The Elder Edda is not a continuous narrative, but a collection of thirty-nine poems of varying lengths and genres, including short narratives or lays, traditional wisdom including what amounts to a manual of good behavior, and several dialogues in which the question and answers provide a glossary of poetic terms and myth. They form a history of the world from creation to apocalypse, and like the Shakespearean canon, high tragedy exists side by side with bumptious comedy. Thirty-four are preserved in the Konungsbók, or Codex Regius (King's book), copied in Iceland about A.D. 1270, now in the Royal Library in Copenhagen. The language of the poems as preserved in that manuscript suggests that they were composed between 800 and 1100 A.D. but were first written down between 1150 and 1250 A.D. The poems are the work of many poets and some draw on historical traditions reaching...