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

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evidence that Snorri drew on this narrative as a model and referent precisely 

for its relationship to visual deceptions (i.e. in the broader narrative contexts 

reflected in the prose) rather than insults of the senna. It draws attention to 

the  hapax  lýsigull, which is only found in these two sources. Margaret 

Clunies Ross shows that this term and motif most probably derive from the 

learned Latin lapidary tradition, presumably adapted by Snorri specifically 

to explain an obscure but central kenning, whereas it is irrelevant to both Frá 

Ægi and Lokasenna.

49

 These features support the probability that Frá Ægi has 

been influenced by or adapted from Snorri’s summary.  

 

Frá Loka describes the binding of Loki in a manner corresponding to 

Snorri’s description in Gylfaginning, ch. 50, without a clear transition or 

relation to the preceding text. This may simply be an appendix of unrelated 

information about Loki much as Frá dauða Sinfj lta (‘Of the Death of 

Sinfj lti’) appears between poems in the heroic section of the Codex Regius 

collection. It exhibits a degree of verbal correspondence indicative of textual 

dependence in what has been generally considered a summary of Snorri 

description of this event in Edda.

50

 The relationships between Frá Ægi and 

Frá Loka and corresponding passages of Edda present a probable scenario 

that Snorri was adapting his knowledge of these traditions and Edda 

impacted the documentation or manuscript transmission of this poem 

within decades of being written.

51

 This is consistent with Lindblad’s 

argument that the prose texts were added to an earlier transcribed poetic 

text in ca. 1250.

52

 Even if Lindblad’s specific dating is questioned, it is based 

on evidence that the prose texts were not originally orthographically 

consistent with the poem and these were brought together in the process of 

manuscript transmission: even if the poetic text of Lokasenna is proposed to 

have been in written circulation by 1220, it remains more probable that these 

prose sections were added in response to Snorri’s Edda rather than in 

anticipation of it. If Edda impacted the prose associated with early recordings 

of eddic poems, this presents the possibility that those impacts may have 

extended to the poetic text, even if this was only in the process of copying 

                                                

49

 Margaret Clunies Ross, Skáldskaparmál: Snorri Sturluson’s ars poetica and Medieval Theories of 

Language, Odense University Press: Odense 1987, at 139–150. 

50

 Wessén 1945; Lindblad 1954, 227–228; Gunnell 1995, 227–228; Frog 2010, 42–43. 

51

 The scribe does not seem to have been a slave to Snorri’s version (Frog 2010, 42–43, 324–325), yet 

Heimir Pálsson (2010, 27–30) opens the possibility that the brief and paraphrased account of the binding 

of the wolf Fenrir attached to copies of Skáldskaparmál is representative of an unpreserved redaction of 

the Gylfaginning text. This presents at least the possibility that Frá Loka could reflect part of the same or 

a similar redaction. 

52

 Lindblad 1954, esp. 286.  

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earlier manuscripts, as was the case in the example of Baldrs draumar above, 

or perhaps in the initial documentation of orally derived verses. 

 

6. Edda, Lokasenna and the Lexicon of Myth 

 

The poetic text of Lokasenna has the character of a parody of a wisdom poem, 

and its composition is marked by a striking number of words otherwise only 

known from prose.

53

 The senna appears centrally concerned with humorous 

entertainment over any specific concern for referring to conventionally 

understood or recognizable myths. Some verse material seems not to have 

been understood while other verses were very possibly unfounded 

fabrications.

54

 As Rudolf Simek has put it, “hardly any of the accusations in 

Lokasenna can be verified through other sources, and some [...] seem 

intended as mere slanderous jibes.”

55

 Caution is required when using 

Lokasenna as a source for mythology, and correspondences between 

Lokasenna and Edda not attested elsewhere warrant scrutiny.  

 

The vernacular apocalypse was referred to in verse with the 

alliterating collocation and kenning ragna r k (‘(final) fates of the gods’).

56

 

Snorri consistently refers to this event with the metaphorical expression 

ragna røk(k)r (‘twilight of the gods’).

57

 Ragna r k is treated by scholarship as 

the common noun for the vernacular apocalypse of Old Norse mythology, 

but the genitive modifier was flexible, allowing different patterns of 

alliteration such as “aldar r k” (‘(final) fates of the age’) (Vm 39.4–5).

58

 Snorri 

deploys  ragna røk(k)r systematically in spite of a clear familiarity with a 

broad range of poems and their conventions, and he paraphrases rather than 

quotes verses in which ragna r k or its equivalent occur. The use of røk(k)r as 

a base-word in this construction is otherwise only found in Lokasenna, st. 39, 

                                                

53

 von See et al., Kommentar, 2.379–380, 381. 

54

 Barbro Söderberg, ‘Till tolkningen av några dunkla passager i Lokasenna’, Scripta Islandica 35 (1984), 

43–86; John McKinnell, ‘Motivation in Lokasenna’, Saga-Book 22 (1986–1989), 234–262. 

55

 Rudolf Simek, ‘Mythological Poetry in Medieval Iceland and France in the 12

th

 Century’, in L. P. 

upecki & J. Morawiec (eds), Between Paganism, 76–84, at 78; cf. von See et al., Kommentar, 2.369.  

56

 Cf. von See et al., Kommentar, 2.465; the DONP  lists  no  examples  of  ragna  r k/røk(k)r in prose 

outside of Edda; on verse material, see LP, s.v. ‘røkr’. 

57

 Haraldur Bernharðsson has recently reviewed the etymological relationship of these terms in ‘Old 

Icelandic ragnarök and ragnarökkr’, in A. J. Nussbaum (ed), Verba Docenti: Studies in Historical and 

Indo-European Linguistics, Beech Stave Press: Ann Arbor, MI 2007, 25–38. 

58

  Cf.  tíva  r k [‘fates of the gods’], þjóða r k [‘fates of peoples’]; Hugo Gering, Vollständiges 

Wörterbuch zu den Liedern der Edda, Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses: Halle 1903, at 837–838; on 

synonymic variation for accomplishing metrical alliteration, cf. Frog & Jonathan Roper, ‘Verses versus 

the ‘Vanir’: Response to Simek’s “Vanir Obituary”’, RMN Newsletter 2 (2011), 29–37, at 29–31. 

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