EDDA. - It is the title of the two most famous monuments of ancient Nordic literature, whose most probable meaning is that of "poetic art" or of "fable", of which one, in verse, older but discovered later, between 1639 and 1643, received, due to the affinity of content, its name from the other, more recent but already known since 1628, which rightly bears the title of E.
The first, called Poetic E. or Elder E., is an anonymous collection, neither homogeneous nor organic, of about thirty mythical and heroic songs, composed for the most part in Iceland between the 9th and 13th centuries, the most important of which is the Voluspa or prophecy of the seeress, which narrates the origin of the world and of men and the end of all things in the so-called "twilight of the gods", and is therefore, in a certain sense, a kind of Genesis and Apocalypse of Germanic paganism.
Notable among the heroic songs, also for their artistic merit, are those that preserve for us the authentic form of the Nibelung saga.
The second, called Prose E. or Snorra E. because it was composed by the Icelander Snorri Sturluson around 1230, consists of three parts, of which it suffices here to cite the Gylfaginning or "delusion of Gylfi", which contains an euhemeristic representation of Nordic cosmology and mythology, with frequent references to the songs of the Elder E.
As for the authenticity and purity of the myths handed down by the latter, once universally admitted when those poems were believed to be of very remote date, there is now agreement in recognizing in several places not a few infiltrations of foreign elements, classical, Celtic and especially Christian, which reached the north at the time of the Viking raids. These elements, easily isolable, do not on the other hand diminish the incomparable value of the collection as a source of ancient Nordic beliefs and traditions, nor the worth of the particular poetry, often lofty and solemn, that clothes the whole body of the original representations; which are those of a world of implacable passions and destinies, gloomy and dark, like everything that is without transcendence and therefore without joy.
Bibliography3 works
Bruno Vignola