The different versions of the Poetic Edda Gods’ roles and importance changed somewhat for some of them, and that could also lead to slight variations. Other drivers of change would have been the variations of beliefs from one region to another, or through time.
That is not to say that the main themes weren’t fairly stable, but there wasn’t one true original version. They would develop over time, and change slightly both over time and across distances and countries. In the Viking Age, stories often came in the form of an entertainer performing them as a song or poem. That disregards the fact that these poems probably lived long before they were ever written down, or performed by poets. However, when we are trying to understand the age of any given poem, it is basically based on the words and grammar used. This was shortly before the separate poems came to be a collection. The latest poems were likely written in the 11th or 12th centuries. Some of the older poems are believed to have been written in the 9th or 10th century, or possibly even earlier. They were written by different poets, possibly hundreds of years apart as well as from different parts of Scandinavia and Iceland. The different poems making up the collection we often perceive as a whole were originally separate poems. Maybe the most important thing to understand about the Poetic Edda is that it was never one book.
Gilwellian, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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