EDDA. – This is the title of the two most famous monuments of ancient Nordic literature, whose most probable meaning is "art of poetry" or "grandmother." One of them, in verse, is older but discovered later, between 1639 and 1643; due to the affinity of its content, it took its name from the other, which is more recent but already known since 1628, and which rightfully bears the title of *Edda*.
The first, called the *Poetic Edda* or *Old Edda*, is an anonymous collection, neither homogeneous nor organic, of about thirty mythical and heroic songs, mostly composed in Iceland between the 13th and 14th centuries. The most important of these is the *Völuspa* or "Prophecy of the Seeress," which recounts the origin of the world and of mankind, as well as the end of all things in the so-called "twilight of the gods." It is, in a certain sense, a kind of *Gesetz* of the "poetic laws" of Germanic paganism.
Notable among the heroic songs, both for their artistic merit and their preservation of the authentic form of the Nibelung saga, are several others.
The second, called the *Prose Edda* or *Younger Edda*, was composed by the Icelander Snorri Sturluson around 1230. It consists of three parts, of which it suffices here to mention the *Gylfaginning* or "Delusion of Gylfi," which contains an euhemeristic representation of the cosmology of Nordic mythology, with frequent references to the songs of the *Old Edda*.
As for the authenticity and purity of the myths transmitted by the latter, once universally accepted when those poems were believed to date back to a very remote period, it is now agreed that in many places there are numerous infusions of foreign elements—classical, Celtic, and especially Christian—that reached the North during the Viking Age. These elements, easily isolable, do not, however, 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 adorns the original representations. These are the expressions of a world of passions and implacable destinies, gloomy and dark, like all that is without transcendence and therefore without joy.