[ON.; usually identified with Edda the name of the great-grandmother in the ON. poem ‘Rigsþul’ (see Vigf. and Powell, Corpus Poet. Bor., II. 514); others consider it to be f. óðr poetry.] The name given to two distinct Icelandic books:
a. By Icelandic poets of 15th c. applied to a miscellaneous handbook to Icel. poetry, containing prosodic and grammatical treatises, with quotations and prose paraphrases of myths from old poems. This work (partly written by the Icelandic historian Snorre Sturluson c. 1230) has since 1642 been commonly called Snorre’s Edda, or the Younger or Prose Edda.
b. A collection (made c. 1200) of ancient ON. poems on mythical and traditional subjects. The names ‘Elder or Poetic Edda,’ ‘Edda of Sæmund,’ were applied to this work by Biorn of Skardsá, who erroneously ascribed its compilation to the Icelandic historian Sæmund (d. 1133).
1771. J. Macpherson, Introd. Hist. Grt. Brit. & Irel., 189. Neither does the Islandic Edda, now in the hands of the learned, supply that defect.
1840. Carlyle, Heroes (1858), 196. Edda, a word of uncertain etymology, is thought to signify Ancestress.
1866. Reader, 3 March, 221/2. The Elder (or Poetic) Edda is a volume of very old mythological and heroic lays.
1875. Whitney, Life Lang., x. 181. The Edda is the purest and most abundant source of knowledge for primitive Germanic conditions.
Hence Eddaic, Eddic a., of or pertaining to the Eddas; resembling the contents of the Eddas.
1868. G. Stephens, Runic Mon., I. Introd. p. xli. No Eddic or other manuscripts in Scandinavia are older than about the 13th century.
1884. Athenæum, 30 Aug., 267/1. African and Australian myths almost as Eddaic … may be quoted.
1883. Vigf. & Powell, Corp. Poet. Bor., I. p. ci. There are not one but many mythologies in the Eddic poems.
