by the use of several centuries. It was early
used as a general term for the rules and materials for versemaking,
and applied in this sense to Snorri's work. When the poems on which
his paraphrase is founded were discovered, Icelandic scholars by a
misunderstanding applied the name to them also; and as they attributed
the collection quite arbitrarily to the historian Saemund (1056-1133),
it was long known as Saemundar Edda, a name now generally discarded in
favour of the less misleading titles of Elder or Poetic Edda. From its
application to this collection, the word derives a more extended use,
(1) as a general term for Norse mythology; (2) as a convenient name
to distinguish the simpler style of these anonymous narrative poems
from the elaborate formality of the Skalds.

The poems of the Edda are certainly older than the MS., although
the old opinion as to their high antiquity is untenable. The majority
probably date from the tenth century in their present form; this dating
does not necessitate the ascription of the shape in which the legends
are presented, still less of their substance, to that period. With
regard to the place of their composition opinions vary widely,
Norway, the British Isles and Greenland having all found champions;
but the evidence is rather questionable, and I incline to leave
them to the country which has preserved them. They are possibly of
popular origin; this, together with their epic or narrative character,
would account for the striking absence from them of some of the chief
characteristics of Skaldic poetry: the obscuring of the sense by the
elaborate interlacing of sentences and the extensive use of kennings
or mythological synonyms, and the complication of the metre by such
expedients as the conjunction of end-rhyme with alliteration. Eddie
verse is governed solely by the latter, and the strophic arrangement
is simple, only two forms occurring: (1) couplets of alliterative
short lines; (2) six-line strophes, consisting of a couplet followed
by a single short line, the whole repeated.

Roughly speaking, the first two-fifths of the MS. is mythological,
the rest heroic. I propose to observe this distinction, and to
deal in this study with the stories of the Gods. In this connexion,
Snorri's Edda and the mythical Ynglinga Saga may also be considered,
but as both were compiled a couple of centuries or more after the
introduction of Christianity into Iceland, it is uncertain how much in
the