Tumgik
#Prose Edda
ohnoitstbskyen · 1 year
Text
On God of War and "canon" in Norse mythology
Playing God of War: Ragnarök and reading writing about it reminds me of something a lot of people have trouble internalizing about Norse myth, which is is that
The vast, overwhelming majority of Norse mythology is lost and
There is no "canon" in Norse mythology
The concept of "canon" in religion is, at least in the west, very much a Christian thing (yes, it's also a feature of other religions). The idea that there is an authorized, central, divinely ordained, "official" central set of facts which are true, and everything else is fanfiction at best or heresy at worst.
And this is something we've taken with us into our general media criticism, hundreds of thousands of words exchanged between people debating which parts of Star Wars or the MCU are canon, or endlessly cycling through interpretations of what parts of Tolkien's mythos apply to each part of the Lord of the Rings or the Hobbit. I've participated in those discussions, and they can be a lot of fun, but it's worth remembering that this is only one of multiple ways to approach writing and narrative.
Norse mythology has no canon. There is no set of texts that have been declared by any central authority to be "the truth" of the Allfather, or the most correct depiction of Thor. Even in its own time, before its suppression by Christianity, Viking-age sailors, farmers and warriors would not have understood their religious practise as bounded by a finite and defined set of stories. It was an oral tradition, transmitted by telling and re-telling.
Your skjald knows some stories of the gods, maybe the guy the next town over knows some different ones, and maybe you go on a trading journey with a guy from Norway who knows completely different stories and you take those home with you where they become a part of the local rotation.
The primary sources for most Norse mythology (and certainly for God of War: Ragnarök) are the Prose Edda and Poetic Edda, two collections of texts compiled in the 13th century in Iceland by Snorri Sturluson, a Christian poet and politician, as well as possibly other contributors at the same time.
They are limited by their geography, consisting only of those stories that survived in Iceland, and limited by their time period. The Viking Age is generally considered to have ended around 1050 CE, so Sturluson was compiling these stories two hundred years after the time when Norse paganism would have been the dominant religious practise in Scandinavia or indeed Iceland.
We have other sources than the Eddas, of course, but they are painfully limited: Runestones and archeological artifacts, as well as stories told about the Vikings by people who weren't them, which obviously comes with a lot of biases. The Viking-era Scandinavians themselves simply didn't leave any substantial body of written sources that survived.
Sturluson being a Christian, writing for Christian audiences, also introduces a lot of suspicion of tampering. He might have had incentive to avoid recording certain stories, for fear of being accused of spreading heresy, and he may have edited or altered aspects of the stories he did record to make them palatable to his audience, or to serve his own political purposes. This, of course, is a concern with any author writing anything ever, but since Sturluson is quite literally our only source for so many of these stories, it is impossible to check his work against competing narratives.
The consequence of all of this is that the vast majority of Norse mythology is lost. We do not know the vast majority of what that old religious practise was, we do not know the vast majority of its stories. This was a set of beliefs and stories told and transmitted across populations ranging from what is now the inland plains of Germany to the heights of the mountains of Norway to the shores and harbors of Denmark to parts of modern day Russia. These disparate populations would have had an absolutely enormous range of shared and local religious practises, they would have emphasized and cared about different gods, they would have absorbed and incorporated stories from neighboring religious groups.
This has a couple of consequences. For one thing, the whiny pissbabies crying about Angrboða being portrayed as a person of color in God of War: Ragnarök because "there were no black people in Norse mythology!" are, indeed, full of piss and expired baby oil. They don't know that, because nobody knows that.
Viking sailors made it as far as Constantinople and old Norse was once spoken in parts of Crimea. They even managed to make it across the goddamn Atlantic to found a settlement in Newfoundland, so the idea that old Norse peoples wouldn't know what a person of color is or tell stories about them is just absurd on the face of it. We have no direct evidence that they told stories about gods of color, but to look at the tiny snapshot provided by one Christian poet writing for a Christian audience in Iceland two hundred years after the Christianization of Scandinavia and confidently concluding that people of color couldn't possibly have existed in the Norse imagination is like finding the Q key off a keyboard lying on the ground and concluding there can be no such thing as vowels or the letter L.
The tiny sliver of Norse mythology that has survived to the modern day should to a modern reader be a prompt to imagine the vast possibility of what has been lost, not a reason to reduce the entire culture of my ancestors to whatever bits that were left by the time some dude in Iceland found it interesting and convenient to write them down.
Which leads us on to the other interesting consequence of the facts of Norse mythology.
It is an oral tradition, with no central canon and no central authority, whose religious practises were local and varied, whose stories were designed to be shared and picked up by whoever finds them compelling. Which means that any story we tell, now, about the gods that we find compelling is every bit as "canon" as anything that survives in the Eddas.
Which is to say: not canon at all, unless you decide to believe in it. Or, hell, even if you just find it enjoyable.
God of War: Ragnarök is as canon as Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology is as canon as Jul i Valhal that ran on Danish TV in 2005 is as canon as the MCU Thor, is as canon as the Prose Edda, is as canon as the half-remembered re-telling of Norse myth I heard from my Danish teacher in class in 1998.
It is often very difficult for a lot of modern audiences to free themselves from the idea of "canon." We seem to instinctively want a certain set of stories to be "the real ones," a certain narrative to be the "official" one, and set adrift without that sense of central authority to guide us, a lot of people exhibit what I would call an almost resentful anxiety. If none of it is definitely true, then what is even the point of any of it? If you can't know for sure which story is the most real, then all of it must be meaningless!
And yeah. It's easy to feel that way. We live in the Age of Canon, the era of the cinematic universe and the franchise, the epoch of copyright. But that is only one way to understand stories and narrative.
If you listen to the stories of the old gods, whether out of the Eddas or re-told in pop culture, and you take some of that with you, and you pass the good bits on to someone else, then you are participating in the oldest and most sacred tradition of Norse mythology. These stories do not belong to any one author (especially not the goddamn Mouse!) or even to any one people. They were telling stories of Thor along the rivers of Russia a thousand years ago, Viking sailors scratched their names in runes in the Hagia Sophia, Islamic artifacts have been found in Viking burials. Those who look at the tradition of my ancestors and feel compelled to do enclosure around them are fools and charlatans, fearful and small-minded.
Our stories are monopolized these days by capital. Canon to them is a tool of enclosure, a way to shut people out of participating in the modern mythology they are trying to build, except with their permission and profit in mind. But there is another way.
Listen to the stories and pass them on. The story you believe in won't be the one everyone likes, and the version you tell won't be the same version someone else passes on from you. But every telling takes the soul of the teller with it, and the stories we weave together in communal tradition become a picture of every storyteller who has contributed to them. And you spite the fucking Mouse.
1K notes · View notes
illustratus · 26 days
Text
Tumblr media
Nótt riding Hrímfaxi by Peter Nicolai Arbo
111 notes · View notes
cuties-in-codices · 9 months
Text
Tumblr media
Auðumbla, a primeval cow from norse mythology
in Ólafur Brynjúlfsson's "Sæmundar og Snorra Edda", an illustrated icelandic manuscript retelling the medieval "prose edda", 1760
source: Copenhagen, Royal Library, NKS 1867 4º, fol. 95r
135 notes · View notes
broomsick · 1 year
Text
Kennings to Loki
Tumblr media
Hail to the Bench-Mate of Óðinn and the Æsir
Hail to the Brother of Býleistr and of Helblindi,
Hail to the the Sly God,
Hail to the Visitor and Chest-Trapping of Geirrödr,
Hail to the Father of the Monster of Ván and of the Vast Monster, and of Hel, and Áli;
Hail to the Kinsman of Sleipnir
Hail to the Harmer of Sif's Hair
Hail to the Thief of the Giants, of the Goat, of the Brísingamen, and of Idunn's Apples;
Hail to the Husband of Sigyn,
Hail to the Slanderer and Cheat of the Gods,
Hail to the Contriver of Baldr's Death,
Hail to the Son of Fárbauti and Laufey, or of Nil,
Hail to the the Bound God
Hail to the Wrangling Foe of Heimdallr and of Skaði.
Tumblr media Tumblr media
136 notes · View notes
lokisbeautifulangel · 9 months
Text
i was watching some youtube videos on Loki and his shenanigans about the walls of asgard  & Sleipnir  while listening i decided to scroll threw the comment section & i came across a comment that was purely gold like bro 
‘’Loki made himself submissive and breedable for the squad ‘’
well when you put it that ways, its hilarious ahah 
31 notes · View notes
hecatesdelights · 23 days
Text
Tumblr media
Odin, the All-Father
I know that I hung
on the wind-swept tree
all nine nights
with spear was I wounded
and given to Odin,
myself to me,
on that tree which no one knows
from which roots it grows.
Bread I was not given,
no drink from the horn,
downwards I glared;
up I pulled the runes,
screaming I took them,
from there I fell back again.
- excerpt from Sturluson's Prose Edda.
6 notes · View notes
notthesomefather · 1 year
Text
Tumblr media
Saga is a super cool goddess and I wish we knew more about her. Here are the bits of info we do know from written sources:
Snorri, Prose Edda - Gylfaginning (A conversation between two men) "Who are the Asyniur*?" "The highest is Frigg. She has a dwelling called Fensalir and it is very splendid. Second is Saga. She dwells at Sokkvabekk, and that is a big place."
*goddess plural
Dr. Jackson Crawford, Poetic Eddas - Grimmismal (Spoken by Odin) "A fourth hall is Sokkvabekk, which the cool waves crash upon. There Odin and Saga drink happily every day, from golden cups."
She is largely associated with libraries, lore, tales, and knowledge/oral history being passed down.
55 notes · View notes
rosemarywaterwitch · 1 year
Text
Has anybody some recommendations on which Edda to buy?
I just can’t find one that looks somewhat good and is not written as if the stories of the gods are just what marvel portrays them as.
30 notes · View notes
ancientorigins · 2 years
Text
The world of Midgard was one of nine realms in Norse mythology, and it was the only realm that was safe for mortal humans. The other realms, filled with other races and lots of monsters, surrounded the safe “island” of Midgard.
60 notes · View notes
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media
8 notes · View notes
Episode 13: Maja Bäckvall on the Prose Edda, funky Norse illustrations, and the MCU Thor movies
Uppsala-Eddan, p. 47, Skaldic lists with figures dancing (?) in the margins.
In Episode 13 of Inside My Favorite Manuscript, Lindsey and Dot chat with Maja Bäckvall about Uppsala University DG 11, one of four surviving copies of the so-called Prose Edda written by Snorri Sturluson in the 1220s. The Uppsala copy was made in Iceland in the first quarter of the 14th century. We talk about what exactly the Prose Edda is, how this copy differs from the others, we look at the illustrations, and we also make Maja talk about THOR (the movies from the Marvel Cinematic Universe).
Listen here, or wherever you find your podcasts.
Below the cut are more page images and links to the shows and books we mention during our conversation.
Uppsala-Eddan, Uppsala University Library DG 11 (digitized on the Alvin portal)
Uppsala-Eddan, p. 50
Tumblr media
Close-up on p. 50 - see the man's name written over his head (also there's a little hole in the parchment on the right, with the text from the page before visible through it)
Tumblr media
Another close-up on p. 50, where a later artist (or wishes-to-be-an-artist) is trying their hand at drawing their own king.
Tumblr media
Uppsala-Eddan, p. 49 (the other side of p. 50), with illustration of a woman added to the manuscript in the 15th century:
Tumblr media
Uppsala-Eddan, p. 47, Skaldic lists with figures dancing (?) in the margins.
Tumblr media
Uppsala-Eddan, p. 42. The bottom portion of the page was left blank and filled in later, with text written upside-down. The staining may be from a chemical reagent used to bring out faded ink.
Tumblr media
Uppsala-Eddan, p. 42, a close-up of the bottom of the page, reversed so the text is right-side-up
Tumblr media
Uppsala-Eddan, p. 43, where the upside-down text continues in the bottom margin.
Tumblr media
Uppsala-Eddan, p. 43, bottom margin reversed and cropped
Tumblr media
Uppsala-Eddan, front flyleaf recto (original parchment with text and illustration added later)
Tumblr media
Uppsala-Eddan, p. 1, close-up of "sphinx-like creature" (I'm not really sure what that is!)
Tumblr media
Uppsala-Eddan, front flyleaf verso with Bishop drawn in after the original text was written, probably at the same time as the text written on the recto side of the leaf
Tumblr media
Uppsala-Eddan, p. 1, the first page of the Edda text.
Tumblr media
Uppsala-Eddan, p. 1, a close-up at the text in red at the top of the page, which names the text as Edda and the author as Snorri Sturluson (both underlined)
Tumblr media
Uppsala-Eddan, p. 1, close-up of the initial, which is quite fancy for an Icelandic manuscript
Tumblr media
Thor movies in the MCU (IMDB)
Vikings TV show (IMDB)
The Northman (Dir. Robert Eggers, 2022) (IMDB)
πορφυρογέννητη, a fan fiction by neonheartbeat (posted with permission from the author)
Travel Light by Naomi Mitchison (book on Goodreads)
6 notes · View notes
freyjas-light · 1 year
Text
Tumblr media
Starting a period of research and studying. I've never read the Poetic or Prose Edda from beginning to end. Figured it was time to change that. Also got this lovely journal to write down notes and thoughts along the way.
7 notes · View notes
poeticnorth · 1 year
Text
Well, I've worded more wordy words. This time about Thor in attempt to link him to the afterlife.
7 notes · View notes
Text
Most sus part of the Poetic Edda (this is Crawfords translation BTW)
Tumblr media
15 notes · View notes
broomsick · 1 year
Text
“The Skírnismál isn’t the love story you want it to be, it’s about coercion and dominance!” It’s neither about one or the other. It’s above all a play, and when you dig deeper, an age old, badly preserved dialogical poem explaining the union of fertility and of the earth, with the latter embodied by Gerðr.
9 notes · View notes
Text
Worms from the rotting remains of Ymir became the cardinal directions
Tumblr media
Odin and his two brothers were in fear that the sky would fall upon them.
Luckily, worms had started to slither out of the rotting remains of the recently murdered Ymir and turned into dwarves.
The brothers grabbed 4 of these newly developed dwarves and had them hold up the sky.
They became known as Nordri (north), Sundri (south), Austri (east) and Vestri (West).
5 notes · View notes