Snorri Sturluson

Snorri Sturluson was born around 1179 into the Sturlungar, one of the most powerful families of Commonwealth era Iceland, and was fostered as a child at Oddi, a center of learning connected to the family that had earlier produced the historian Ari Thorgilsson. He grew into one of the wealthiest and most politically prominent men in Iceland, holding land and chieftaincies across the country and serving two separate terms as Lawspeaker of the Althing, the office responsible for reciting and overseeing Iceland's laws, first from 1215 to 1218 and again from 1222 to 1231.

He traveled to Norway in 1218 to 1220 and became closely entangled in Norwegian court politics, accepting the rank of a royal retainer under King Hakon Hakonarson and Earl Skuli Bardarson, a relationship that shaped and ultimately doomed the last two decades of his life. Iceland's internal politics in this period, remembered as the Age of the Sturlungs, were marked by escalating feuding among great families, and Snorri's own son in law Gizur Thorvaldsson led an armed party that killed him at his estate at Reykholt on 23 September 1241, reportedly acting on the Norwegian king's order after Snorri defied a royal summons.

Snorri is traditionally credited as the compiler, around the 1220s, of the work now called the Prose Edda, a handbook written to teach the traditional forms and mythological allusions of skaldic poetry to a Christian Icelandic audience two centuries removed from the conversion. Its sections, including Gylfaginning, a sustained narrative retelling of the major Norse myths, preserve by far the fullest connected account of the Norse deities and cosmology to survive from the medieval period, drawing on older poetic sources, some of which also survive independently in the separate collection known as the Poetic Edda.

He is also credited with Heimskringla, a history of the kings of Norway from legendary origins down to his own near contemporary period, written in the saga style and valued both as literature and, cautiously, as a historical source. Snorri's authorship of both works rests on medieval attribution and internal and manuscript evidence rather than a signed text, and scholars continue to debate the precise extent of his personal composition versus compilation of earlier material, but the attribution to him is the strong scholarly consensus and the one the manuscript tradition itself preserves.