In this chapter I offer a short survey of the way eddic poetry has been edited, noting the challenges faced by editors and considering some of the ways in which interventions by editors have the potential to distort the interpretation of the poetry. I am taking my primary examples from the edition of eddic poetry that is most often used by scholars and students throughout the world: the German edition commonly referred to as Neckel Kuhn, first produced in 1914 by Gustav Neckel, revised by him in 1927 and 1936 and then revised again by Hans Kuhn in a fourth edition in 1962 and a fifth in 1983, the last primarily an orthographic revision of the fourth. The recent Icelandic edition by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason in the Íslenzk fornrit series (2014) will also be taken into account, as will the work of earlier editors whose emendations have been adopted and have to some degree become mainstream. For reasons of space I am leaving aside here consideration of eddic poetry quoted in a piecemeal fashion (such as verse quoted in the fornaldarsögur and in other prosimetric contexts) to focus on editorial practice in regard to whole poems – works written conscientiously from beginning to end, as clearly marked entities in most cases – in compilation manuscripts such as the Codex Regius, GKS 2365 4° (see the first chapter in this Handbook for a full account of preservation). The editing of poetry quoted in prosimetrum presents particular challenges, especially where there is a proliferation of manuscript witnesses and stemmatic relations are difficult to chart; these are addressed by the editors of Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages in forthcoming volumes treating poetry composed in eddic metres.

A small collection of mythological poems is preserved in another manuscript, AM 748 I a 4°, the texts being close enough to those of the Codex Regius poems to suggest a common written source, with variations between the texts generally not very significant, although the naming of poems, their sequence, and other aspects of preservation are of independent value (Quinn 1990a). In general, eddic poems preserved as whole poems present a reasonably straightforward editorial proposition since most of the poems are preserved in just one version.