Snorri Sturluson

With the recent publication of The Gospel of Loki (Joanne Harris, 2014), and the forthcoming Vikings exhibition at the British Museum, interest in the life and legends of early Scandinavia is at a high point, but the mythological Old Norse narrative of the birth of Sleipnir has always been treated with caution. Loki, an outcast from the Æsir, is required to assume the role of a female creature and give birth, in order to save the gods from disaster. This paper will look at the medieval poetical treatise, Snorra Edda, alongside a more recent reinvention by Brian Day in his poem: “Loki and Sleipnir” in his publication: Love is not Native to My Blood (2000), and intends to examine these two versions of Loki’s transformation from male to female, and human to animal; analysing the changes in form and perspective given to the text through time and translation. Many scholars have considered the ambiguous figure of Loki, but few have associated this ambiguity with contemporary social changes outside of the introduction of Christianity. This paper will suggest that Snorri Sturluson’s apparent appropriation of Loki’s shape and gender has less to do with Christian morality, and more with everyday medieval Icelandic social values. It will suggest that the shape-shifting of Loki’s story reflects the social and geographical circumstances of its audience; something that Day, in his presentation of Loki as a victim in the hyper-masculine world of the gods, uses to comment on contemporary social attitudes to sex and gender.

Snorri contributed much to the image, prestige, and authority of poets in Old Norse vernacular literature. However, he did not originate or conclude this lionization of poets and poetry in the culture, and those who came before and after him also played their parts in establishing a robust and impressive written reputation for the poets. From almost the beginning, Old Nose vernacular literature would gradually come to exalt poets and poetry in many domains. These domains would include grammar, historic factuality, prestigious origins, mythology, narrative uses, runes, and magic. To show that, this essay surveys key Old Norse works over a two hundred year period. The works considered here have been chosen because they deal with poetry and poets in a wide variety of ways, and they are notable or represent significant developments in Icelandic literature.

Snorri à beaucoup contribué à l'image, au prestige et à l'autorité des poètes dans la littérature vernaculaire en ancien norrois. Cependant, il n'est ni l'instigateur ni le dernier chantre de cette glorification des poètes et de la poésie dans la culture, et ses prédécesseurs et successeurs jouent également un rôle dan l'établissement d'une réputation solide et impressionnante pour les poètes. Presque dés son commencement, la littérature vernaculaire en ancien Norrois exalte les poètes et la poésie dans de nombreux domaines. Ces derniers incluent la grammaire, la véracité historique, les origines prestigieuses, la mythologie, les usages narratifs, les runes et la magie. Afin de démontrer cela, cet essai passe en revue les travaux littéraires en ancien norrois sur une période de deux cent ans. Les oeuvres étudiées ici ont été choisies car elle adressent la question des poètes et de la poésie de manières variées et représentent des développements significatifs dans la littérature islandaise.

Dans l’Islande médiévale, la foi et l’honneur esquissent un « code » de valeurs dont les grandes tendances sont la loyauté et la rigueur morale nécessaires tout à la fois au respect d’accords fondés sur la confiance mutuelle et à la cohésion de la société. Fides et honor participent alors d’un système juridique ancien appuyé sur des valeurs primaires de sociabilité qui, dans une Islande si pauvre en institutions exécutives, s’attachent à constamment garantir l’ordre et le tissu social. A la fin du XIIe siècle cependant, l’ère des Sturlungar révèle les carences de ce système primaire et annonce la soumission de l’Islande à la couronne norvégienne.

This is a synopsis of my 2 volume work. It provides a new perspective on the origins of many Scottish Clans - identifying many of the lies fabricated to suit the necessity of the times and since believed and consistent with a sensible chronology. Supporting this there is a wholly new understanding of Pictish place names and of the origins of Heraldry, a rechronologising of Norwegian history covering the period 800-1015 together with a narrative overview of the politics of the Scotland of the day. Many people, such as Crinan and Duncan I's wife are identified for the first time.

“Hero or Traitor? The Cultural Canonisation of Snorri Sturluson in Denmark, Norway, Iceland, and Beyond”, in Marijan Dović and Jón Karl Helgason (eds.), Great Immortality. Studies on European Cultural Sainthood (Boston and Leiden: Brill, 2019) p.p. 211-241.

Résumé :
La première apparition postclassique de descendance des exilés troyens se trouve dans la Chronique de Frédégaire (environs de 660), qui décrit les Francs avec les Turcs comme partageant une ascendance commune parmi les réfugiés de la prise de Troie. Bien que cette connexion semble absurde (et les revendications d’origines troyennes des Turcs ont été ridiculisées), elle pourrait être due à la diplomatie byzantine à la fin du 6e ou du début du VIIe siècle. Frédégaire rapporte le retour des ambassadeurs nommés de Constantinople en 629, qui pourrait être la source de beaucoup de ces histoires orientales dont certains détails correspondent à cette période précise. Alors que le séjour des ambassadeurs a coïncidé avec l’alliance de Héraclius avec les Göktürks, Frédégaire ignore l’implication turque dans les guerres Perses. Curieusement, un matériau similaire se retrouve plusieurs siècles plus tard dans la Edda de Snorri Sturluson, qui fournit une ascendance troyenne pour les dieux nordiques dans ce qu’il appelle « la ville turque de Troie ». Écrit bien avant que les Turcs aient conquis le site de Troie, il a parfois été avancé comme un écho des documents de Fredegaire mais semble plus susceptible d’être indépendant. Cet article suggère que le mythe des origines troyennes a fourni un moyen pour les peuples indigènes sans l’histoire de migration de se réinventer dans une histoire sacralisée.

Abstract :
The first post-classical appearance of descent from Trojan exiles is found in the Merovingian Chronicle of Fredegar (around 660), who describes the Franks as sharing a common ancestry with the Turks among refugees from the Fall of Troy. While this connection seems absurd (and claims of Trojan origins of the Turks were later ridiculed), it could have originated with Byzantine diplomacy in the late VIth or early VIIth century. Fredegar reports the return of named ambassadors from Constantinople in 629, who could be the source for many of his eastern stories as some details fit that specific time. While the ambassadors’ sojourn coincided with Heraclius’s alliance with the Göktürks, Fredegar seems unaware of Turkish involvement in the Persian wars. Oddly, similar material is reflected several centuries later in the Icelandic Prose Edda where, in a euhemeristic introduction, Snorri Sturluson finds a Trojan ancestry for the Norse Gods in what he calls « the Turkish city of Troy ». Writing well before the Turks had conquered the site of Troy, it has sometimes been argued as a reflection of the Fredegarian material but would appear more likely to be independent. This paper suggests that the myth of Trojan origins provided a means for peoples without native migration stories to re-imagine themselves in a sacralized history.

With a special focus on the accounts and depictions of the Raven Banner, an iconic symbol of Norse expansion towards the west in the 9th to 11th centuries, I will here attempt to reconcile sources from Iceland, Norway, England and Ireland, in order to trace a connection between the kings and earls of what is now Norway and the bearers of the Raven Banner in Medieval Ireland and Anglo-Saxon England. For this purpose, I will first follow their lineages back to Ragnvald 'Heidumhaere' and Ragnar 'Lodbrok'. I will then attempt to tie up these two strings by discussing how these two forefathers may have been related. This overview will also form the basis for a discussion of whether the Raven Banner could be seen as a family banner.

Even gods are not always above bureaucracy. Societies very different from each other have entertained the idea that the heavens might be arranged much like an earthly bureaucracy, or that mythological beings might exercise their power in a way that makes them resembles bureaucrats. The best-known case is the Chinese “celestial bureaucracy,” but the idea is also found in (to take nearly random examples) Ancient Near Eastern cosmology, the Hebrew Bible, Late Antiquity, and modern popular culture. The primary sources discussed in this essay pertain to an area of history where bureaucracy was historically underdeveloped, namely medieval Scandinavia. Beginning with the Glavendrup runestone from the 900s, I examine a way of thinking about divine power that seems blissfully bureaucracy-free. Moving forwards in time to Adam of Bremen’s description of the temple at Uppsala (1040s–1070s), I find traces of a tentative, half-formed bureaucracy in the fading embers of Scandinavian paganism. In the 1220s, well into the Christian era, I find Snorri Sturluson concocting a version of Old Norse myth which proposes a novel resolution between the non-bureaucratic origins of his mythological corpus and the burgeoning bureacratization of High Medieval Norway. Although my focus is on medieval Scandinavia, transhistorical comparisons are frequently drawn with mythological bureaucrats from other times and places. In closing, I synthesise this comparative material with historical and anthropological theories of the relationship between bureaucracy and the divine.

The Icelandic sagas describe men and women from the North travelling throughout the medieval world, journeying to foreign, even marginal lands, fighting in foreign wars, serving at, or visiting foreign courts.  These saga far-travellers were uniquely Icelandic cultural creations; their stories were a form of epic literature.  The sagas were also written during a time of unrest and uncertainty; a time when Icelandic society was under great pressure from Norwegian political influence that was bringing great change to the community.  This thesis argues that the saga authors used images of far-travelling warriors and explorers to create and foster a sense of Icelandic independence, and their imagery was a deliberate construct that served to subtly advance the reputation of Iceland and Icelanders on the world stage.  The crafting of these images also reveals aspects of author intent and values, and how far-travel and journeys have been used to promote personal agendas, be it religious evangelism, to legitimise land-holdings, or for political purposes.  They articulated a literary response to a sense of an emerging Icelandic identity; the images served to shape, and were in turn shaped by attitudes towards far-travellers.  Far-travellers were now to be seen as cultural heroes.

Undergraduate Dissertation- Grade 1:2

A comparison between Odin and Loki, focusing on the similarities in character and how these similarities seem to change in face of changing society, religion and belief. Focusing on a number of issues such as eschatology and cultural themes in religious literature.

The first post-classical appearance of descent from Trojan
exiles is found in the Merovingian Chronicle of Fredegar. The text
reached its final version around 660 and, in it, the author describes
the Franks as sharing a common ancestry with the Turks among refugees from the Fall of Troy.

While this connection seems absurd (and claims of Trojan origins of
the Turks were later ridiculed), it could have originated with
Byzantine diplomacy in the late 6th or early 7th century. While it was retained in Frankish origin myths for nearly a millennium, its
original significance appears to have been neglected very soon.
Fredegar reports the return of named ambassadors from Constantinople in 629, who could be the source for many of his eastern stories as some details fit that specific time. While the ambassadors' sojourn coincided with Heraclius's alliance with the Göktürks, Fredegar seems unaware of Turkish involvement in the Persian wars.

Oddly, similar material is reflected several centuries later in the
Icelandic Prose Edda where, in a euhemeristic introduction, Snorri
Sturluson finds a Trojan ancestry for the Norse Gods in what he calls the Turkish city of Troy.  Writing well before the Turks had conquered the site of Troy, it has sometimes been argued as a reflection of the Fredegarian material but would appear more likely to be independent.

What do these accounts of Turks and Trojans tell us about the mindset of the authors?  What do they reflect about the memories of Troy?

The human memory is treacherous. Ideas can become forgotten, be misattributed and mutate. As a result, the mythologies of oral cultures change over time. Taking literature about Þórr as a case study, this thesis aims to understand the operations underpinning both this change and stability in Old Norse mythological representations. To do so, I adopt, develop and evaluate a methodology from the Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR), an amalgamation of disciplines including psychology, anthropology, neurobiology and zoology. I hope to contribute to the ongoing debate over the socio-cultural and cognitive roots of religion.

Many of the major sources of Old Norse religion are Christian documents, negotiating with a pagan heritage through the prisms of Biblical and classical religious traditions. After discussing the problems this creates for modern commentators examining diversity, I analyse two competing schools of thought in CSR, a context-focused model of transmission and a concept-focused model. Certain factors are distinguished as key to stability in oral transmission: culturally inculcated expectations regarding a concept, counterintuitive breaches of these expectations and the capacity of a concept to adapt to novel textual and extra-textual contexts.

In the following chapters, two major concepts now associated with Þórr are examined. Strength is shown to be integral to the deity’s mythological representation, but thunder and lightning, despite the breadth of sources considered, is not. According to the factors previously identified, therefore, thunder and lightning cannot offer a transmission advantage. However, a dichotomy between Icelandic and Scandinavian material is observed regarding the importance of thunder and lightning to Þórr’s characterization.

Þórr is demonstrated to be a very flexible supernatural concept. The pivotal quality of strength facilitates the formation of new associations with culturally salient concepts like volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, whilst irrelevant associations are shed. Coalitions of strongly associated concepts act as narrative vessels for the deity’s survival, preserving conceptualizations about the god over successive authors’ iterations on a narrative and perhaps assisting in the stability of traditional poetry in oral transmission. 

The present study aimed to analyze Prose Edda's first chapter, which is named Gylfaginning and translates to "The tricking of Gylfi". The Prose Edda is a literary material written in Old Norse language by the Icelandic historiographer and poet Snorri Sturluson, around the year of 1220. Divided in three parts, this opus holds the objective to serve as a manual of mythology, considering that the old poetic metaphors and mythic narratives from Scandinavia's polytheist past were about to be forgotten after the consolidation of Christianism. It tells the story of king Gylfi, who travels to Ásgarðr searching for a dialogue with the gods; however, they can foresee that the king is coming and so they prepare him a deception. This qualitative, investigative and bibliographic research aimed to identify certain symbolic patterns which pointed to the perpetuation of unconscious symbols in the mythic material, besides investigating the way these symbols were manifested in Norse culture and mythology specifically. According to analytical psychology, it was conceived that every artist may have his rationalism and conscientious intention surmounted when executing his work, mainly when dealing with mythological material. As a consequence, it would be possible that the writer revealed, in his work, symbolic aspects which would be fruits of an alignment of his collective subconscious with certain themes e archetypes. It was demonstrated that symbols and archetypes of the collective subconscious are presented and inscribed on mythologies, incarnating places, heroes, gods and beasts. As a result from this last fact, it was emphasized the importance for psychologists of studying mythology, taking into account that it is in mythology where peoples give life to symbols alive in their collective subconscious.

Is it possible for characters in fiction to be motivated by unique ideologies in the way that political movements are in real life? This essay considers the example of the Æsir (the dominant tribe of gods) in Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda. Analogies with later ideologies are offered as a way to highlight the idiosyncratic ideological brew which seems to govern the Æsir’s actions. The Æsir have the acquisitiveness, violence, and sexual neurosis of a colonial regime. They have the reactionary’s aptitude for cynical manipulation of history. They have the frailties of the modern capitalist. These comparisons are used to sketch out an ideology which is more than the sum of its comparanda: Æsirism

This article re-examines the much-debated question of the indebtedness of the medieval Icelandic scholar-poet-politician Snorri Sturluson to the Christian-Latin tradition. I offer an argument for a relationship between the construction of Snorri’s mythography in the Edda and two figurative traditions stemming from the Old Testament,  most notably codified in the 9th chapter of the Book of Ecclesiastes, and their subsequent reception in the medieval commentary tradition in Latin and Icelandic, the Old Norse liturgy, vernacular saints’ lives, and lives of the Icelandic bishops. My central claim is that two pervasive figures, the bird and the fish—prototypically represented as captured in Ecclesiastes 9:12 and elsewhere in the Christian literary tradition—merit consideration not as “sources” of certain myths of Loki but of Snorri’s representation of them. Previous scholarship, I suggest, has overlooked a Christian background to the Norse gods’ final fishing expedition, which leads to the binding of Loki and his captivity until Ragnarǫk, when Loki is caught in a net of his own invention: a widespread biblical topos concerning the devil and other “evil-doers.” Snorri’s treatment of the “The Matter of Loki” is hence relevant more broadly to long-standing debates concerning the intellectual debt of Snorri’s conception of Norse myth as “mythic history” to the formative influence of Christian eschatology.

This article is the second part in a series. It shows that the Old Norse term hrímþurs, often translated 'frost-ogre' or 'frost-giant' in English, was a poetic term as a variation on the archaic and obscure poetic term þurs (addressed in part I) that was employed for h-alliteration. After reviewing the limited poetic examples, the article shows that this term was strategically correlated with hrím ['rime, frost'] as a prime element of the world-creation in Snorri Sturluson's 13th century mythography, where hrímþurs is otherwise uniquely elevated to a distinct ethnonym. This construction of a mythic ethnic category is placed in
dialogue with other places where Snorri seems to have elevated or created a term and constructed a mythic ethnos in Edda. This discussion is put forward as a frame for considering whether Snorri also constructed the category of gods called ‘Vanir’, the controversial topic of the so-called Vanir Debate.

This book is an examination of some of the principal issues arising from the study of the kings’ sagas, the main narrative sources for Norwegian history before c. 1200. Providing an overview of the past two decades of scholarship, it discusses the vexed relationship between verse and prose and the reliability as historical sources of the verse alone or the combination of verse and prose; the possibility and extent of non-native influence on the composition of these texts; and the function of the past, in particular given that most of the historiography of Norway was produced in Iceland. This book aims to stimulate studies of medieval Scandinavian historiography with its critical perspective on the texts and the scholarship, while also providing a useful work of reference in order to make this area of research accessible to scholars in cognate fields.

The Prose Edda exists in a number of manuscripts – how are they related and why should we care? Argues for a particular stemma for the surviving pre-1600 Prose Edda manuscripts. Includes a general defence of the validity and usefulness of stemmatics.

Significantly, as one of the Nine Worlds of Norse cosmology, Vanaheimr receives only a few collective mentions in the Poetic Edda, the Prose Edda, and Heimskringla. Despite the low frequency of textual references, the possible importance of Vanaheimr should not be diminished. Enhanced knowledge about Vanaheimr could have a profound impact on how we read and understand the body of Old Norse texts, as well as our approach to Norse mythology. In cosmological terms it is the plane of the Vanir, a host of Norse gods aligned with fertility, wisdom, and prophecy. But where is Vanaheimr, and what does it look like in literary terms? How does Vanaheimr comport with Ásgarðr, the other plane of the Norse gods? In this presentation I will examine not only the noted text references, but any relevant clues to be found throughout the Old Icelandic texts and other contemporary Latin and Germanic sources. Also, I will deeply investigate related word etymologies in Old Norse, Proto-Germanic, and any other Indo-European languages which may illuminate the search, and I will relate Vanaheimr to possible parallel contexts in other world mythologies. In addition to literary research, I will investigate geographic data and the archaeological records for insights.

This paper constructs an overview of Snorri Sturluson’s impact, through Edda, on the cultural activity of mythology in vernacular poetries and narration. General evidence of impacts on eddic and skaldic poetries (§1) provides a frame for a series of illustrative examples, beginning with the relatively unequivocal cases of the rímur Lokrur (§2) and the late stanzas added to the eddic poem Baldrs draumar (§3). The kenning ‘mud of the eagle’ is examined in skaldic verse as an indication of Snorri’s reception in a contemporary context (§4), opening a three-part survey of cumulative evidence of influence on the eddic poem Lokasenna (§5–7). The possibility of influence as a model for the eddic poem Þrymskviða’s composition is suggested (§8), which would have analogues in saga prose (§9). Although details may be equivocated, Edda nevertheless emerges as a (sometimes contested) voice of authority in medieval Icelandic mythological discourses.

„Reykholt as a Centre of Power 3. Regional Power Centres – The Case of Borgarfjǫrðr“, Snorri Sturluson and Reykholt. The Author and Magnate, his Life, Works and Environment at Reykholt in Iceland, eds. Helgi Þorláksson & Guðrún Sveinbjarnardóttir, Kaupmannahöfn: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2018, 138-151.

Snorri Sturluson was a poet of exceptional skill. This is generally overlooked when considering Snorri's knowledge of poetry and its content. Edda will be taken to reflect his knowledge of and competence in the poetic system, and specific poetry and poems known or otherwise available in his immediate environment: it is approached as a concrete example of applied knowledge. Snorri's knowledge of oral traditions and their cultural activity is viewed through patterns of quotation as well as Snorri's own composition in order to develop an overview. The poetic system is addressed as a coherent and dynamic whole which is best approached as systems of registers, meters and prosodies with conventional constellations according to genre and application (Frog 2009:280-288). However, the conventional binary division of the poetic system into 'eddic' and 'skaldic' categories retains a practical (though not analytical) value for discussion.

By means of some veiled hints related to the figure of the Pardoner, Chaucer introduces his readers to a peculiar character whose ambiguous moral and sexual identity might be discovered in a far-flung Germanic past once prevailing in Anglo-Saxon England. The description given in the General Prologue recalls Old Norse Gylfaginning where Snorri Sturluson tells the story of Loki: a god who once turned into a mare. It is plausible to think that Chaucer might have drawn from a faded mythologema still known and accessible to his readers’ understanding. This Pardoner–Loki correlation stands as another testimony of the Pardoner’s homosexual nature.

This article examines an exchange of skaldic verses between a number of Icelandic chieftains, landholders and semi-professional poets, reported to have taken place in a period of political crisis in western Iceland in 1229. The surviving sequence, preserved in Sturla Þórðarson’s Íslendinga saga, constitutes an unparalleled example of extended verse-capping in medieval Icelandic narrative writing. The historical context of these verses and their narrative treatment in Íslendinga saga are considered in detail, and some new readings of the verse material and the political relationships they disclose are proposed. The verses are shown to illuminate the continuing value of skaldic performance as an instrument of social and political leverage in thirteenth-century Iceland, and the stimulatory function of competitive posturing in skaldic discourse. The analysis presented here suggests the need to revise some recent propositions concerning the supposed clerical and scholastic co-option of skaldic poetics in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Further stanzas composed in the period 1229–32 perpetuate the agonistic pattern developed in the initial sequence, and the narrative framing of these later compositions is shown to embody conspicuous ambivalence to the adversarial ethics underlying the continuing exchange.

French translation of 'Mittelerde: Tolkien und die germanische Mythologie' by Rudolf Simek, 2005, published in Passés Composés in 2019. As translators, we adapted the book to a French public and annotated with many references and notes.
The book focuses and the Matter of the North and of Germany and the reception in Tolkien's work.

This article considers Borges' interest in the thirteenth-century Icelandic writer Snorri Sturluson, in particular as regards their mutual interest in kennings (poetic periphrases). Borges' final work was a translation of part of Snorri's Prose Edda, and Borges' textual source and translation approach are elucidated.

The Uppsala University Library, Carolina Rediviva, houses an Icelandic manuscript written around the year 1300. This is the so-called Uppsala manuscript of Snorri Sturluson’s Edda, also known by its shelfmark, DG 11 4to. Brynjólfur Sveinsson, who would later become Bishop of Skálholt, brought the manuscript to Copenhagen in the 1630s and gave it to his friend Stephan Stephanius, headmaster of Sorø college. Upon Stephanius’s death in 1650, the manuscript was purchased by the Swedish count Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie, who donated it to Carolina Rediviva in 1669, along with many other priceless medieval manuscripts.
The traditional scholarship treats Snorri Sturluson’s Edda as a single work unto itself, and the brainchild of one brilliant author. Each section follows sequentially from the one before it like links on a chain: Prologus, Gylfaginning (‘The Deluding of Gylfi’), Skáldskaparmál (‘The Language of Poetry’), and Háttatal (‘Tally of Meters’). The order is more or less reversed after Elias Wessén’s 1940 edition: Háttatal, Skáldskaparmál, Gylfaginning, and Prologus. In his study “Reflections on the Creation of Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda” (2017), Heimir Pálsson rejects Wessén’s theory and argues instead for the treatment of at least Gylfaginning, Skáldskaparmál, and Háttatal as independent works.The present study of DG 11 4to has its basis in this idea, and the author posits it as an explanation for the two different main versions of Gylfaginning and Skáldskaparmál. For Gylfaginning, the main idea is that the author/editor gathered myths on the one hand, and descriptions of the geography, history and dramatis personae in the world of gods and giants on the other. It is assumed that the author/editor’s primary sources were poems, stories, and myths. Snorri most likely gathered this material during his years in Oddi, perhaps adding to it later in Borgarfjörður.
At the heart of Skáldskaparmál, however, are the traditional techniques and vocabulary that aspiring students of poetry would have learned by heart during the centuries of oral culture and memory; in other words,what Snorri would have learned as a boy in Oddi in preparation for his
role as a court poet. He now organizes this material, first by explaining
and illustrating with examples the method of kenning-building in all major
domains, beginning with the gods and gradually moving through the
universe. The second part of Skáldskaparmál is what we would today call
a thesaurus, a dictionary containing mostly semantically-organized substantives.
These are the heiti, or names used first and foremost in poetry.
Some of the tales of the lives of the gods that we find here are better
considered as seasoning than essential metrical nourishment. The original
Skáldskaparmál was later revised according to two very different pedagogies,
again resulting in two different versions of the text.
A crucial feature of Skáldskaparmál are the hundreds of half-strophes
used to demonstrate both kennings and heiti. Only around thirty of the
nearly one thousand strophes that Snorri quotes in Edda and Skáldskaparmál
appear in both works, which suggests that we are dealing with two
separate collections; one for historical studies and the other for poetics.
We can claim with reasonable certainty that Skáldskaparmál is the
oldestIcelandic textbook, and DG 11 4to most probably contains the oldest
preserved copy intended for use by the student.

The similarities are apparent on a variety of levels; some are visually striking, others are more a matter of motif or thematic content. In some cases the parallels are noticeable in terms of mood. Sometimes the similarities are encapsulated in shots of just a few seconds, other times in more extended sequences. Either way, the parallels involve various aspects of the culture and mythology of the saga era, and it is obvious that the filmmakers were influenced by the Snorri illustrations. In this article I shall examine the complex visual relationships between the drawings, texts and film, and their common origins in the world of the sagas. 2 The Lord of the Rings film epos is a trilogy consisting of The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Two Towers (2002) and The Return of the King (2003). The basis for the films were the books of the same titles by J.R.R. Tolkien, which were originally published in three volumes. The first two volumes appeared in 1954, the third in 1955. The film version is regarded as one of the foremost examples of recent years of the " fantasy " genre, the characteristics of which are supernatural events and magic. As in " fantasy " stories in general, the action of the books takes place in a fictional world , in this case that of Middle-earth. We

In my doctoral thesis,'Kvinnor och män i Gesta Danorum' ('Women and men in Gesta Danorum') 1980 the focus on the relationships between women and men opened up a new approach to the study of the literary techniques used by Saxo and Snorri, revealing their sophistication and their ambiguity.
This paper replaces both 'Saxo Grammaticus and Snorri Sturluson...' and 'A brief comparison between Saxo and Snorri...'
I apologize for a mistake onpage 3, line 15: Instead of 'Saxo', read Snorri!