Edda Hattatal Snorri Sturluson

'Hattatal' is a treatise in Old Icelandic on the metres and verse-forms of Old Norse poetry. It forms the third part of the 'Edda' (known as the 'Prose Edda') of the Icelandic historian and poet Snorri Struluson (1179-1241). The first part, 'Gylfaginning', deals with the mythological background to the diction of skaldic poetry; the second, 'Skaldskaparmal', with the language of poetry. 'Hattatal consists of a poem in 102 stanzas in various verse-forms in praise of the rulers of Norway, the young King Hakon Hakonarson (1204-1263) and Earl Skuli (1188-1240), composed by Snorri in about 1222/1223, after he had just visited the Norwegian court, together with a commentary which points out the main features of the variety of verse-forms that the poem exemplifies. As the earliest medieval treatise on the metres of poetry in a Germanic language, it is of great importance to the understanding of the metres not only of Norse poetry but also of those of Anglo-Saxon and Medieval German, and it