A Playful Text and a Text Full of Play: Examples of Ludic Elements in and around the Prose Edda

This article argues that play is prioritized and placed centrally in the Prose Edda. It shows that this medieval text engages with play both on a metacommunicative level and in the stories it tells. It points out that the actual subject matter of the Prose Edda, skaldic poetry, is a serious mode of expression which contains several play-elements. The article draws on theories of play (Huizinga, Caillois, Sutton-Smith, Classen) and investigates how various definitions of play can help us to qualify and explain play as a complex and ambiguous phenomenon in a particular textual and historical setting.