Snorri Sturluson
Snorri Sturluson wrote down the Norse gods and was killed in his own cellar on the orders of a king. He was fostered at Oddi, the richest learned household in Iceland, married money twice and inherited more, and became the wealthiest man in the country and twice its lawspeaker - the presiding officer of a commonwealth that had no king and no executive. Almost everything known about Norse mythology comes through him. The Prose Edda was written as a handbook for poets who no longer understood the pagan allusions their craft was built on, and to preserve the kennings it explains the myths: Odin, Thor, Loki, the wolf that swallows the sun, the ash tree. He was a Christian writing two centuries after the conversion, treating the gods as ancient kings mistaken for divinities, which is why the material survived at all. Heimskringla, his history of the kings of Norway, opens with a sceptical preface about the reliability of praise poetry and then uses it as evidence anyway, which is roughly the modern position. His politics ruined him. He accepted a title from Hakon IV of Norway and undertook to bring Iceland under the crown, then did nothing about it for years while feuding with his own family. He left Norway against the king's express order. In 1241 his former son-in-law came to Reykholt with seventy men on Hakon's authority. He hid in the cellar and was cut down there, reportedly saying only that they were not to strike. Iceland lost its independence within twenty years and did not have it again until 1944.
- Lived: 1179 CE – 1241 CE
- Nationality: Icelandic
- Roles: historian, writer, politician
