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Its bards and historians visited other climes, became the favourites of monarchs, and returned to their island covered with honour and loaded with presents. The Edda, by Samund, is one of the most valued poems of the ancient days of Iceland. The second portion of the Edda, called Skalda, dates from a later period, and is ascribed by many to the celebrated Snorri Sturluson.
The Younger Edda is a prose paraphrase of, and commentary on, these poems and others which are lost, together with a treatise on metre, written by the historian Snorri Sturluson about 1220. This use of the word Edda is incorrect and unhistorical, though convenient and sanctioned by the use of several centuries.
Isleif, first Bishop of Skalholt, was the earliest Icelandic historian; after him came the noted Snorri Sturluson, born in 1178, who became the richest and mightiest man in Iceland. Snorri Sturluson was frequently followed to the General Assembly of Iceland by a splendid retinue of 800 armed men.
Close beside the entrance to the church is the mound beneath which rest the bones of Snorri Sturluson, the celebrated poet; over this grave stands a small runic stone of the length of the mound itself.
The story of that great battle, told with a few inaccuracies, but told as only great poets tell, you should read, if you have not read it already, in the "Heimskringla" of Snorri Sturluson, the Homer of the North: High feast that day held the birds of the air and the beasts of the field, White-tailed erne and sallow glede, Dusky raven, with horny neb, And the gray deer the wolf of the wood.
On my return I had still to visit a basin with a jet of water, in a fine meadow near the church; a low wall of stone has been erected round this spring to prevent the cattle from scalding themselves if they should approach too near in the ardour of grazing. Some eighty paces off is to be seen the wool-bath erected by Snorri Sturluson.
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