Snorri Sturluson qua Fulcrum: Perspectives on the Cultural Activity of Myth, Mythological Poetry and Narrative in Medieval Iceland

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that Edda impacted the cultural activity of this poem in either the manuscript 

tradition or at some level of oral-written interface.  

 

The interpolated stanzas are compositionally so late that they must 

have been composed in a milieu were rímur poetry was already a vital 

contemporary tradition, and where drawing directly on manuscript texts in 

poetic composition was a popular practice. The lateness of the example 

makes Snorri’s influence relatively unequivocal: it presents evidence that 

Snorri’s account was employed as providing an authoritative or central form 

of traditional mythological narratives with a long and rich history. It also 

presents evidence that Snorri’s work could have impact on eddic poems 

known in the 13

th

 century. Consequently, this example raises the question of 

whether Snorri’s work may have already been having corresponding effects 

on specific eddic poems in the period when their manuscript activity seems 

to have been most vital – in the century when Edda’s impact on mythological 

reference in skaldic verse was most marked. 

 

4. The Theft of the Mead of Poetry 

 

The situation of skaldic verses on a chronology makes skaldic poetry a 

valuable point of departure, not only for considering the impact of Edda on 

the cultural activity of mythology generally, but also on the cultural activity 

of individual myths. Perhaps the most central mythological referent for 

skaldic poets was the so-called ‘mead of poetry’ and its origins. Snorri 

presents a synthetic summary of the mythological cycle associated with this 

mead and its origins in Skáldskaparmál (ch. 

G

57–

G

58), probably exercising his 

creative genius.

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 The mead of poetry was a symbolic actualization of poetry 

as both product and art, correlated with mythic inspiration (as distinct from 

                                                                                                                                          

belonging to categories of either ‘living’ or ‘dead’ and a genre transgression in the unique attribution of 

anthropomorphic qualities and decision-making ability to these unworked natural materials. See further 

Frog 2010, 243–250. 

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 See e.g. E. Mogk, Novellistische Darstellung mythologischer Stoffe: Snorri und seiner Schule, 

Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia: Helsinki 1923, at 21–33; Roberta Frank, ‘Snorri and the Mead of Poetry’, in 

U. Dronke et al. (eds), Speculum Norroenum: Studies in Memory of Gabriel Turville-Petre, Odense 

University: Odense 1981, 155–170. The episode of the theft appears historically stratified with roots in an 

ancient tradition of the theft of the water of life; in Old Norse, it has taken a unique form associated with 

the metaphor of liquid knowledge (Renate Doht, Der Rauschtrank im germanischen Mythos,  Karl  M.  

Halosar: Wien 1974; Clive Tolley, Shamanism in Norse Myth and Magic, 2 vols., Academia Scientiarum 

Fennica: Helsinki 2009, at 2.434–450). Snorri’s narrative is so complex that choice in the selection and 

organization of material is implicit: exercising his creative genius is a question of degree rather than 

simply a question of whether he were a creative ‘author’ or an unthinking quill of das Volk. 

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unmediated divine inspiration).

32

 This conceptualization in terms of a 

magical and intoxicating liquid or drink was central to the semiotics of 

versification, represented in terms of orally consumed and expelled liquid. 

Judy Quinn shows this conceptual metaphor to be a secondary reflex of the 

fundamental metaphor of ‘liquid knowledge’ in which it participates.

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The  myth  culminates  in  Óðinn’s  acquisition  of  the  mead  for  use  by  

gods and poets: Óðinn drinks it and flees in the form of an eagle, pursued by 

the giant Suttungr. According to Snorri, “en honum var þá svá nær komit, at 

Suttungr myndi ná honum, at hann sendi aptr suman mj ðinn, ok var þess 

ekki gætt.”

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 In three of the four main manuscripts of Edda, this is referred to 

as “skáldfífla hlut” (‘share of poetasters’, lit. ‘poet-fools’), whereas Heimir 

Pálsson emphasizes that the Codex Upsaliensis (U) reads “ok hafa þat 

skáldfífl ok heitir arnar leir. En Suttunga mj ðr þeir er yrkja kunna.” 

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 Óðinn 

was the cultural model of a poet and god of poetry, as well as provider of 

that knowledge. Within the semiotics of poetry, mead coming from the 

mouth of Óðinn is equivalent to uttering verse (culturally appropriate to the 

situation and potentially magical).

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  In  this  sense,  the  motif  of  Óðinn  

releasing some mead behind him during his escape by flight would be 

consistent with the tradition and its semiotics, potentially offering an 

ætiology of the first verse ever uttered. Although a triumphal or provocative 

verse would be conventional in this circumstance, Snorri suggests that this 

spillage is a consequence of Óðinn’s fear by noting that it was ignored 

without reference to which end it came from. According to Snorri, the hapax 

arnar leir  (‘mud  of  the  eagle’)  is  clearly  identified  as  a  kenning  for  this  

                                                

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 A basic example can be taken from Einarr skálaglamm’s Vellekla, st. 3: “þýtr Óðrøris alda / [...] hafs 

við fles galdra”,– ‘a wave of Óðrørir’s sea roars against the flat sea-stone of incantations’; Óðrørir = 

‘mead of poetry’ or the vessel containing it (‘sea of a cup/vessel’ = ‘poetry’: see §7); ‘flat sea-stone of 

incantations’ = (probably) ‘tongue’ or (possibly) ‘teeth’ (cf. gómsker, ‘gum-skerries’ = ‘teeth’) – the roar 

of a wave of the mead of poetry crashing over a stone describes the elocution of poetry as a liquid. See 

Doht 1974, esp. 205–226; Carol Clover, ‘Skaldic Sensibility’, Arkiv för Nordisk Filologi 93 (1978), 63–

81, at 68–79; on the distinction from divine inspiration, see also Clunies Ross 2005, 83–84; cf. also 

Rudolf Meissner, Die Kenningar der Skalden: Ein Beitrag zur skaldischen Poetik. Kurt Schroeder: Bonn 

1921, at 427–430. 

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 Judy Quinn, ‘Liquid Knowledge: Traditional Conceptualisations of Learning in Eddic Poetry’, in S. 

Rankovi  et al. (eds), Along the Oral–Written Continuum, Brepols: Turnhout 2010, 183–226. 

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 Skáldskaparmál, ch. 

G

58; ‘yet for him, it got so close to Suttungr catching him, that he sent some of the 

mead behind him, and this was not paid attention to.’ 

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 ‘[A]nd the poetasters have that, and it is called mud of the eagle. And Suttungr’s mead, those who 

know how to compose poetry’ See Heimir Pálsson, ‘Fyrstu leirskáldin’, Són 8 (2010), 25–37, at 30–31, 

35; see also Heimir Pálsson, ‘Tertium vero datur: A Study of the Text of DG 11 4

to

’, preprint manuscript 

2010, 

http://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?searchId=1&pid=diva2:322558

, at 21–24. 

36

 Identifying mead regurgitated from the mouth of eagle-Óðinn (as into vats from which it is served 

among gods) with the knowledge of mortal poets is also symbolically consistent with birds feeding their 

young (cf. Mitchell 2001, 173–174).  

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