norse mythology research paper

Norse Mythology for Smart People

Our current knowledge of the pre-Christian mythology and religion of the Norse and other Germanic peoples has been painstakingly pieced together from a large assortment of sources over the past few centuries.

The most significant category among these sources is without a doubt the literature concerning mythological and historical subjects written in the Old Norse language from about 800 to 1400 CE, a span that includes the epochs we now refer to as the Viking Age and the Medieval Period. The Scandinavians and Icelanders held onto their traditional religion far longer than the more southerly Germanic peoples, and the Icelanders in particular did a remarkable job of preserving their heathen lore long after Christianity became the island’s official religion in 1000 CE. Were it not for the body of poems, treatises, and sagas that they’ve handed down to us, the pre-Christian worldview of the Germanic peoples would now be almost entirely lost.

The Poetic Edda

Old Norse-speaking poets have left us countless valuable clues regarding their religious perspective, but the collection of poems known today as the “Poetic Edda” or “Elder Edda” contains the most mythologically rich and thorough of these. Two of these poems, Völuspá (“The Insight of the Seeress”) and Grímnismál (“The Song of the Hooded One”) are the closest things we have to systematic accounts of the pre-Christian Norse cosmology and mythology.

The name “Edda” has been retroactively applied to this set of poems and is a reference to the Edda of Snorri Sturluson (see below). The authors of the poems are all anonymous. Debates have raged over the dates and locations of the poems’ composition; all we can really be certain about is that, due to the fact that some of the poems are obviously written in a manner that places them in dialogue with Christian ideas (especially the aforementioned Völuspá ), the poems must have been composed sometime between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, when Iceland and Scandinavia were being gradually Christianized.

The Poetic Edda is likely the single most important of all of our sources.

The Prose Edda

Among the prose Old Norse sources, the Prose Edda , or simply the “Edda,” contains the greatest quantity of information concerning our topic. This treatise on Norse poetics was written in the thirteenth century by the Icelandic scholar and politician Snorri Sturluson, long after Christianity had become the official religion of Iceland and the old perception of the world and its attendant practices had long been fading into ever more distant memory. The etymology and meaning of the title “Edda” have puzzled scholars, and none of the explanations offered so far have gained any particularly widespread acceptance.

Snorri made use of the poems in the Poetic Edda, but added to his account a considerable amount of information that can’t be found in those poems. In some cases he quotes from other poems that have been lost over the course of the centuries, but in other cases he offers nothing but his naked assertions. Some of these can be confirmed by other sources, and many of his uncorroborated claims are in keeping with the general worldview he describes, which makes scholars more inclined to accept them. Others of these assertions, however, appear to be simple rationalizations, attempts to reconcile the old mythos with Christianity, or other sorts of fabrications. Modern readers of Snorri have advanced widely differing appraisals of the value of his work.

While it would be rash to simply dismiss everything in the Prose Edda that the earlier poems haven’t already told us, it would be equally presumptuous to accept every statement of Snorri’s at face value. Unfortunately, the latter approach was common throughout much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and as a result most popular introductions to Norse mythology uncritically rehash Snorri’s contentions and thereby present a skewed portrait of the old gods and tales.

Even though their definition of “history,” or at least what constitutes a reliable piece of historical information, might diverge considerably from our present understanding, the Icelanders of the Middle Ages have left us with numerous historical texts that add mightily to our knowledge of pre-Christian Norse religious traditions. While many of these, such as the priest Ari Thorgilsson’s Íslendingabók (“Book of Icelanders”) and the anonymous Landnámabók (“Book of Settlements”), don’t fit into the saga genre, the majority of these historical works are Icelandic sagas.

The sagas were written primarily in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and recount the lives of famous Icelanders, Scandinavian kings, and Germanic folk heroes. Their literary style is as stark as the landscape of Iceland; events are described in a terse, matter-of-fact way that leaves much to the imagination and intuition. When elements of pre-Christian religion are mentioned, it’s almost invariably casually and in passing, as opposed to the more direct manner of Snorri and the poets. The most notable exception to this is the first several chapters of the Saga of the Ynglings , which give a thorough exposition of the character and deeds of many of the Norse deities, albeit in a euhemerized (trying to rationalize mythology by casting it as an exaggerated account of ordinary historical events) context. This same technique is used in the Prose Edda , which should be unsurprising, since the Saga of the Ynglings and the collection of sagas to which it belongs, the Heimskringla or History of the Kings of Norway , were also written by Snorri. Virtually all of the other sagas, however, are anonymous.

Other Sources

Indispensable as it is, Old Norse literature isn’t our only source of information concerning the pre-Christian religion of the Germanic peoples.

The Danish scholar Saxo Grammaticus wrote a Latin history of the Danes ( Gesta Danorum , The History of the Danes ) in the twelfth century that includes variants of many of the tales found in the Old Norse sources and even a few otherwise unattested ones. As with Snorri, these are presented in a highly euhemerized form.

Late in the first century CE, the Roman historian Tacitus wrote a book on the Germanic tribes who dwelt north of the Empire. This work, De origine et situ Germanorum , “The Origin and Situation of the Germanic Peoples,” commonly referred to simply as Germania , contains many vivid descriptions of the religious views and practices of the tribes.

The literature of the Anglo-Saxons, another branch of the Germanic family, contains several mythological parallels to some of the narratives and themes dealt with in the Old Norse sources. The epic poem Beowulf is the most significant Old English source, and the Latin work Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (“The Ecclesiastical History of the English People”) by the eighth century monk Bede contains numerous pieces of information concerning the pre-Christian religious traditions of the Anglo-Saxons.

The continental Germans have also bequeathed to us accounts of their heathen traditions such as those found in the so-called Merseburg Charms, which are medieval prayers or spells composed in Old High German, and the Middle High German epic poem Nibelungenlied .

Medieval law codes from the Germanic countries are another valuable source; many of them describe, or at least reference, particular animistic folk traditions in the process of outlawing them for being “pagan” and “abominable.”

Archaeology is the most significant of our non-literary sources. A plenitude of archaeological finds have provided striking corroborations of elements from the written sources, as well as offering new data that can’t necessarily be explained by the written sources, reminding us of how incomplete a picture the literary sources contain.

The study of place-names has also yielded valuable evidence. Many sites throughout the Germanic lands are named after heathen deities, often combined with words that indicate a sacral significance such as “temple” or “grove.” This allows us to trace the popularity of devotion to specific deities across space and time, and often yields additional clues about the gods’ personalities and attributes, as well as those of their worshipers.

Finally, the study of comparative religion has illuminated our understanding of the pre-Christian religion of the Germanic peoples by intelligently filling in some of the gaps in our other sources by connecting the known themes, figures, and tales from the Germanic peoples with those of other, related peoples. For example, esteemed historian of religion Georges Dumézil has shown how the Germanic myths are in many ways representative of much older Indo-European models, and others such as Mircea Eliade and Neil Price have analyzed the profound similarities between Norse shamanism and that of other circumpolar and Eurasian societies.

The Present State of Our Knowledge

Based on the above, you might be tempted to think that we currently have a very full picture of heathen Germanic mythology and religion. But such is certainly not the case. As I try to make clear in various articles on this site, the knowledge provided to us on these topics by our sources is actually very fragmentary. We do, of course, know many things about the ancient Germanic religion, but there are also gaps in our knowledge that sometimes seem as vast as Ginnungagap itself. To fill in these lacunae, we can avail ourselves of the time-honored techniques of informed guesswork and intuition, but there will always be frayed and broken threads that dangle tantalizingly at the outer edges of our knowledge, reminding us of the missing pieces that might still be available to us today were it not for the intervening centuries of the more or less malign neglect of that information.

Looking for more great information on Norse mythology and religion? While this site provides the ultimate online introduction to the topic, my book The Viking Spirit provides the ultimate introduction to Norse mythology and religion period . I’ve also written a popular list of The 10 Best Norse Mythology Books , which you’ll probably find helpful in your pursuit.

The Ultimate Online Guide to Norse Mythology and Religion

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Old Norse Mythology

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Old Norse Mythology treats the mythology of Scandinavia: the gods Þórr (Thor) with his hammer, the wily and duplicitous Óðinn (Odin), the sly Loki, and other mythological figures. They create the world, battle their enemies, and die at the end of the world, which arises anew with a new generation of gods. These stories were the mythology of the Vikings, but they were not written down until long after the conversion to Christianity, mostly in Iceland. The mythology of the Vikings was an oral mythology, without canonical or even fixed texts. Following contemporary research trends, this book recognizes that variation in time and space are to be expected, and it notes rather than tries to resolve inconsistencies. In addition to a broad overview of Nordic myths, the book presents a case study of one myth, which tells of how Þórr (Thor) fished up the World Serpent analysing the myth as a sacred text of the Vikings. Old Norse mythology also explores the debt we owe to medieval intellectuals, who were able to incorporate the old myths into new paradigms that helped the myths to survive when they were no longer part of a religious system, and it traces the use of the mythology in ideological contexts, from the Viking Age until the twenty-first century.

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Folklore and Old Norse Mythology (ed. Frog & Joonas Ahola)

2021, FF Communications 323. Helsinki: Kalevala Society.

The present volume responds to the rising boom of interest in folklore and folklore research in the study of Old Norse mythology. The twenty-two authors of this volume reveal the dynamism of this lively dialogue, which is characterized by a diversity of perspectives linking to different fields and national scholarships. The chapters open with a general overview of how the concepts of “folklore” and “mythology” have been understood and related across the history of Old Norse studies, which is followed by a group of chapters that discuss and present different approaches and types of source materials, with methodological and theoretical concerns. The interest in folklore is bound up with interests in practice and lived religion, which are brought into focus in a series of chapters relating to magic and ritual. Attention then turns to images that link to mythology and different mythic agents in studies that explore a variety of usage in meaning-making in different forms of cultural expression. The next group of studies spotlights motifs, with perspectives on synchronic usage across genres and different media, cross-cultural exchange, and long-term continuities. The volume culminates in discussions of complex stories, variously in oral traditions behind medieval sources and relationships between accounts found in medieval sources and those recorded from more recent traditions. Individually, the chapters variously offer reflexive and historical research criticism, new research frameworks, illustrative studies, and exploratory investigations. Collectively, they illustrate the rapidly evolving multidisciplinary discussion at the intersections of folklore and Old Norse mythology, where the transformative impacts were recently described as a paradigm shift. They open new paths for scholarly discussion with the potential to inspire future research.

Related papers

FF Communications 323, 2021

Folklore in Old Norse - Old Norse in Folklore (Nordistica Tartuensia 20), 2014

During the 20th century, Old Norse philology has been strongly textually oriented. This is evident in saga scholarship, where the book-prose ideology turned the issue of the origin of individual sagas into an issue of direct influences from other written works. This focus has methodological advantages, but it has also meant that valuable folkloristic knowledge has been neglected. The present volume targets the advantages, the problems and the methods of using folklore material and theory in Old Norse scholarship. An important theme in folklore is the encounter with the Supernatural and such stories are indeed common in saga literature. Generally, however, scholars have tended to focus on feuds and the social structure of the sagas, and less on encounters with Otherworld beings. In this volume, the supernatural themes in the sagas are discussed by means of several approaches, some folkloristic, some traditionally philological.

Nordistica Tartuensia 20, 2014

Nordic references abound in contemporary popular culture, they are so common in fantasy literature, role-playing games, comics or cinematography that the time of their anonymity outside of Scandinavia has long gone by. Whether or not merely anthropological curiosities that serve for a good story or attempts to reconnect with the ancient past in the form of Neopagan revivals, the world of Asgard and Valhalla proves to be very potent in its adaption to different discourses.

European Journal of Archaeology, 2007

The present thesis involves a study of the various ways in which the Northernmost regions of Fenno-Scandinavia and their inhabitants were depicted as being associated with the supernatural in pre-Modern literature. Its findings are based on an exhaustive study of the numerous texts engaging with this subject, ranging from the Roman era to the publication of the Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus of Olaus Magnus in 1555. The thesis presents and analyses the most common supernatural motifs associated with this Far- Northern area, which include animal transformation, sorcery and pagan worship, as well as speculating about their origins, and analyzes the ways in which such ideas and images evolved, both over time and depending on the nature of the written sources in which they appear. The author argues that Northern Fenno-Scandinavia was thought of as a wild, supernatural and pagan land because of the differences in languages, ways of living and magical practices of its inhabitants, an image partially mirrored in literary texts, some of which are of considerable antiquity. The thesis also notes the way in which the supernatural images associated with the Sámi and Finnic peoples seem to have also become attached to the other Germanic-related people living in the north of Norway, who are also often depicted as supernatural “others” equipped with supernatural or magical skills in the literature.

Hermann, Pernille, Stephen A. Mitchell, Jens Peter Schjødt, and Amber J. Rose, eds. 2017. Old Norse Mythology—Comparative Perspectives. Publications of the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature, 3. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

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The vivid presence of material objects in Scandinavian cosmology, as preserved in the Old Norse myths, carries underexplored traces of belief systems and the material experience of Iron Age Scandinavia (400–1000 CE). This paper proposes an archaeological reading of Norse mythology to help explain how ancient Scandinavians understood the presence and role of deities, magic, and the supernatural in everyday life. The Norse myths retain records of material objects that reinforced Scandinavian oral traditions and gave their stories power, memory, and influence. From Thor’s hammer and Freyja’s feathered cloak to Sigyn’s bowl and Ran’s net, such materials and the stories they colour are informed by everyday objects of Iron Age life – spun with the magic, belief, and narrative traditions that made them icons. The mythic objects promoted a belief system that expected and embraced the imperfections of objects, much like deities. These imperfections in the divine Norse objects and the ways in which the gods interact with their materials are part and parcel of the Scandinavian religious mentality and collective social reality. This work ultimately questions the relationship between materiality and myth, and seeks to nuance our current understandings of the ancient Scandinavian worldview based on the available textual evidence.

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