_Elder Edda_--great-grandmother the name is said to mean, but after all she scarcely seems old enough to be called a great-grandmother. We have traced her growing up, and seen how she has dressed herself, and we begin to think of her almost as a modern young lady. When we listen to the odd jumble of tales she tells us, too, we are more than half inclined to quarrel with her, though without exactly knowing whether it is with her youth or her age that we find fault. You are too young to know what you are talking about, great-grandmother, we complain; but, oh dear! you mumble so and make use of such odd old-fashioned words we can scarcely understand you. Sæmund was not the only man who wrote down songs and sagas; he had some contemporaries, many successors; and, about fifty years after his death, we hear of Snorro Sturleson, a rich man, twice Supreme Magistrate of the Icelandic Republic, who also lived for some time at Oddi, and who has left many valuable additions to the stock of Icelandic written lore. Laing says of him--"Snorro Sturleson has done for the history of the Northmen, what Livy did for the history of the Romans." Amongst other things, he wrote a sort of commentary or enlargement of Sæmund's _Edda_, probably drawn from MSS. of Sæmund and of others, which were preserved at Oddi. This is called the _Prose_, _Younger_, or _Snorro's Edda_, and was translated many years ago by M. Mallet into French. Added to these two sources of information respecting the Scandinavian mythology, there are many allusions to the myths scattered through the heroic lays with which Northern literature abounds. The _Poetic Edda_ consists of two parts--the mythological and the heroic. The mythological songs contain an account of the formation and destruction of the world, of the origin, genealogies, adventures, journeys, conversations of the gods, magic incantations, and one lay which may be called ethical. This portion of the _Edda_ concludes with a song called "The Song of the Sun," of which it is supposed Sæmund himself was the author. Thorpe, the English translator, says, "It exhibits a strange mixture of Christianity and heathenism, whence it would seem that the poet's own religion was in a transition state. We may as well remark here that the only allusion to Christianity in the _Elder Edda_, with the exception of this last song, which stands quite alone, is a single strophe in an incantation:-- "An eighth I will sing to thee, If night overtake thee, When out on the misty way, That the dead Christian woman No power may have to do thee harm." Which savours curiously of the horror which these heathens then evidently felt of the new faith.