only. Reports from foreign lands also found a most hearty welcome, and the Icelanders had abundant opportunity of satisfying their thirst for knowledge in this direction. As vikings, as merchants, as courtiers and especially as skalds acompanying kings and other distinguished persons, and also as varagians in Constantinople, many of them found splendid opportunities of visiting foreign countries. They took active part in many things, and gained information in regard to others of which we would now know little or nothing, had not the tales which they told on their return to Iceland to their eagerly listening countrymen been faithfully remembered and later committed to writing.
Such were then the conditions and circumstances which produced that remarkable development of the historical taste with which the people were endowed, and made Iceland the home of the saga.
We are now prepared to consider this remarkable literature itself, and shall give our first attention to the old poetry, the origin of which must doubtless be sought far back in the prehistoric times, and which therefore we must especially regard as a common inheritance of the North.
The poems to which we here refer are preserved in the collection well known by the name of the Elder Edda[1] or Sæmund's Edda (Edda Sæmundar hins froða). The old parchment (Codex Regius) of the Elder Edda appears to have been written about the year 1300, and came to Denmark in the middle of the seventeenth century as a present from the Icelandic bishop Brynjulf Sveinsson to King Frederick the Third. At that time, and for a long time afterward, it was be-
- ↑ Edda means great-grandmother—the word occurs in this sense in the old poem Rigsmál and elsewhere—and this name of the old collection of poems from the past was suggested by their venerable age. Meanwhile the word has another signification, meaning also that which is excellent or remarkably good. Jacob Grimm derives Edda from the root iz, azd, uzd (Mœsogothic izdan, azd, plur. uzdun) from which we have Mœsogothic azd, genus nobile, Old High German art (Latin ars, art-is), Anglo-Saxon órd, Icelandic oddr, Danish odd, meaning point. According to this derivation Edda is the feminine form of the Icelanic oddr, signifying that which is at the point (at the highest point) and is analogous to the poetic expression in Icelandic aldar oddr, princeps virorum.
