According to John McKinnell, when we look for genuine heathen voices, there are three or perhaps four principle sources:
a) Mythological eddic poems
b) Skaldic verse
c) Viking Age Picture stones
d) Contemporary Christian views of Norse heathenism
Dating the material is problematic. While some of the eddic poems and skaldic verses may have been composed after the conversion of Iceland, in particular those poems preserved only in late paper manuscripts and skaldic verses incorporated into later sagas, there is little debate that on the whole, the bulk of eddic and skaldic poetry contain authentic heathen material. If the physical texts of the eddic poems can only be dated to the thirteenth century, that is not to say that the poems themselves did not originate much earlier. Eddic poetry bears all the hallmarks of oral-traditional verse, including alliteration, repetition and formulaic construction, with direct analogs in both Old English and Old High German poetry. Evidence indicates that the eddic songs are the last vestiges of the ancient oral histories of the Germanic people which Tacitus, writing in the first century AD, says “form the only record of their past,”(Germania 2), and which the Gothic historian Jordanes, writing in the sixth century, confirms, stating that “in the earliest times, they sang of the deeds of their ancestors,” (Getica, ch. 5).”
