Snorri Sturluson: The Man Who Preserved the Norse Gods

In this episode of Viking Legacy and Lore, we explore the life and legacy of Snorri Sturluson, the man responsible for preserving much of what we know about Norse mythology today.

At a time when the Viking Age was fading and oral traditions were disappearing, Snorri recognized a critical truth:

If the stories were not written down, they would be lost forever.

Through his work—most notably the Prose Edda—he recorded:

• The Norse creation story
• The gods and their roles
• The prophecy of Ragnarök
• The structure and language of Viking poetry

This episode combines immersive storytelling with historical analysis to explore:

• How Norse mythology nearly disappeared
• The cultural shift from paganism to Christianity
• The role of oral tradition in Viking society
• Snorri’s political life and the events leading to his death
• The debate over whether he reshaped Norse myths through a Christian lens

Beyond history, this episode asks a deeper question:

What is worth preserving—even if you don’t believe in it?

Snorri’s story is not just about mythology.

It is about memory, identity, and the power of storytelling to shape civilizations.

This episode is sponsored by the Great Northern Viking Festival.

Experience the Viking Age at this amazing festival for the whole family.

greatnorthernvikingfestival.com

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:35

They were dying. Not by sword, not by fire, not by a plague, but by fading memory. The old gods, the legends, and the lore of the Viking Age, it was on the brink of extinction. In a world that was changing rapidly, people who were once centralized were now spread over vast areas of the Baltic and North Atlantic. New religious beliefs and practices that did not use their old stories led to a quick move away from the old ways. And in the Viking Age, traditions and stories were passed on orally. They didn't write their stories down, they shared them verbally and intentionally. But when the world pivots almost overnight, what becomes of the oral traditions? The more time that passed, the more memories faded, sagas misquoted, and the stories thinned. The words had shifted, the meanings, they'd been updated with the current culture, and they had begun to adapt in a new way in the original intent, it was lost altogether. And the style of writing, the style of telling these stories was becoming obsolete. The Viking Age, it had ended. Pagan temples and sites of worship were being leveled, buried, or Christian churches were being built on top of sacred grounds. Old rituals faded into memory. But memories that aren't passed on are in danger of extinction within a single generation. The myths and mythology, sagas and storytelling that once held the North together, they were slipping quietly into silence. The stories, they weren't forbidden as much as they were just being forgotten. There was, however, one man living in Iceland with roots in Norway. He came from a powerful family. He was a leader in the community, a lawyer, and a Christian. He didn't worship Odin or pray to Thor, but he understood something most men did not. The stories of the North, they weren't pagan worship instructions, they were stories. They were echoes of his heritage and possibly a bridge to a truth that they held on to. He also realized that if no one writes these stories down, it wouldn't be just the gods of the North that would vanish. It would be the stories and the poetic voice of the Viking Age. So one man picked up a pen and with ink he saved the memory of an entire world and gives us access to so much of the sagas that we explore on this podcast. His name Snorri Sturlson. And without him, the Viking Age might have even been reduced to raids and royal bloodlines. But the sagas and the poetic writings give the Viking Age depth, depth that we all appreciate and enjoy. And one of the most fascinating parts is that the people that left their mark on history during the Viking Age, they never met this man. And he didn't worship the old gods, but he preserved them anyway. Today we'll tell the saga of Snorrius Thurlsson, a man who archived myth for future generations to enjoy and to learn. He helped save an entire civilization's imagination, and who in the end paid for it in blood. Outside the wind moved across the Icelandic plain in long, low sighs. It brushed the frozen grass and it whispered against the turf walls of Snorri's hall. In the distance beyond the rolling hill, a river flowed, calm and steady. Beyond that, steam from the hot springs drifted upward into the darkness, ghost like as though the earth itself exhaled memories older than men. Inside the fire it burned low, and Snorri sat alone. A lamp flickered beside him, the flame bending and straightening as if it too were listening. Early in the day, the hall was alive with many voices, farmers, messengers, petitioners, men arguing over the law and land. It was silent now except for the small crackle of birchwood in the hearth. Before him lay a parchment. Blank, a goose quill rested in the shallow dish of ink. Snorry hadn't touched it yet. His mind had wandered far beyond the walls of the longhouse, beyond the coasts of Iceland, across the centuries and across the sea, to a world that no longer existed. He tried as hard as he could to place himself there, in the heart of it all, to hear it, to taste it, to smell it, to feel what it would have been like to live among the bravest, most daring people of the eighth and ninth century. He closed his eyes to hear the roar of a long ship cutting through the whale road. He imagined the cool air blowing, the salt mist landing on his lips. He pictured the laughter in the mead halls of Norway and the tales that warriors would have told at the long table. He listened for the voice of the Skald, standing before the king, weaving words like the roots of Yigdrisel. Snorri had grown up with these echoes, but they were also distant, remnants of an age that had faded into the faintest whisper. He had heard these stories as a boy, and there were still a few old men that spoke the names of the gods without fear of being sacrilegious and without concern of what other pious folk might think. They told the stories of Odin, his wanderings, and Thor's hammer, of giants older than mountains and wolves that would one day swallow the sun. He understood that those stories once lived in every tongue and every home where the ancestors once resided. As he grew older, and the law dominated his education, and scripture was a priority for learning wisdom, he could tell that less and less people brought up the old way and the old stories. He recognized in that moment that they were fading. No one had decreed it, no priest had ordered the stories forbidden, no king had made any law against them, they simply were just slipping away. Snorri saw a huge need, and that great sense of urgency, the need to preserve the stories that inspire some of the greatest figures in history. For those that were willing to explore this path with Snorri, to uncover the old ways, that they could barely understand what the stories were even about and what they were saying. They were like travelers who had forgotten the road and the landmarks to the destination. They spoke of the giant Ymir's blood, but couldn't connect the dots to the creation of the sea. They no longer remembered, according to Norris mythology, that it was one giant's body who became the whole world. They spoke of Odin, but they couldn't make sense of his actions. For Snorri, this was more than forgetting. This was missing the point of the prose, failing to even understand what was being passed down and the potential to lose something that created warmth in the coldest parts of the North. Snorri knew something no one else did. Without memory, stories wouldn't be told, and without meaning, the poetry would die and no one would care to even remember. To Snorri, the poetic history of the North lay wounded on the battlefield of time and change, and it was in desperate need of attention because if these stories died, part of the North itself would die with them. So the wind pressed against the hall. Snorri leaned forward in his chair and opened his eyes. He thought for a moment about what it was to be a Christian man. He knew the creeds and prayers. He remembered the day that he was baptized by the priest, and heard stories of when the entire island had been baptized before he was even born. And he knew that he had never knelt to Odin, but he did in that moment feel a deep connection to his roots and an obligation to understand the old stories, not as gods to worship, but as memories to be preserved, to be shared and to be remembered. So he picked up the pen, he dipped it in the ink, and he laid the tip on the parchment, the first dab of black soaked into the sheet, and then the first stroke, the first letter, the first word, the first sentence on a quest to give us, to give you and me a gift. He looked down again at the parchment as it began to take shape. The sense of duty swelled in him, a motivation from beyond him carried him forward in the project. There were many moments where Snorry paused and sat for long periods of time, reflecting, thinking, imagining, placing himself in the moments where these stories were first told, and then he reached for the quill once more and he continued. The feather was light between his fingers, it glided across the page as he wrote, each stroke left ink heavy, black, and permanent. But because he understood the weight of responsibility, once written, these myths would no longer drift like breath between storytellers. They would be fixed, they would be captured, and they would last. A world that had lived in memory only would now live in ink. Outside, the Icelandic wind moved across the frostbitten fields, carrying with it the faint sound of a river water and distant murmur of the hot springs bubbling up from the earth. Snorri continued to write, and with each scratch of feather pen on parchment, the fading voices of the North found new life. The first bit of irony in this history is that it was a Christian chieftain that sat alone in a dimly lit hall in Iceland, riding and preserving what many Christians would have considered pagan or heathen. And though he could not have known it then, the words forming at the touch of his pen, the slow, steady movement of his hand across the page, they would travel further than any Viking ship because his words would traverse across centuries. They would outlive kings, kingdoms, epochs, and eras. They would carry the old gods, Odin, Thor, Loki, the giants, the Doom of Ragnarok. They would carry them into the future that had not yet imagined them. Not in the form of a manual for worship, but a poetic history of what the North believed and the lessons that would put wind in their sails. What Snorri did was give us the most important bridge between the Viking Age imagination and our own modern world. And we have it because one man refused to let the stories of the North be forgotten. But Snorri would pay dearly, and the history leading up to and including his death, it doesn't read like a boring high school textbook. No, it sounds a lot more like a saga that you can find in the Prosetta. The year was 1067. The Viking Age had settled into something quite different. The raiders and the fearless adventurers, they had become farmers and settlers. The sword in many places was exchanged for farming tools. Across the North Atlantic world, something subtle was changing. The longships, they were still present, but they were linked to trade routes, and they ferried passengers from Norway to Iceland, from Normandy to England. The tides of history had changed, and the North settled into a new rhythm. Warriors wielding weapons found themselves keeping the peace through policing the peasants. The same hands that once gripped shields and embraced predetermined fate now gripped fishing nets and prayed for divine providence and provision. All over Iceland, Greenland, and the British Isles, Norris families built farms that would last generations. The great kings of the Viking Age, men like Olaf or Harold Hardrata, or Harold Bluetooth, they were fading into history. It was happening quietly, slowly, almost without anyone noticing. The North began to change its identity through marriage and through faith. The Norse who settled and established themselves in Francia, England, Ireland, they settled into communities, they married and they embraced the faith that had deeper roots than Odin's great tree. Children were born into this new way of living, and the North, it wasn't an easy place to get to, so most didn't try. They stayed where they were, they lived their lives. But the next generation was something new. Not entirely Norse, not entirely wherever they had resided. They became Normans, Anglo Scandinavians, and Galgales. And that first generation or two that would grow up hearing the stories of warriors who settled further than any could imagine, these and they had epic battles and heroic moments. But then those stories would they would start to sound a lot like legends, and many times they were, but every legend we know has a little bit of truth, at least some truth within it. So the Viking Age, it didn't explode, it didn't disappear, it didn't collapse, it simply emerged, it blended, and it settled down. There is no single final battle, even though many will point to 1066, the Battle of Sanford Bridge as the last Viking battle. Instead, the Viking world slowly became something new. And one of those new features was the rise of Christianity. I mention it only to say that Christianity was a major factor that thrust Scandinavia away from the old gods and the old ways. There are historical records suggesting that the spread of Christianity in Scandinavia sometimes involved coercion, destruction of pagan sites, and occasional violence against pagan practices, but that reality is a bit nuanced. It wasn't a constant religious purge, and in many places conversion was surprisingly gradual, and most of the time politically motivated rather than purely violent. But slowly, generation by generation, Christianity became the public language of faith across the North. And if you know anything about Christianity, well, it has its own epic accounts of heroes, battles, and miracles to share. Priests taught the new stories, the new prose, the new cosmology, and yet something curious happened. The old gods, they refused to disappear completely. Because the gods of Norse mythology weren't just what people of the Viking Age worshipped and used to make sense of the world. They were embedded into the stories that meant something to the Viking Age, that taught lessons that connected generations to the past. But the language of the North that carried the echoes of an old imagination, they existed for a long time side by side with Christianity. But soon the memory began to thin. To make matters worse, Iceland had no king and never did. The island had been founded by men who fled kings like Harold Fairhair, choosing law and independence over crowns and thrones. Instead of a monarch, Iceland was governed through chieftains and the great assembly called the All Thing. And for a time the system worked, but it had a weakness. When people focus on the law only, life tends to get sucked out of the community. Laws are often great for helping guide society and protect people, but it can easily become the end-all be-all of a community. And when it does, the stories die. Fun dies. Expression is lost to fear, and memories of life-giving stories are forgotten. They're misunderstood or they're dismissed altogether. Without a king, there was no single authority responsible for preserving culture, commissioning historians to chronicle or to protect the stories of the past, even if it meant preserving their own legacy. So the combination of factors was turning into a perfect storm to see Norris mythology and sagas swept away and lost to the tides of change. The last piece of the catastrophic tidal wave was that this oral storytelling had complex meaning. The Norris prose were not simple verses, stories, prose, and myths. They were all passed down verbally, they weren't written down, and there was no canon or collection of Norris mythology, and there were no commentaries on these things. So what was happening is the meaning was beginning to be lost. Not one of these issues was the whole problem, but they were all adding up to something catastrophic. Of course, the further out from time the story was told, the more things faded or blurred or they were left out. But the other part of it is the language changed. Language modernized. It was influenced by the rest of the world. The old poetic language became less and less understood. Parts were clear, others didn't make as much sense. The structure of poetry, the vocabulary, the metaphoric intentions made it hard to process, to retain, and even understand why the story should continue to be told. New systems took priority and the culture shifted away from old systems to new ones that were much better in some ways, but they weren't friendly to imagination. The sagas they were losing their meaning and their storytellers. And that is the moment where Snorrius Throssen begins to matter more than most people want to give him credit for. Snorri was born in 1179 in Iceland, long after the Viking Age had begun to fade. By the time he was grown up, most people in the north were Christian, and old Norris gods like Odin and Thor were no longer being worshipped the way they once had been. But something interesting was happening. The stories were still around, poets still told the tales of Odin, Thor, Loki, and the end of the world. The problem was that they were starting to forget what the stories meant. Snorri was not just a farmer or a warrior, he was well educated. He studied law, language, poetry, and history, and he became very skilled at each. Later in life, he became one of the most powerful leaders in Iceland. He served as a law speaker, which meant he helped lead Iceland's government and he knew the law better than almost anyone. Snorri was smart, wealthy, well connected, and very interested in stories. But in Snorri's day, discussing old Norse literature was not a popular thing to do. There were young poets, few in number, that they were still reading the old Viking poetry, but they didn't understand it anymore, at least not the way that it was intended. The language of the Viking age, it was still being used, but the meanings were slowly disappearing. That is when Snorri realized that if nobody writes these stories down, the myths of the North, they could fade away completely. So Snorri decided to do something bold. He would write a book that would explain the old Norris myths and the poetry that connected to them. Around the year 1220, he wrote a book we now call the Pro Zeta. It had three main parts. The first section focused on the story of the Norris universe. It explained how the world was created, who the gods were, and how the world would end at Ragnarok. Here are a few lines. In the beginning there was nothing but a great gap. To the north lay cold and frost, to the south fire and flame, where heat and cold met life began. From this came the giant Ymir, the first of all beings. The second section was to explain the special language used by Viking poets, and here's another example from the prose at what it would have sounded like. Why is gold called the tears of Freya? Because Freya wept for her lost husband, and her tears fell to the earth as red gold. The third and final part was to teach the rules and the rhythm of poetry. For example, a verse is considered complete when it has the proper number of syllables, the correct placement of stresses, and the full pattern of rhythm. And here he was, teaching less about myth and more about mastery of the old Norris ways. Snorri isn't just preserving stories, he's teaching people how to speak like the past, how to write their own prose, just like they did in the North. So keep in mind Snorri wasn't trying to bring back the old ways of the old religion. He was trying to save the stories and the poetry. Because without the myths and the understanding of how to read them, the poetry of the Viking Age would make no sense, and therefore have no reason to continue. Snorri lived during one of the most dangerous periods in Iceland's history. Powerful leaders were fighting for control of the island. Alliances shifted, loyalty was temporary, and politics followed Snorri everywhere. And he wasn't just a writer, he was deeply involved in the struggle of power. Snorri originally allied himself with Hakon IV of Norway, a king determined to bring Iceland under Norwegian rule. At first, the alliance elevated him, it gave him influence, connections, royal favor, but Iceland was a place where power cuts both ways. Snorri began to hesitate, he delayed the king's command, he ignored a royal summons, and slowly he became something far more dangerous than an enemy. By twelve forty one the tension had reached its boiling point. Under the cover of night, armed men from Norway rode into his estate, and they entered the hall. Torches flickered against the wall and boots echoed through the dark rooms. They were not there to negotiate, they were there to end Snorri. Snorri fled to the cellar beneath the house, where it was dark and he could hide in the corner, and for a moment he believed he might be spared. But then the door to the cellar opened. Men walked down with torches, and they found him. And in the final moment it's recorded that his last words were do not strike. Well, they struck anyway. And with a single act, Norway silenced one of the most powerful voices in Iceland. Snorri was a man who preserved the gods of the North, and he was not killed for the myth or for religion, but for politics. And yet what he wrote lives on and it still speaks. Now I want to consider something just for a moment. This is something that scholars have debated for centuries. Did Snorri Christianize Ragnarok? Did Snorri reshape the mythology? Did he subtly bend the old stories towards Christian ideas? You can listen to episode 19 on Ragnarok to understand more and hear the parallels. Because Ragnarok described in the prose Edda has a very familiar pattern. There is apocalypse, a final battle, fire and destruction consuming the world, but then something flows from that. Rebirth, a renewed earth rising from the sea, green fields returning, a small remnant of survivors stepping into a new age. To some scholars, it resembles. Christian eschatology, the pattern of destruction followed by restoration. To others, Snorri is simply organizing fragments that already existed within older poems. The truth that may lie somewhere in between. But the book of Revelation and the Prosetta, they're available to read if you want to come to your own conclusion. Snorri was not a pagan storyteller living inside of mythology. He was a 13th-century Christian intellectual who knew what the Bible said about the end of the world. So it's impossible to not wonder whether or not Christian scripture influenced his rendition of Ragnarok. And this would be a great time for you to share your thoughts in the comments section or listen to episode 19 and then continue the conversation over there. The prosetta manuscript outlived kings and kingdoms, and that may be the most impressive part of all. Because kings rise, kings fall, empires dissolve, Iceland itself eventually loses its independence and becomes subject to Norway. The great chieftain families they vanish from power. But Snorri's work, it survives. The prose Edda is copied again and again by scribes, passed between monasteries, studied by scholars, preserved through centuries of change, long after politics killed Snorri and forgot who he was. His words remain, and those words travel far beyond medieval Iceland. They inspire historians, influence scholars, and shape the imagination of writers like Tolkien. And today we still hear the echoes through modern books, films, and podcasts. Snorri may be gone, but the gift that he gave the world, it continues. Here's the deeper layer of Snorri's story. It's not about mythology, it's about memory. Snorri teaches us something far bigger than the survival of Norse legends. He shows us a rare kind of wisdom, the ability to preserve, honor, and enjoy something without necessary believing in it. Snorri did not worship Odin, he didn't yield to Thor, but he understood that the myths of the North, they were more than religion. They were culture, they were language, they were the imagination of a civilization. And so he did something remarkable. He preserved them, not to revive pagan worship, not even to challenge Christianity, but to show how they mattered. So it was the least likely candidate that saved Norris mythology and the poetic sagas. The wisdom of Snorri, it says there's value there. And what's wild is that we live in an age where people they often do the opposite. Oh, I don't agree with that. Let's delete it, let's cancel it, just erase it altogether. If something comes from a worldview that we disagree with, the instinct oftentimes, unfortunately, is to bury it, dismiss it, dismiss it with a hot take, pair, a one-liner that supports our narrative. But Snorri shows us another way. You can listen, you can preserve, and you can do that without endorsing the opposite view of what you believe. You can protect the memory of a culture without adapting every belief it held. And because Snorri understood this distinction, we still have the sagas. And if you think for a moment, you realize there are stories out there that people refuse to consider just because they dislike where they came from. But what if those stories, what if that story, is the one that is true, the one that all other stories are pointing us to? Civilization doesn't just die when cities burn or when occupations change or when more dominant empires rise. They die when their stories are forgotten. If this episode changed the way you see the Viking Age, if it gave you a new respect for the man who stood between dying embers and fanning the flame, then share it. Send it to a mythology lover, send it to a historical skeptic, send it to a friend who thinks the Viking Age was nothing more than raids and axes. Because this story proves something powerful. Civilizations are not saved by warriors alone. Sometimes they're saved by the ones who write the stories down. And sometimes an entire civilization's guardian is the one that you would least expect. I'm always blown away by the number of downloads each week, and so I thank you for making this podcast what it has become. And if you haven't yet, please follow, share, leave a review. But until next time, be bold, be strong, and awaken the Viking in you.