lore cuts: a norse reading list
let's all hang for nine days and nine nights on the world tree Yggdrasil
This is the second installation in my lore cuts series, in which I offer reading lists on variest European mythologies. This one’s on Norse myth. I won’t get too much into the Germanic or Anglo-Saxon material here, in part because there’s an awful lot less primary source material for those, but I may come back to the latter in a future post.
Where to Start
The Prose Edda, ed. and trans. by Jesse L. Byock
The Poetic Edda, ed. and trans. by Caroline Larrington
These two together are by far our most important sources for Norse mythology. Any given myth you’ve heard of likely comes from one of them. The creation of the world from the corpse of the primal giant Ymir, the deceptions of Loki, the fall of the gods at Ragnarok — it’s all here. The Poetic Edda’s verse can be dense and riddling — that’s part of its charm — but the Prose Edda is lucid and easy to read, and also not very long. If you just want the absolute basics of Norse myth, grab the Prose. If you really can’t be bothered with either, Neil Gaiman has helpfully penned a retelling of the Norse myths.
Deeper Cuts
The Völsunga Saga, ed. and trans. by Jesse L. Byock
The sagas are prose narratives, mostly written in Iceland in the High Middle Ages, that blur the lines between history and myth, legend and folkore. The Völsunga Saga is the most influential of these, serving as a source text for Wagner’s Ring cycle and Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Parts of it descend from the real history of fifth century Europe — Attila the Hun makes an appearance — set into a mythic world where Odin (and a cursed dwarven ring) shapes the destinies of men. This is the story of the dragonslayer Sigurd who slays a dragon, woos a valkyrie in a haunted hall, and learns to speak bird. Tolkien retold this in verse in The Legend of Sigurd and Guthrun.
The sagas in general are rewarding reads, especially if you’re looking for action and weird supernatural incursions. I particularly recommend Grettir’s Saga, which shares some material with Beowulf, and Eyrbyggja Saga, which begins with a war over poop and features an outbreak of undead revenants on an isolated farm. There’s also some kind of ghost seal.
Gesta Danorum, Saxo Grammaticus, ed. and trans. by whoever you can find
The first nine books of the Gesta Danorum (“Deeds of the Danes”) is, after the Eddas, maybe our most vital source on Norse myth and early Scandinavian history. Unfortunately, it’s hard to find a good English edition, though you can find some reprintings of older editions on Amazon. The link above is to the free version on Project Gutenberg.
Germania, Tacitus
As the title would suggest, this is an account of the Germans, not the Scandinavians. There would have been variation between Germanic paganism and Norse paganism, but there was also variation within both, and variation over time. Tacitus was writing much, much earlier than any of the sources given above, all of which were written by Christians after Norse, Germanic, or Anglo-Saxon paganism had ceased to be a going concerm. You’ll have to push through the interpretatio romana — the Roman tendency to interpret other religions through the lens of their own, and replace the names of the native gods in their writings with those of Roman ones. Hence when Tacitus says that Mercury is the chief god of the Suebi, we understand him to mean Odin, who fulfilled some of Mercury’s roles (they were both psychopomps, for example). It’s an essential source nonetheless, and well worth the fairly short read for anyone interested in the subject.
From the academy
The Viking Way: Magic and Mind in Late Iron Age Scandinavia, by Neil Price
This book is especially focused on sorcery and magic. A good understanding of Norse paganism requires the awareness that it did not exist in a vacuum — there was, for example, important interchange between the Germanic Scandinavians and the non-Indo-European Sami peoples of the North. Price delves into all of this and works hard to realize the conceptual mental landscape of Iron Age Scandinavians.