As lawspeaker, Sturluson was one of the most important politicians in Iceland. Eventually, he would serve as lawspeaker at the Althing, the Icelandic parliament. He quickly became known as a poet, but was also a successful lawyer. It would be in Reykjaholt that Sturluson would compose almost all of his poetry. He was said to have had many children, but only five are said to have survived to adulthood. The remains of his farm, including his hot outdoor bath, have been preserved to some extent. His marriage made him a wealthy man, and by 1206, he and his wife had settled in Reykjaholt. He was raised in the village of Oddi by Jon Loptsson, one of the most powerful chieftains in all of Iceland, from whom he learned much of the traditions of Icelandic culture and literature. His parents were Sturla Þórðarson and Guðný Böðvarsdóttir.

He was a distant descendant of Egill Skallagrimsson, the semi-mythical poet-warrior who is the protagonist of the Egils Saga. Nonetheless, a handful of facts are generally agreed upon. Sturluson has almost become a mythological figure in his own right, nearly as mysterious as the heroes and demigods found in his poems. Little definitive is known of Sturluson's life, and much of what is known is subject to dispute and conjecture. A major influence on the Icelandic poets of his own times, Sturluson has also influenced a number of non-Scandinavian authors, including the Argentinian poet and story-writer Jorge Luis Borges and a number of minor poets of German Romanticism. His works are also generally considered to be among the most beautiful and brilliantly-crafted of all Icelandic poetry. As an author of poetry, history, and instructional verse, Sturluson is one of the most informative sources for scholars of medieval Scandinavian history and culture. Sturluson is also believed, through stylistic and linguistic evidence, to be the author of Egils Saga, one of the most important and widely-read of all the Icelandic sagas. The Heimskringla is a more traditional sequence of semi-mythological sagas relating the history of the Norse kings. In the Prose Edda, an instructional poem of great value to scholars, Sturluson recounts a number of stories out of Norse mythology while explicating on the verse-forms and literary techniques utilized in each of the myths he recounts.

He is known today as the author of two lengthy verse works, or eddas, the Prose Edda and the Heimskringla. Snorri Sturluson (1178 – September 23, 1241) was an Icelandic historian, poet, and politician, considered to be one of the most important poets in Icelandic literature. A statue of Snorri Sturluson by Norwegian sculptor Gustav Vigeland was erected at Reykholt in 1947.

Anthony faulkes edda