...religious ideas and beliefs in these geographical areas have always varied by time, place, fashion, cultural and social environment, and the general demands of society. Snorri Sturluson's' suggestion that Óðinn was the accepted leader of the Nordic pantheon is seriously challenged not only by place name evidence in Norway, Sweden, and Iceland but also by the fact that Freyr is called Freyr ('Lord'), that Þórr has pride of place amongst the gods in both Uppsala and Mære, and that Óðinn is not mentioned in the twelfth-century Landnámabók, the early Icelandic Book of Settlements which provides genealogical information and legends about the first settlers. The notion that there was a single, unified belief that the world had been created from the giant Ymir (given in Vafþrúðnismál, stanza 21" and Gylfaginning, chs VII-VIII") seems contradicted by the statement in Völuspá, stanza 4 that the earth rose from the sea (an idea deftly avoided by Snorri). As John McKinnell has effectively demonstrated in his book Both One and Many, the extant mythological texts in the Poetic Edda and Prose Edda suggest that there were clearly several different images of Loki over time, and also a variety of accounts of Þórr's fishing trip (some of which ended with Þórr killing the Middle-Earth sea serpent long before Ragnarök)." The range of conflicting myths that must have been in existence within the remarkable multicultural gathering of people that settled in Iceland in the late ninth century is particularly evident in the difficulty that Snorri Sturluson has in trying to construct a single image of the Nordic cosmological world in the Prose Edda; and also in the words of the Icelandic editor of the Sigurðr poems found in the main Codex Regius manuscript of the Poetic Edda, as he attempts to piece together the differing accounts of how Sigurðr Fáfnisbani died (in the prose Frá dauða Sigurðar). Written history demands facts and, ideally, uniformity, whereas oral culture has always tended to be quite satisfied with differing degrees of variation within spoken or sung texts'." The same can be said for folkloristics. —"How Elvish Were The Álfar?" Terry Gunnell (2007)