as in these earliest fragments of Icelandic song. A very curious poem, in some MSS. attributed directly to Saemund, is the Song of the Sun, _Sólarlióð_, which forms a kind of appendix to the poetic _Edda_. In this the spirit of a dead father addresses his living son, and exhorts him, with maxims that resemble those of _Hávamál_, to righteousness of life. The tone of the poem is strangely confused between Christianity and Paganism, and it has been assumed to be the composition of a writer in the act of transition between the old creed and the new. It may, however, not impossibly, be altogether spurious as a poem of great antiquity, and may merely be the production of some Icelandic monk, anxious to imitate the Eddaic form and spirit. Finally _Forspjallsljóð_, or the Preamble, formerly known as the Song of Odin's Raven, is an extremely obscure fragment, of which little is understood, although infinite scholarship has been expended on it. With this the poetic _Edda_ closes. The principal MS. of this _Edda_ is the Codex Regius in the royal library at Copenhagen, written continuously, without regard to prose or verse, on 45 vellum leaves. This is that found by Bishop Brynjulf. Another valuable fragment exists in the Arne-Magnaean collection in the University of Copenhagen, consisting of four sheets, 22 leaves in all. These are the only MSS. older than the 17th century which contain a collection of the ancient mythico-heroic lays, but fragments occur in various other works, and especially in the _Edda_ of Snorri. It is believed to have been written between 1260 and 1280. The poetic _Edda_ was translated into English verse by Amos Cottle in 1797; the poet Gray produced a version of the _Vegtamskviða_; but the first good translation of the whole was that published by Benjamin Thorpe in 1866. An excellent edition of the Icelandic text has been prepared by Th. Möbius, but the standard of the original orthography will be found in the admirable edition of Sophus Bugge, _Norroen Fornkvaeði_, published at Christiania in 1867. The Eddaic poems were rearranged, on a system of their own which differs entirely from that of the early MSS., by Gudbrand Vigfusson and F. York Powell, in their _Corpus poeticum boreale_ (Oxford, 1883). This is a collection, not of _Edda_ only but of all existing fragments of the vast lyrical literature of ancient Iceland. It supplies a prose translation. (E. G.) EDDIUS (AEDDI), a Kentish choirmaster, summoned by Wilfrid (c. 634-709), bishop of York, to help in organizing church services in Northumbria. He wrote the _Life_ of his patron, and this biography of St Wilfrid is the earliest extant historical work compiled by an Anglo-Saxon author. He is a strong partisan and very credulous, but the _Vita Wilfridi_ is nevertheless invaluable for the period it treats. Its date is little after the first decade of the 8th century, and it was used by Bede in compiling his _Historia_.