In 1971 Denmark returned a single book to Iceland by ship under naval escort because an airplane was judged too risky. This episode explains why: the Codex Regius is the primary surviving manuscript of the Poetic Edda, the source of most of what is known about Thor, Odin and Ragnarok. The hosts recount its emergence in 1643 in the hands of Bishop Brynjolfur Sveinsson, who mistakenly credited it to Saemundr the Learned, and how it confirmed the long-suspected older poetry behind Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda before being sent as a gift to the Danish king.

The conversation covers the challenge of dating anonymous oral poetry through clues like the Greenlandic Atlamal, the debated argument that wolves point to mainland composition, and linguistic forensics such as the lost initial V in the word for angry that traps pre-1000 pronunciations in alliteration. It then surveys the manuscript’s contents, from the Voluspa and its interpolated roster of dwarfs to heroic lays that throw Attila the Hun and Ermanaric into the same story, the missing pages of the Great Lacuna known only through the Volsunga saga, translation debates since A.S. Cottle’s 1797 Latin-based version, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s borrowing of dwarf names and the Misty Mountains.

• Why the Codex Regius earned its name as the Royal Book in Copenhagen
• Fornyrdislag, the old story meter that relies on stress rather than rhyme
• Odin resurrecting a seeress in the Voluspa to learn his own doom
• How scholars use dated skaldic poetry as a control group for Eddic verse
• What anonymous medieval poets say about modern ideas of authorship and ownership