Snorri Sturluson was born in 1179, fostered at Oddi, the leading centre of learning in Iceland, and made rich by marriage and richer by litigation. He was lawspeaker of the Althing twice, from 1215 to 1218 and again from 1222 to 1231, the highest office the Icelandic commonwealth had. He visited Norway in 1218 and became a retainer of the young King Hakon Hakonarson and Earl Skuli, and accepted, at least nominally, a commission to bring Iceland under Norwegian rule.
He did not deliver it, and Iceland's factional violence in the following decades entangled him thoroughly. He was on the losing side more than once, fled to Norway again in 1237, returned against the king's express prohibition, and in September 1241 was killed in the cellar of his house at Reykholt by men acting on Hakon's authority. Iceland lost its independence to Norway less than twenty-five years later.
He is also credited with Heimskringla, the history of the kings of Norway, and by many scholars with Egils saga, though that attribution is not certain. That combination matters for reading the Edda: Snorri was not a priest or a mythographer but a historian, a working poet and a political operator, writing about the old gods for reasons that included professional utility, aristocratic patronage and an evident personal delight in the material. The book is dedicated to teaching craft, and its longest section is a reference list.
The context is also worth naming. Skaldic poetry was going out of fashion, displaced by imported continental verse forms and by the fact that its imagery had become unintelligible to audiences who no longer knew the myths. Snorri wrote to arrest that decline, and the whole book is best read as a conservation effort by a man who could see the tradition he had trained in being forgotten.