Page:The Prose Edda, Brodeur (American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1916).djvu/20

xiv the written prose sources he drew upon he only mentions Ari the Learned's 'book,' … probably, as it seems to us, because in the statements of that work he had as implicit a faith as in the other sources he mentions, and found reason to alter nothing therein, while the sources he does not mention he silently criticises throughout, rejecting or altering them according as his critical faculty dictated.

"Before Snorri's time there existed only … separate, disjointed biographical monographs on Norwegian kings, written on the model of the family sagas of Iceland. Snorri's was a more ambitious task. Discerning that the course of life is determined by cause and effect, and that in the lives of kings widely ramified interests, national and dynastic, come into play, he conceived a new idea of saga- writing: the seed of cause sown in the preceding must yield its crop of effect in the succeeding reign. This the writer of lives of kings must bear in mind. And so Snorri addresses himself to writing the first pragmatic history ever-penned in any Teutonic vernacular—the Heimskringla."

The evidence for Snorri's authorship of Heimskringla is not conclusive; but Vigfússon's demonstration is accepted by most scholars. We may safely assume, apart from the general tendency of the external evidence, that one and the same author must have written the histories and the Prose Edda. A comparison of the names of skalds and skaldic poems mentioned in both works will show that the author of each had a wide acquaintance with the conventional poetic literature of Scandinavia, particularly of Iceland, and that, if we suppose two distinct authors, both men had almost precisely the same poetic equipment. Each