Are Snorri Sturluson's theories in the Edda locating the origins of the Aesir 'gods' and Norse people in Troy idiosyncratic to himself, or do they reflect an earlier Northern/Germanic tradition of claiming relation to the Romans?

by ZWass777

I noticed when reading the Edda that Sturulson claims the Aesir gods are later aggrandisements of the memory of kings who came from Troy in the distant past before migrating Northwards. While he points to the etymology of Aesir and Asia as evidence, I was struck by the fact that this story sounds a lot like Aeneas and his foundation of Latium. I know that one possible reason for the Romans adopting Aeneas is to claim relation to Ancient Greek society and its prestige. Is the Edda reflective of a similar trend among Germanic peoples or is it simply a reflection of Snorri's own imagination?

Platypuskeeper

Short answer is, no: Snorri's Trojan connection appears unique to him. It doesn't reflect his own imagination as much as it reflects the prestige afforded in contemporary Europe to common origins with the Romans.

Snorri himself seemed aware of Aeneas and seems to consider Trojan origins a defining European thing, as he claims Aenea as an alternate name for Europe in the first paragraphs of Ynglinga Saga in Heimskringla, where he describes the 'circle of the world' that gives the book its title. But let's start with a broader context, here are just some of the Trojan origin myths from before Snorri:

660: Fredegar's Historia Francorum claims Francius, brother of Aeneas founded a powerful kingdom between the Rhine and Danube, and becomes the progenitor of the Franks

727: The Liber Historiae Francorum elaborates further on a variant of this story, the Merovingian dynasty now being ancestors of Antenor and Priam too.

828: The Historia Brittonum is written and claims Trojan expatriates settled in Britain, named for a Brutus, descendant of Aeneas.

1000: Dudo of Saint-Quentin's Historia Normannorum equates the Dacians and Danes, and claims they're descendants of Antenor. Thus giving a Trojan descent to the Normans.

1136: Geoffrey of Monmouth writes Historia Regum Britanniae and repeats the Trojan origins from Historia Brittonum.

1160s: Benoît de Sainte-Maure writes Le Roman de Troie, which becomes a hugely popular literary account of the Trojan war, and follows it up, when:

1180: Benoît writes Chronique des ducs de Normandie which repeats the Trojan origin of the Normans. Rigord elaborates on the myth in his own version around the same time.

The "Matter of Troy" had become a popular topic of medieval fiction by Snorri's time, particularly in England and north France.

Particularly Paris was the undisputed intellectual center of north Europe around 1200. Scandinavian priests and other VIPs went to study there at the Cathedral School of Notre Dame (known as the Sorbonne after 1257). Iceland is no exception, and we know a number of Icelandic luminaries who studied there in Snorri's era, not least the bishop Saint Thorlak (1133 -1193). One does not have to look hard to find French influences in Scandinavia (wherein I include Iceland) in the 1100s and 1200s. From simple material culture: stonework at monasteries done by French monks, or the Saleby church bell from 1228, whose inscription blesses Saint-Denis, the patron saint of France (in Latin but with runes). But also in manuscripts, such as the Norwegian/Icelandic Niðrstigningar Saga, an 1100s translation of a French version of the Gospel of Nicodemus, with some interesting Norse takes introduced (e.g. the midgard serpent and giants are servants of the devil)

By 1300, and for the rest of the Middle Age, Scandinavia would be dominated by German influences. But in Snorri's days around the year 1200, it was mainly France and Britain from whence intellectual influences came, and in both places you had VIPs claiming Trojan descent and the Trojan war generally being a hot topic. A few decades after Snorri, Iceland would produce medieval Scandinavia's only adaptation of the Matter of Troy with Trójumanna saga. Like Niðrstigningar it too has some interesting interpretatio germanica, like turning the Judgement of Paris into a choice between Freyja, Sif and Gefjon rather than Aphrodite, Hera, and Athena .

But there are no mentions of Troy in older Old Norse sources. Some European historical legends had (in highly distorted form) found their way into Old Norse culture - Attila the Hun (Atlakviða) and Theodoric the Great (Völsunga Saga). But not the Aeneid, as far as known.

Likewise other and earlier origin tales on Norse kings, such as Ynglingatal, Saxo Grammaticus and the Gutasaga have little or nothing in common with Snorri's story on this point. To the contrary, Saxo rejects Dudo's equating of Danes and Dacians. Where there is a common denominator it'd be with stated links to the area north of the Black Sea. Which is probably rooted in a historic reality of the Rus', who were both of Scandinavian origins and who the Scandinavians had frequent contact with. (By 1200 there were still Scandinavians around who'd served in the Varangian guard; this continued well into the 1100s) So there's a shard historical basis here but of far later vintage. Not much suggests a common tradition - Gutasaga for instance has migration from Scandinavia eastward unlike Snorri's migration from the east. There may also be influence here from Jordanes' history of the Goths, where he claimed migration from Scandza in Sweden eastwards.

The Edda is mainly about the gods from what you'd call today an 'in-universe perspective'. It is in his prologue and a footnote in Gylfaginning that he mentions the 'actual' historical origins of the gods. But Ynglinga Saga is on the other hand an attempt at history. Although the bulk of the Saga is a prose elaboration on the older Ynglingatal by Þjóðólfr, the early chapters of it are not from Ynglingatal, and it is these which deal with the actual people who would later be regarded as gods, it's these that elaborate on Aesir-Asia and indirectly mention Aeneas.

We first meet the Æsir there, in the 'real' Ásgarð, east of Tanais in the Don delta (which Snorri relates to the vanir through another unlikely etymology; that said this method of history-by-folk-etymology was very common in medieval chronicles; my favorite being the contemporary Hungarian claim they conquered Spain and the Hungarian word ispán became Hispania)

Interestingly enough, Troy gets no explicit mention in Ynglinga Saga. (But it doesn't contradict it, on the contrary it does put the god-king origins closer to Turkey) Nor is his genealogy in Ynglinga Saga entirely compatible with the Edda prologue, even if the main ideas are similar. But as these were recorded at different times, so Snorri's thinking may have evolved.

In any case though, the royal genealogy of Snorri's Edda prologue is very obviously influenced by English sources, as it is in part based on the royal genealogies in Historia Brittonum and later English sources. The motive is clear: Snorri believes in a common origin for all of what-we'd-now-call Germanic peoples, or at least their rulers. This explains why the languages were similar, etc.

But that's not his only motive, by engaging in euhemerism, he'd been doing what Christians in Europe had already been doing for centuries earlier. Explaining pagan gods as distorted stories of humans. Not only did that make the mythical stories more acceptable, by doing so for Norse gods Snorri was thus equating Norse pre-Christian religion with Roman pre-Christian religion, raising the stature of the former. In creating a Trojan origin myth as well he was creating a common origin for Scandinavian royal dynasties (including his own) and continental European ones, again raising the stature of his culture but also him personally.

So Ynglingatal provided a starting point, as it is an story of a line of kings, and claims a divine origin (from Freyr). This is synthesized together with Anglo-Saxon genealogies that'd included Woden, but also Trojan origin stories that were both common to them but common in general at the time. To this mix is also added a vague idea of Scythia Magna being "The great Svíþjóð (Sweden)" that may in some vague form have come from Jordanes or from Rus' histories.

In the case of Heimskringla the book's prologue that states outright it's Snorri's own synthesis from many sources. It's hard to see much reason to think the history told in the Edda prologue would be much different, in particular given that some of the sources are obvious and non-Norse.

Even the mythology of the Edda most likely contains interpretations, synthesis and expansions by Snorri. The older texts are poetry; Norse poetry was terse and took great pleasure in clever allusions and wordplay, not plot. Oftentimes the plot is little more than a framing device (e.g. Alvísmál or Lokasenna) for a set of clever exchanges (riddles and insults respecitvely). In other cases it's typically assumed the listener already knew the basic story; those had been relayed in prose which was separate from the poetry tradition. So Snorri is an invaluable guide to what these poems were all about. But he's often taken at face value (for instance in pop books on Norse mythology), even though some things had been forgotten by his time and some gaps had to be filled with guesses. We know some things were actual tradition (Thor's fishing: His foot going through the bottom of the boat is not mentioned elsewhere, but exists in Viking Age art), but some things may simply be Snorri's misinterpretations (e.g. reading berserkr as meaning 'bare-shirt' when it's likely from bera and thus 'bear-shirt') or even inventions. One suspect being Snorri's version of the Baldr story, which not only has almost nothing in common with the earlier version we have from Saxo (other than Baldr being killed by a guy named Hǫðr), it makes Baldr out to be a suspiciously Christ-like figure, and also has many details not attested anywhere else. (such as the god Hermóðr, which is not implied to be a god's name anywhere else, or Freyr's boars and Freyja's cats). Most egregiously (considering how often it's been taken for granted as true), a pretty strong case has been made that Snorri's claim of the vanir as a distinct group of gods may simply be a misreading. - Which is a distinction that's front-and-center in those early parts of Ynglinga Saga, and thus plays a bigger role in Snorri's euhemerism than in the mythology.