Page:The Prose Edda, Brodeur (American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1916).djvu/22

xvi very little shock, in spite of the great difference in subject and treatment, which the author has attempted, rather skilfully, to modulate through a second dialogue. The questioner this time is one Ægir; and replies are made by the god Bragi, famed for eloquence and the gift of poetic expression. This intermediate dialogue, called Bragarædur or Bragi's Discourses, strikes the keynote of the entire book, and really reconciles the first section to the second and third, whose dissimilarity to Gylfaginning have led some scholars to believe that one or the other is not Snorri's work. The god relates several adventures of the Æsir of the same character as those recounted in Gylfaginning and concludes with a myth concerning the origin of the poetic art. From this point on, barely maintaining the fiction of the dialogue, Snorri makes his work a treatise on the conventional vocabulary and phraseology of skaldship, for the guidance of young skalds.

The third section of the Edda is the Háttatal, or Enmmeration of Metres, and combines three separate songs of praise: one on King Hákon, a second on Skúli Bárdsson, the King's father-in-law and most powerful vassal, and a third celebrating both. Each of the hundred and two stanzas of the work belongs to a distinct metric type or sub- type, and between stanzas Snorri has inserted definitions, occasionally longer notes, or comments.

We are now in a position to see the purpose and the artistic unity of the Prose Edda: the entire work is a textbook for apprentice poets. Gylfaginning, conceived in the true antiquarian spirit, supplies the mythological and legendary background which, in the Christian age that had superseded the vivid old heathen days, a young man might not know or might avoid. "Do not lose sight of these