Wisdom in Old Norse denotes two things. On the one hand, wisdom describes maxims, proverbs, riddles and the like: abstracted pronouncements about humanity and the world it inhabits that might occur in a range of texts. On the other, wisdom describes a genre of texts that are concerned in whole or large part with the conveyance and context of such wisdom material. The two need to be understood together, like words and the typeface in which they are written, and as a pair the two sides of wisdom encapsulate a particular cultural urge to relate generalised knowledge to particular or collective experience. Wisdom literature in one sense derives from wisdom content, since the former perforce contained reams of the latter, but the relationship between the two was symbiotic. Wisdom as a genre stemmed from what was considered to be valued knowledge – and in turn helped valorise that knowledge, and situate its acquisition, exchange and deployment within a relatable framework. By this means knowledge was arranged and categorised, as well as contextualised with voice and setting.

The way in which wisdom texts encoded information inevitably depended on specific cultural, historical and literary circumstances. Both wisdom and the literature that conveyed it tended to be highly diverse, reflecting shifting tastes in what knowledge mattered and why. These variations can be perceived in a great many medieval and world cultures. In part that is because wisdom – and the desire to record it – is a response to universal social situations, and the inherent human desire to provide a structure for defining reality, knowledge and truth, in a sense doing what the concept of genre does in relation to literary compositions. Another reason for the heterogeneity of wisdom and literature is that it is an analytic category, not an ethnic one, which is to say that it is based on analogy with the textual product of a particular culture and then exported into others. In this instance the base category is ultimately the Biblical books of wisdom. If one takes Biblical wisdom as the prototype from which all others diverge, the expression of wisdom in other cultures will inevitably seem highly diverse.