Anonymous (Old Norse)

The mythological and heroic lays of the Old Norse tradition are anonymous. They were composed and handed down orally over several centuries, some of them perhaps as early as the 9th century, and were written down only in Iceland in the 13th. Their chief witness is the Codex Regius (GKS 2365 4to), an Icelandic manuscript copied around 1270 and rediscovered in the 17th century, which gathers most of the poems now known as the Poetic Edda; a few further lays survive in other manuscripts and in prose sagas.

The lays fall into two groups: poems of the gods, such as the Voluspo, the Hovamol and the Lokasenna, and poems of the heroes, such as the Volund, Helgi and Sigurth cycles and the lays of Guthrun and Atli. They are composed in short alliterative lines, often in speeches and dialogue, with brief prose links (kept in this archive) that supply the story between the verses. The collection is the principal source for Norse mythology and for the legends that later fed the Volsunga saga and the Nibelungenlied.