Other drivers of change would have been the variations of beliefs from one region to another, or through time. That is not to say that the main themes weren’t fairly stable, but there wasn’t one true original version. They would develop over time, and change slightly both over time and across distances and countries. In the Viking Age, stories often came in the form of an entertainer performing them as a song or poem. That disregards the fact that these poems probably lived long before they were ever written down, or performed by poets. However, when we are trying to understand the age of any given poem, it is basically based on the words and grammar used. This was shortly before the separate poems came to be a collection. The latest poems were likely written in the 11th or 12th centuries. Some of the older poems are believed to have been written in the 9th or 10th century, or possibly even earlier. They were written by different poets, possibly hundreds of years apart as well as from different parts of Scandinavia and Iceland. The different poems making up the collection we often perceive as a whole were originally separate poems. Maybe the most important thing to understand about the Poetic Edda is that it was never one book.

Furthermore, all the wizards seem to have some characteristics who link them to Norse gods: Gandalf from Odin, Saruman from Loki, Radagast from the God Frey.Gilwellian, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons In one of his letter to his son Christopher, Tolkien called Gandalf “Odinic wanderer”, one of the deities of the Norse mythology.

Moreover, the typical dwarf characteristics such as short stature with long beards, love for treasure, skill as smiths, and bad temper comes from the Eddas. In the Poetic Edda we found sixteen dwarves names that are also present in The Hobbit and from the Prose Edda we receive two additional names. Both sources were relevant to Tolkien: here can be found the earliest accounts of elves and dwarves. It contains mythological information of the period before the conversion to Christianity. Then there is the Poetic (or Elder) Edda, a source used by Snorri in the creation of his Edda, compiled around the 1270s by an anonymous writer. The Prose Edda, written by Snorri Sturluson (1179-1241), is one of the main sources of Norse mythology in Icelandic literature.

Prose edda norse mythology