euhemeristic account in which Snorri, writing as a Christian, explains the Norse gods as originally human kings and heroes from Troy who were later deified. This framing device allowed him to discuss pagan mythology without appearing to endorse it. Modern scholars generally read past the Prologue to the mythological content beneath it.

Gylfaginning: The Tricking of Gylfi

Gylfaginning (The Tricking of Gylfi) is the heart of the Prose Edda for anyone interested in Norse mythology. Its narrative frame is ingenious: a Swedish king named Gylfi, seeking to understand the source of the Aesir gods' power, travels in disguise to their realm. He is received by three mysterious figures seated on thrones: High (Har), Just-as-High (Jafnhar), and Third (Thridi). Gylfi asks them questions. They answer with the full body of Norse mythology.

The framing device achieves several things. It allows Snorri to present pagan mythology as a story told by suspicious characters to a foreign king, maintaining Christian plausible deniability. It creates a dialogic structure that mirrors the question-and-answer format of wisdom literature across many traditions (from Platonic dialogue to the Irish immrama narratives). And it establishes the mythology as something Gylfi, and by extension the reader, discovers rather than inherits: each piece of knowledge is earned through a question.

Gylfaginning covers: the primordial void and creation of Ymir; the making of the world from Ymir's body; the creation of humanity (Ask and Embla, made from two trees); the structure of the Nine Worlds and Yggdrasil; the nature and attributes of each major god; the great mythological stories (Baldr's death, Loki's punishment, Thor's adventures); and the events and aftermath of Ragnarok. It is, in approximately 20,000 words, the most complete account of any non-Mediterranean Indo-European mythology to survive from the pre-modern period.

The Creation Myth: Ymir and the World from a Body

The Prose Edda's creation myth begins in Ginnungagap: the yawning void that existed before any world. To the south was Muspelheim, a realm of primordial fire and heat. To the north was Niflheim, a realm of ice, mist, and the spring Hvergelmir. Where the heat met the ice in Ginnungagap, the frost melted and dripped. From these drops formed Ymir, the first being, a primordial giant of extraordinary size.

Ymir is a disturbing figure. He reproduces asexually: a man and woman grew from his armpit as he slept; one of his legs fathered a son on the other leg. From this strange family came the race of frost-giants. Meanwhile, the melting ice produced a cosmic cow, Audhumla, whose milk fed Ymir. Audhumla herself was nourished by licking the salt from the primordial ice. As she licked, she revealed a figure: Buri, the first of the Aesir gods. Buri's grandson was Odin, who, with his brothers Vili and Ve, eventually killed Ymir.

The cosmogonic significance of Ymir's death is total. The gods made the entire world from his body:

Comparative mythologist Mircea Eliade, in The Myth of the Eternal Return (1954), identifies this pattern (a world created from the body of a primordial being) as one of the most widespread cosmogonic structures in world mythology. It appears in the Vedic Purusha hymn (Rigveda X.90), the Babylonian Enuma Elish (Marduk making the world from Tiamat), and the Norse Ymir myth. The common element is sacrifice as the precondition of creation: the universe is possible only because something gave everything it had. This is not merely ancient biology. It is a cosmological statement about the nature of existence: being arises from the total surrender of a prior state.

The Nine Worlds and Yggdrasil

The Norse cosmological structure of Nine Worlds connected by the world-tree Yggdrasil appears primarily in the Prose Edda, supplemented by the Poetic Edda poem Voluspa. The exact list of nine worlds is not given explicitly in any single source, which has led to scholarly debate about their precise identification. The Prose Edda's Gylfaginning section 34 mentions nine worlds in passing, in the context of Hel's dominion. The fuller picture must be assembled from multiple references across both Eddas.

Yggdrasil (the world-tree, an ash of cosmic proportions) connects all nine worlds. Its three roots reach into Asgard (Odin's well of wisdom), Jotunheim (Mimir's well of knowledge), and Niflheim (Hvergelmir, the primordial spring). At its top sits an eagle. At its base coils the serpent Nidhogg, perpetually gnawing. A squirrel named Ratatoskr runs up and down the trunk carrying messages (and insults) between the eagle and the serpent. The tree is constantly damaged and constantly renewed: gnawed by serpents below, nibbled by deer and goats on its branches, tended by the Norns who pour sacred water from Urdarbrunn over its roots each day.

The image of Yggdrasil is one of the most sophisticated cosmological metaphors in any mythological tradition. A single living structure connects all dimensions of reality. Its health is collective: everything in the cosmos participates in either its damage or its renewal. No world is separate from any other; every action in one realm has resonance in all others. This is the Norse version of the Hermetic "as above, so below": a universe of radical interconnection in which all dimensions are aspects of a single organic whole.

The Gods of the Prose Edda

Gylfaginning introduces and characterises twelve major Aesir gods and their domains. Snorri is careful to give each deity a portfolio that includes both mythological stories and symbolic meaning. His presentation is more systematic than anything in the Poetic Edda, which presents the gods in the context of specific narratives rather than organised description.

Odin (Allfather) is the dominant figure: god of wisdom, war, poetry, and death. Snorri's Odin is defined by his perpetual quest for knowledge at personal cost. He gave an eye to drink from Mimir's well. He hung on Yggdrasil for nine days to receive the runes. He sacrificed the solar power of his right eye (associated with the sun in Norse symbolism) for the deeper sight of the left (associated with the moon and inner vision). Every sacrifice Odin makes is an epistemological act: he is the god who trades comfort for consciousness.

Thor receives more narrative space in the Prose Edda than any other god. His adventures against giants occupy large portions of both Gylfaginning and Skaldskaparmal. Snorri's Thor is physical, direct, and often outmanoeuvred by cleverness, which he lacks. He is the patron of farmers and fishermen as much as warriors. His hammer Mjolnir is both a weapon and a blessing tool, used to consecrate marriages and births. Thor represents the principle of protective order: the force that holds back chaos not through wisdom but through consistent, unrelenting will.

Skaldskaparmal and the Art of Kennings

Skaldskaparmal (The Language of Poetry) is the most technically demanding section of the Prose Edda and the longest. It opens with a dialogue between Bragi (god of poetry) and Aegir (god of the sea) in which Bragi explains the origins of skaldic kennings through mythological stories. It then becomes a systematic reference: thousands of kennings organised by category, with the mythology that justifies each one.

The kenning is a defining feature of Old Norse and Old English poetry. It is a metaphorical compound that replaces a direct noun with a poetic circumlocution. Blood becomes "sword-dew" or "raven's wine." The sea becomes "the whale-road" or "the seal-bath." Gold becomes "fire of the sea" (from the myth of Aegir's gold-lit hall). A poet becomes "the god of the hawk-land" (because a hawk sits on the wrist, and the wrist is a plain, and the plain belongs to its lord).

Kennings are not decorative. They are compressed mythological references that assume the listener knows the stories behind them. When a skald calls gold "Fafnir's lair," he is invoking the entire mythological complex of Fafnir the dragon, Sigurd the dragonslayer, and the cursed gold that destroys everyone who possesses it. A single kenning carries a whole story in miniature. Without Snorri's explanations in Skaldskaparmal, most of the skaldic corpus would be unreadable.

Three Misconceptions About the Prose Edda

Prose Edda vs. Poetic Edda

The Poetic Edda (also called the Elder Edda) is a collection of Old Norse poems preserved primarily in the Codex Regius manuscript (c. 1270 CE), discovered in 1643. The poems are older in composition than Snorri's text, some of them traceable to the 9th or 10th century. They include Voluspa (the seeress's prophecy describing creation and Ragnarok), Havamal (the High One's sayings, attributed to Odin), Skirnismal, Lokasenna, Thrymskvida, and others.

The relationship between the two Eddas is complementary. The Poetic Edda preserves the oldest layer of Norse mythological poetry in its original form: dense, allusive, often oblique, assuming extensive prior knowledge in the listener. The Prose Edda provides the narrative context that makes the poetry interpretable, explains the kennings, and gives us the connecting tissue between the individual poems. Scholars of Old Norse mythology (Ursula Dronke, John McKinnell, Carolyne Larrington) work with both constantly, using each to illuminate the other.

The critical difference is that the Poetic Edda's sources are likely more authentic to pre-Christian belief, while the Prose Edda is more readable and more complete as a narrative. Someone beginning with Norse mythology will find the Prose Edda more accessible; someone wanting to go deeper will move to the Poetic Edda and find layers of meaning that Snorri's prose simplifications obscure.

The Scholarly Context

The serious academic study of the Prose Edda begins with Rasmus Rask and Jacob Grimm in the early 19th century, continued through the major 20th-century scholars (Gabriel Turville-Petre, Hilda Ellis Davidson, Jan de Vries), and reaches its current state in the work of Anthony Faulkes (whose 1987 Everyman translation remains standard), John Lindow, Carolyne Larrington, and Neil Price.

Anthony Faulkes' critical edition of the Prose Edda (3 volumes, Viking Society for Northern Research) is the scholarly standard for the original Old Norse text. His Everyman translation provides both accessibility and scholarly apparatus. John Lindow's Norse Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs (2001) is the best single-volume reference for contextualising the Prose Edda material. Neil Price's The Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings (2020) provides the archaeological and historical context within which the mythology lived.

The Spiritual Meaning of Snorri's Cosmology

Read as a spiritual document rather than a historical curiosity, the Prose Edda presents a cosmology of extraordinary depth. The universe begins in emptiness (Ginnungagap), moves through primordial conflict (the meeting of fire and ice), produces a being whose death becomes the world (Ymir), and is sustained by a structure of radical interconnection (Yggdrasil) that is perpetually threatened but perpetually renewed.

The gods themselves are not omnipotent. They are subject to fate. Odin knows Ragnarok is coming; he cannot prevent it. He can only prepare, learn, gather the best of the human dead in Valhalla, and act as well as possible within a universe that does not guarantee outcomes. This is a profoundly honest cosmology. The Norse universe is not held in place by an all-powerful benevolent deity. It is held in place by the combined effort of beings who are doing their best within conditions they did not choose and cannot ultimately control.

The spiritual teaching that emerges from this is not pessimism but clarity. The question is not "how do I guarantee a good outcome?" but "how do I act well within a universe that contains both the light of Asgard and the gnawing of Nidhogg?" The answer the Prose Edda models is: with wisdom (Odin's perpetual sacrifice for knowledge), with strength directed toward protection (Thor), with skill and craft (the dwarves who made Mjolnir, Gleipnir, and the walls of Asgard), and with the acceptance that Ragnarok is not the end of the story.

This resonates directly with the Hermetic tradition's understanding of the cosmos as a training ground: a reality structured to develop consciousness through challenge, loss, and renewal. The Norse cosmology is not fatalistic. It is teleological in the deepest sense: the destruction of Ragnarok is the precondition for the new world that rises from the sea in Voluspa's final stanzas. Every ending enables a beginning that would have been impossible without it.

The Hermetic Connection

The Prose Edda's cosmology converges with Hermetic philosophy at several points that are too structurally precise to be coincidental. Both traditions describe a reality that begins in undifferentiated unity (Ginnungagap/the Hermetic Pleroma), passes through a creative act that divides the original whole into a structured multiplicity (the Aesir making worlds from Ymir/the Demiurge ordering the material world), and maintains itself through a living mediating principle (Yggdrasil/the Logos) that connects all dimensions.

Both traditions also hold that wisdom requires sacrifice. Odin's eye for Mimir's well is structurally identical to the Hermetic initiate's willingness to surrender ordinary identity in order to receive genuine knowledge. In both cases, what is given up is a comfortable mode of seeing; what is received is a deeper, costlier, and ultimately more real vision of what is.

The Hermetic Synthesis course at Thalira explores these convergences in depth. The Norse cosmological tradition, preserved through the remarkable effort of Snorri Sturluson, is not an isolated cultural artefact but a member of a global family of wisdom traditions that describe the same fundamental reality from different geographical and cultural angles. The world-tree of Norse cosmology and the Hermetic tree of the Sephirot are different maps of the same territory.