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Of the men who composed these poems,—"wrote" is obviously the wrong word,—we know absolutely nothing, save that some of them must have been literary artists with a high degree of conscious skill. The Eddic poems are "folk-poetry,"—whatever that may be,—only in the sense that some of them strongly reflect racial feelings and beliefs; they are anything but crude or primitive in workmanship, and they show that not only the poets themselves, but also many of their hearers, must have made a careful study of the art of poetry.

Where the poems were composed is almost equally uncertain. The claims of Norway have been extensively advanced, but the great literary activity of Iceland after the settlement of the island by Norwegian emigrants late in the ninth century makes the theory of an Icelandic source for most of the poems plausible. The two Atli lays, with what authority we do not know, bear in the Codex Regius the superscription "the Greenland poem," and internal evidence indicates that this statement is correct. Certainly in one poem, the Rigsthula, and probably in several others, there are marks of Celtic influence. During a considerable part of the ninth and tenth centuries, Scandinavians were active in Ireland and in most of the western islands inhabited by branches of the Celtic race. Some scholars claim nearly all the Eddic poems for these "Western Isles," in sharp distinction from Iceland; their arguments are commented on in the introductory note to the Rigsthula. However, as Iceland early came to be the true center of this Scandinavian island world, it may be said that most of the evidence concerning the birthplace of the Eddic poems in anything like their present form points in that direction,