because Iceland was such a small society numerically, the penetration of Christianity throughout the culture occurred much more quickly than in those other nations. Secondly, Iceland had only been seriously settled from the last quarter of the ninth century, so the populace could (and did) maintain an accurate oral tradition of their family genealogies until, through the intervention of Christianity, they were recorded in written form. These genealogies existed coterminously with a sharp memory of general Nordic mythology as shared in large part with the other Norse cultures. Thus, thirdly, Iceland had an advantage in the cultural sweepstakes over the other Nordic nations in that it was relatively easy for it to throw up an educated elite who had mastered both reading and writing and who had lived in a society in which settler genealogy and sagas were organically intertwined in everyday life. Hence, it was Icelanders who become the premier paid remembrancers of the Norse aristocracy. The best of these was Snorri Sturluson who, among other things, produced a life of St Olaf of Norway and a biography of an Icelandic poet-warrior, and also a record of the kings of Norway and Sweden from the earliest times through the twelfth century. Some of this was puffery, but in fact it was also high art.1 Grasping Snorri’s personality is impossible for he comes from a world for which we have at present few cognate figures: a large and ambitious landholder in southern Iceland, a courtier to Norwegian royalty, a major political figure in his own country and, apparently, a fearsomely ill-tempered man whom you really did not wish to have sit at your table. Beyond that, he was a disciplined and erudite genius in prose, poetry, and poetics. Snorri’s monumental work, The Prose Edda, is (despite its title) in part about the theory of Nordic poetry and a thesaurus of figures of speech and of characters’ names, but that is not what is central to our present purpose. What counts here is that Snorri assembled in one package a coherent corpus of work, parallel to the Lebor Gabála in Irish mytho-genealogical writing but much smoother and more believable. He melds together a small bit of Christian piety with the largest collection of Norse mythology assembled in the Middle Ages, incorporates the genealogies of the ancient Norse gods, and joins these to sagas and genealogies that date from the settlement of Iceland and which were part of an oral tradition that was close enough in time to the actual events to be fundamentally factual, albeit not necessarily precise in every detail.
[...]
Snorri was a Christian, or at least a shrewd enough courtier to bow his head before the Hebrew genealogies, however briefly.

(Akenson 2007)

Snorri’s work conforms to Christian historiographic conventions, beginning with ritual homage to Genesis: “In the beginning Almighty God created heaven and earth and everything that goes with them and, last of all, two human beings, Adam and Eve, from whom have come families.” This feigned submission to biblical order allows Snorri to pivot almost immediately toward a rival lineage—a genealogical chain extending from human ancestors to Norse gods. Having invoked Adam and Eve to satisfy orthodoxy, he then “escapes smoothly and swiftly sideways,” constructing an alternative sacred history in which Odin, Thor, and their descendants populate a fully realized system of divine and human descent.

He explains that after Noah’s flood the population grew so large and their settlements so spread out that the great majority of humankind left off paying homage to Yahweh and boycotted all reference to him. Soon, they developed their own religion, one based upon the material world, but reflectively so: Snorri does not condemn it. Instead, he slides gracefully into telling us about the “Aesir,” Nordic gods who come from Asgard, an otherworld found vaguely in Asia and also, according to other Norse versions, where Valhalla and the palaces of various gods are located. Once he has a locale and a broad description of world geography defined, Snorri drops any pretence of Christian piety and gives us the real goods: god stories, genealogies, the works. Clearly this is an act of cultural resistance to the imperial might of the ancient Hebrew model as enforced through Christianity. That is interesting in itself, but I think Snorri is much cleverer than that: he is, I suspect, engaged in a massive subversion of the Hebrew-Christian genealogical program.

Snorri’s gesture, Akenson argues, is not mere defiance but “a massive subversion of the Hebrew-Christian genealogical program.” By using the structural logic of biblical genealogy—the very framework that legitimized Christian cosmology—Snorri turned it “inside out.” He appropriated its narrative machinery to enshrine pagan deities and local mythic histories as the ancestral foundation of Nordic civilization. This act of cultural counter-imperialism proved so effective that its logic survived far beyond its original context. Akenson demonstrates this by tracing how Snorri’s mythic genealogies, through centuries of repetition and transmission, found their way into the Mormon genealogical archives—the world’s largest repository of family lineage. There, figures like Odin, Frigg, and Skjold appear as historical ancestors, integrated seamlessly into lines of descent leading to medieval Norse rulers such as Somerled of Argyll. The Mormon database, designed to preserve the Hebrew-Christian genealogy of humankind, thus unwittingly perpetuates Snorri’s inverted version of it.

For Akenson, this strange convergence is the ultimate proof of Snorri’s success. His “seamless glove” of mythic genealogy still fits perfectly, centuries later—“turned inside out,” but perfectly shaped by his subversive hand.

1. Akenson, Donald Harman. 2007. Some Family: The Mormons and How Humanity Keeps Track of Itself. Montréal, CA: McGill-Queen’s University Press.