The Snorra Edda (also known as the Prose Edda) was written by the Icelandic explorer and statesman Snorri Sturluson.
In Snorri's time the old Germanic saga's were very popular in Iceland and he decided to collect and write the saga's down to preserve them and allow skalds to study them, he collected the saga's in a book that he called "Edda" (Great-grandmother), the Edda contained two texts; the Gylfaginning and the Skáldskaparmál.
A long time had passed before Snorri wrote down the saga's and most of them have been tainted with later additions and alterations, Snorri also tried to connect the stories to historical facts and when such a link could not be found he simply made one up; he even wrote that the god Odin was a grandson of king Priamus of Troy, nowadays historians do not take this kind of speculations serious anymore.
Although Snorri sometimes loses sight of reality in his work he contributed a lot to the current knowledge of Germanic religion and mythology, in my opinion he should receive a posthumous nobel price for doing such a great job preserving the folklore of our ancestors; much information about ancient cultures has been lost forever because nobody took the time to write them down.
An online version of the Snorra Edda (or Prose Edda) can be found here:
