{
  "id": "prose-edda",
  "type": "entity",
  "name": "Prose Edda",
  "summary": "The Icelandic textbook of poetics attributed to Snorri Sturluson (c. 1220), in four parts — Prologue, Gylfaginning, Skaldskaparmal, Hattatal — and the fullest single source for Norse myth. This corpus could not read a translation of it in the authoring environment, so this object rests on a derived summary and is tiered accordingly; claims elsewhere that cite \"the Prose Edda\" mean this tradition, not a passage read.",
  "locale": "en",
  "tags": [
    "norse",
    "texts",
    "primary-sources",
    "prose"
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "rel": "contrasted_with",
      "target": "poetic-edda"
    },
    {
      "rel": "discussed_in",
      "target": "primary-sources-of-norse-mythology"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "bragi"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "idunn"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "loki"
    }
  ],
  "questions": [
    "What is the Prose Edda?",
    "Who wrote the Prose Edda?",
    "What are the parts of the Prose Edda?",
    "What is Gylfaginning?",
    "What is the difference between the Prose Edda and the Poetic Edda?",
    "Why is the Prose Edda not cited directly in this corpus?"
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c1",
      "text": "The Prose Edda (Younger Edda, Snorra Edda) is an Old Norse work written in Iceland in the early 13th century, generally held to have been written or compiled by Snorri Sturluson around 1220; it draws on versions of the poems that survive in the Poetic Edda.",
      "sources": [
        "wikipedia-prose-edda"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c2",
      "text": "It has four sections — a Prologue that makes the gods Trojan warriors who came north; Gylfaginning, a question-and-answer account of the creation and destruction of the world; Skaldskaparmal, a dialogue of Ægir and Bragi on myth and kennings; and Hattatal, a catalogue of verse forms.",
      "sources": [
        "wikipedia-prose-edda"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c3",
      "text": "Seven manuscripts survive, none complete, dating from c. 1300 to the 1600s; the four main ones are the Codex Regius, Codex Wormianus, Codex Trajectinus and Codex Upsaliensis, and the Upsaliensis attribution naming Snorri is the basis of his authorship.",
      "sources": [
        "wikipedia-prose-edda"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c4",
      "text": "Its purpose was a poet's handbook — to help Icelandic readers understand alliterative verse and kennings — and it was known simply as \"Edda\" until the rediscovery of the Codex Regius poems, after which the older poems were called the Elder or Poetic Edda.",
      "sources": [
        "wikipedia-prose-edda"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c5",
      "text": "English translations include Brodeur (1916), Young (1954), Faulkes (1987) and Byock (2006). No translation was readable in the environment where this corpus was authored; the Poetic Edda in Bellows's version is the only Norse primary text the claims here cite.",
      "sources": [
        "wikipedia-prose-edda"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    }
  ],
  "takeaways": [
    "Snorri's book is the source of most \"Norse mythology\" as retold today — Loki's binding, Idunn's apples, Sleipnir's eight legs, Hel's face.",
    "It is a manual for poets, written by a Christian two centuries after the conversion; the Poetic Edda's poems are the older material it quotes.",
    "This corpus flags every Prose Edda element as such and does not cite passages of it, because none were read."
  ],
  "faqs": [
    {
      "q": "Who wrote the Prose Edda?",
      "claim": "c1"
    },
    {
      "q": "What are the parts of the Prose Edda?",
      "claim": "c2"
    },
    {
      "q": "What is Gylfaginning?",
      "claim": "c2"
    },
    {
      "q": "Why is the Prose Edda not cited directly in this corpus?",
      "claim": "c5"
    }
  ],
  "evidence_tier": "derived",
  "evidence": {
    "level": "theoretical",
    "source_types": [
      "paper"
    ]
  },
  "moat_flag": false,
  "winning_edge": "Honest about provenance: says what the Prose Edda is and that this corpus did not read it, so an agent knows which Norse claims rest on the poems and which on Snorri's tradition.",
  "confidence": 0.85,
  "last_verified": "2026-09-03",
  "media": [],
  "x": {
    "myth": {
      "pantheon": "norse",
      "kind": "text",
      "wikidata": "Q205882"
    }
  },
  "canonical_url": "https://mythosdata.dev/k/prose-edda",
  "api_url": "https://mythosdata.dev/api/k/prose-edda.json",
  "jsonld": {
    "@context": "https://schema.org",
    "name": "Prose Edda",
    "description": "The Icelandic textbook of poetics attributed to Snorri Sturluson (c. 1220), in four parts — Prologue, Gylfaginning, Skaldskaparmal, Hattatal — and the fullest single source for Norse myth. This corpus could not read a translation of it in the authoring environment, so this object rests on a derived summary and is tiered accordingly; claims elsewhere that cite \"the Prose Edda\" mean this tradition, not a passage read.",
    "url": "https://mythosdata.dev/k/prose-edda",
    "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html",
    "dateModified": "2026-09-03",
    "citation": [
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Wikipedia — Prose Edda",
        "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prose_Edda"
      }
    ],
    "@type": "Article",
    "headline": "Prose Edda"
  }
}