EDDA. — This is the title of the two most famous monuments of ancient Nordic literature, whose most probable meaning is “poetic art” or “grandmother.” One of them, in verse, is the older but was discovered later, between 1639 and 1643; because of the affinity of its content, it took its name from the other, more recent work, already known as early as 1628, which rightly bears the title of E.
The first, called the poetic E. or the ancient E., is an anonymous, non-homogeneous and non-organic collection of about thirty mythological and heroic songs, composed for the most part in Iceland between the ninth and thirteenth centuries. The most important of these is the Voluspa, or prophecy of the seeress, which recounts the origin of the world and of human beings and the end of all things in the so-called “twilight of the gods”; it is therefore, in a certain sense, a kind of Genesis or Apocalypse of Germanic paganism.
Among the heroic songs, those that preserve for us the authentic form of the Nibelung saga are also noteworthy for their artistic merit.
The second, called the prose E., or Snorra E., because it was composed by the Icelander Snorri Sturluson around 1230, consists of three parts. Here it is enough to mention the Gylfeghning, or “Gylfi’s deception,” which contains a euhemeristic representation of Nordic cosmology and mythology, with frequent references to the songs of the ancient E.
As regards the authenticity and purity of the myths transmitted by the latter—already universally accepted when those poems were believed to date from the remotest antiquity—there is now general agreement that, in many passages, they contain no small number of infiltrations of foreign elements, classical, Celtic, and especially Christian, which reached the North at the time of the Viking raids. These elements, which can easily be isolated, do not, on the other hand, diminish the incomparable value of the collection as a source for ancient Nordic beliefs and traditions, nor the merit of the distinctive poetry, often lofty and solemn, in which the whole complex of the original representations is clothed: those of a world of passions and implacable destinies, dark and gloomy, like everything that lacks transcendence and therefore joy.
BIBLIOTHE: Original text: G. Neckel, E., vers. red., Heidelberg 1936 (with glossary); F. Gemmer, E., 2 vols., Jena 1931–32; a good Italian translation of selected passages: O. Gogola, Conti dell'E., Turin 1939. Studies: a bibliography of E. was compiled by H. Hermannsson, Ithaca (New York) 1920. Cf. also: G. Manacorda, L'E. occoro del pessimismo, in La Selva e il Tempio, Florence 1933, pp. 9–27. Bruno Vignola