Despite this, Edd Sturluson for many generations was the only relatively complete repository of knowledge about the mythological history of the Scandinavian world. Also today, however, it must be handled with great care, it is helpful in interpreting and supplementing myths, often known only in fragments from the song of the poetic Edda.
The breakthrough came in a year 1643. It was then that Bishop Brynjolfur Sveinsson discovered a collection of songs with a mythological content, similar in content to the first part of Sturluson's treatise. Due to this and the poetic nature of the works, Sveinsson took a priori, that they must be the prototype of Edda Sturluson and thus be older than her. He also founded, that the author can only be living in years 1056-1133 Saemund inn Fraud, called the Wise, whom he himself considered the greatest scholar of a bygone era. Hence the collection of songs he found he called Edda the Elder or Saemund. In next years, due to the nature of the works it consists of, she was also called the poetic Edda. Currently, the collection is called Codex Regius. It is composed of songs about gods and heroes. They were woven into their adventures in the form of a sentence, bard, proverbs and cautions and various moral instructions. Today, works known from other manuscripts are published with them. Through careful research it was established, that the Codex Regius is a copy of the earlier one, a lost manuscript written in all likelihood in Iceland. Minor mistakes made by the copyist allow us to conclude, that this text is a copy of another code, and it was not - as previously thought - based on oral tradition.