Let's start with Snorri

This isn't the beginning. I don't know what the beginning would be, but this is....not the end. Snorri, for all his flaws, saved the end. Snorri Sturluson was a poet, chieftain, politician, and lawspeaker of Iceland. He was J.R.R. Tolkein's inspiration for hobbits. He has been described as a round little man who loved books and sitting by his cozy fire with plenty of good food and drink and a pretty woman to serve it. Doesn't that sound like a hobbit? But wait, before you start picturing Viking Bilbo played by Martin Freeman, there was another side to Snorri. Snorri could be ruthless. He was a politician, after all. He sometimes had a tendency to cheat on deals. Most of all, he was ambitious. He wanted to be the uncrowned king of Iceland. He never quite achieved that ambition to his own satisfaction. His plan was to snap up as many chieftaincies as he possibly could. He was a major landowner and a very important man, but this somehow just wasn't enough for Snorri. I don't know if he wanted to be instantly obeyed, instead of an important man among equals who could be argued with, or if he wanted adulation he never got because, quite frankly, someone was always just about fed up with his crap. Maybe he just never quite felt special enough. He tried to get what he was looking for from the King of Norway, which still didn't really work, but ultimately, we are all the beneficiaries of Snorri's attempts to kiss royal ass. More on that in a second. Iceland had been stubbornly independent for a few hundred years when Snorri came along in the 12th century. Icelanders didn't want the power struggles and drama that accompanied the jockeying for position in the courts of kings. So they didn't have a king. Iceland was the the most democratic country in Europe at the time. It was also small, sparsely populated, lacking in several important resources, and kind of isolated in the North Atlantic, so it wouldn't be difficult for a more powerful neighbor to come in and take over if they wanted to without causing the ripples of "you're too close now, I can't have that, now we're fighting" that would come up if a country on mainland Europe got taken over. So, Icelanders were trying to keep from being absorbed by a bigger Royal Power, Snorri was trying to get the stamp of royal approval, a measure of prestige, recognition that even without a crown and throne, he was pretty much a king, or all of the above from the King of Norway. Possibly also making promises on behalf of Iceland that he was not authorized to make while doing so. Imagine Bilbo played by a Ferengi who keeps inviting himself to the Cardassian Empire, and you just know that the next time he comes back, you're going to be told you're all Cardassian now. Now do you understand why Snorri died (at a respectable old age nontheless) hiding behind a barrel of skyr in his storage room while his house was raided? But Snorri did do one great thing, he wrote the Prose Edda. This is our main source material for Norse mythology. Old Norse poetry is full of metaphors called kennings. A lot of them are references to particular stories, which in pre-Christian Scandinavia were commonly known. As the pagan Norse religion faded away in favor of Christianity, the stories that the kennings referred to were lost. Iceland was one of the last Nordic countries to adopt Christianity, and even then, it was kind of a half-hearted "we're all going to be Christian in public, but what you do in private is your own business," so the Icelanders held onto those myths longer than everyone else. Snorri was trying to get a job as a poet to the King of Norway. Snorri wrote in the old style, as was right and proper, but people in Norway wouldn't understand it because they had lost all the old stories. So first, he wrote down all the old stories so the King would properly understand how great Snorri's job interview poem was, then he wrote the actual audition poem. Snorri didn't get the job. But it really works out, because we still have the Prose Edda.