Norse & Eddic.

OpeningGods who knew they would die.

The Norse gods are unique among the major mythological systems in knowing, from the start, how the world ends. They lose. They fight anyway.

This deck moves from the cosmogony — Ginnungagap, Ymir, the world-tree — through the major figures of the Aesir and Vanir, the great myths (Mjölnir, the binding of Loki, the death of Baldur), to Ragnarök and the literary afterlife. The skaldic tradition, the saga tradition, and Wagner's Ring cycle are treated separately.

The two primary sources are the Poetic Edda — anonymous mythological and heroic poems mostly preserved in the 13th-century Icelandic Codex Regius — and Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda, c. 1220, a handbook of mythology and skaldic technique written by an Icelandic chieftain-historian who was also a Christian.

Chapter IGinnungagap.

In the beginning there was Ginnungagap, the yawning void, between two regions: Niflheim in the north (mist, cold, the river Élivágar) and Muspelheim in the south (fire, the giant Surt with his flaming sword). Where the rivers met the heat, ice melted into the form of the giant Ymir, the first being. From Ymir's sweat came the frost giants. From the salty rocks the cow Auðumla licked there emerged the man Búri, grandfather of Odin.

Odin and his brothers Vili and Vé killed Ymir and made the world from his body. His blood became the seas, his bones the mountains, his skull the sky held up by four dwarves at its corners (Norðri, Suðri, Austri, Vestri), his brain the clouds. The first humans, Ask and Embla, were made from two driftwood logs: Odin gave them spirit, Hœnir intelligence, Lóðurr blood and the colour of life.

The world is held together by Yggdrasil, the immense ash tree whose three roots run to the well of Urd (where the Norns spin fate), to Mímir's well of wisdom, and to the spring Hvergelmir in Niflheim where the dragon Níðhöggr gnaws.

Chapter IIThe nine worlds.

Yggdrasil's branches connect nine worlds. Asgard, citadel of the Aesir gods, joined to Midgard (the human world) by the rainbow-bridge Bifröst, watched by Heimdall whose horn Gjallarhorn will sound the alarm at Ragnarök. Vanaheim, home of the older Vanir gods (Njörðr, Freyr, Freyja). Alfheim of the light-elves. Svartalfheim or Niðavellir of the dwarves and dark-elves.

Jötunheim of the giants, beyond a great river from Asgard. Niflheim the frozen mist-realm. Muspelheim the fire-realm. Hel, the realm of the dishonoured dead, ruled by Loki's daughter of the same name — half blue-black corpse, half living woman.

The geography is not quite consistent across sources. Snorri tries to systematise; the Eddic poems are more local and elliptical. Treat the nine-worlds map as a Snorrian organising device.

Chapter IIIOdin.

Allfather, but not father-as-Zeus. One-eyed (he gave the other eye to drink from Mímir's well of wisdom), wanderer in a broad-brimmed hat and grey cloak, accompanied by the ravens Huginn (thought) and Muninn (memory) and the wolves Geri and Freki. Rides the eight-legged horse Sleipnir.

God of war, but more centrally of poetry, magic (seiðr, traditionally women's magic which Odin practised at the cost of his masculine status), and the runes — which he won, in Hávamál, by hanging himself from Yggdrasil for nine nights, wounded by his own spear, given no bread and no cup.

His warriors are the einherjar, slain heroes brought to Valhalla by the Valkyries, where they fight all day and feast all night, in training for Ragnarök. Odin's purpose is not to win Ragnarök — he knows he cannot — but to muster the largest possible army for the foreseen last battle.

Chapter IVThor.

Red-bearded, hot-tempered, immensely strong, the most-worshipped god of the Viking-age laity. Son of Odin and the giantess Jörð (Earth). Wields Mjölnir, the hammer that always returns to his hand and can be shrunk to fit inside his shirt. Wears the iron gauntlets Járngreipr and the belt Megingjörð, which doubles his strength. Rides a chariot drawn by two goats, Tanngrisnir and Tanngnjóstr, that he can kill, eat, and resurrect overnight from their bones.

Thor's job is the protection of Midgard — humans — and Asgard from the giants. He kills them in great numbers. The poem Þrymskviða tells of Thor disguised as Freyja in a wedding dress to recover Mjölnir from the giant Þrymr. Hymiskviða tells of his fishing-trip with the giant Hymir, where he hooks the world-serpent Jörmungandr and pulls it almost out of the sea before Hymir cuts the line.

At Ragnarök, Thor and Jörmungandr will kill each other.

Chapter VLoki.

Not an Aesir by birth — son of the giant Fárbauti — but blood-brother to Odin and resident among the gods. Shape-shifter (mare, salmon, fly, falcon-feather-cloak). His function is twofold: he creates the gods' problems by mischief and then solves them by cleverness. The hammer, Sleipnir, the wall around Asgard, the golden hair of Sif, the binding of Fenrir — all involve Loki creating the crisis and Loki resolving it.

The relationship deteriorates. In Lokasenna, Loki crashes a feast in Ægir's hall and insults every god in turn — including detailed sexual allegations against the goddesses, which reveal a layer of mythology Snorri otherwise tries to hide. The gods drive him out.

His final act before binding is engineering the death of Baldur. The gods catch him as a salmon, bind him with the entrails of his son Narfi (turned to iron), and place a serpent above his head dripping venom. His wife Sigyn catches the venom in a bowl. When she empties it, Loki's writhing makes earthquakes. He will break free at Ragnarök.

Chapter VIThe goddesses.

Freyja is goddess of love, fertility, war, and seiðr. She rides a chariot drawn by two cats; she has a falcon-feather cloak that lets her fly. She owns the necklace Brísingamen, made by four dwarves, which she paid for by sleeping with each of them in turn — a story Snorri reports with discomfort. Half the slain in battle go to her hall Fólkvangr; the other half go to Odin's Valhalla. She, not Odin, gets first pick.

Frigg knows the fates of all beings but cannot or will not say. Her role in the Baldur story — extracting oaths from every thing in creation not to harm her son, except the mistletoe she thought too small to bother with — is the structural pivot of the entire mythology.

Other goddesses: Sif, Thor's golden-haired wife. Iðunn, keeper of the apples that keep the gods young. Skaði, giantess huntress, who married Njörðr and could not stand the sound of the gulls at Nóatún. Gefjon, who ploughed Zealand from Sweden with four oxen who were her sons.

Chapter VIIThe first war.

The mythology contains a memory of conflict between two divine kindreds, the Aesir and the Vanir. The Aesir tortured and killed the Vanir witch Gullveig three times; she was reborn each time. War followed. Neither side won. They settled it by exchange of hostages: Njörðr, his son Freyr, and his daughter Freyja went to the Aesir; Hœnir and Mímir went to the Vanir.

The Vanir found Hœnir useless without Mímir to advise him; they cut Mímir's head off and sent it back. Odin preserved it with herbs and consults it for counsel ever after — which is why the well at the root of Yggdrasil is called Mímir's well.

To seal the truce the gods spat into a vat. From the spittle they fashioned the wisest being, Kvasir. He was killed by two dwarves who mixed his blood with honey to make the mead of poetry — which Odin, in another adventure, eventually steals back. This is why poetry is called "Kvasir's blood" or "Odin's drink" in skaldic kennings.

Chapter VIIIThe death of Baldur.

Baldur, son of Odin and Frigg, was the most beautiful and beloved of the gods. He dreamed of his own death. Frigg extracted oaths from every thing in creation — fire, water, iron, every plant and animal — not to harm her son. The gods amused themselves by throwing weapons at him, which all rebounded harmlessly.

Loki, in disguise, tricked Frigg into admitting she had not bothered with the mistletoe — too young to swear. He fashioned a dart from it and gave it to the blind god Höðr, guiding his hand. The dart killed Baldur.

Hermóðr rode Sleipnir down to Hel to plead for Baldur's return. Hel agreed, on condition that every thing in creation weep for him. Every thing did, except one giantess, Þökk (Thanks) in a cave — Loki in disguise. Baldur stayed dead. The gods bound Loki. The countdown to Ragnarök had begun.

Chapter IXThe doom of the gods.

The end is foreseen. It begins with the Fimbulwinter, three winters with no summer between them. Brothers will kill brothers, sisters' sons will not spare their kindred. The wolves Sköll and Hati will catch the sun and the moon. The cock Gullinkambi will crow in Asgard, the cock Fjalar in Jötunheim, a soot-red cock in Hel.

Loki breaks free. The fire-giant Surt rides up from Muspelheim with his flaming sword. The sons of Múspell ride across Bifröst, which breaks. Heimdall blows the Gjallarhorn. The gods arm themselves at the field Vígríðr.

Odin and Fenrir: Fenrir swallows Odin. Víðarr, Odin's son, tears Fenrir's jaws apart. Thor and Jörmungandr: each kills the other; Thor takes nine steps after the wound and falls. Freyr falls to Surt because he gave away his sword for the giantess Gerðr. Loki and Heimdall kill each other.

Then Surt's fire burns the world. Sky cracks, sea swallows earth, stars fall. A new world rises from the sea, green and fair. Baldur returns. Two human survivors, Líf and Lífþrasir, hidden in the wood Hoddmímis holt, repopulate it.

Chapter XThe Poetic Edda.

Anonymous mythological and heroic poems, mostly preserved in the Icelandic Codex Regius (c. 1270). The mythological poems include Völuspá (the seeress's prophecy of cosmogony and Ragnarök), Hávamál (Odin's gnomic wisdom poems and the rune-winning), Þrymskviða (Thor in drag), Lokasenna (Loki insulting the gods), Skírnismál (the wooing of Gerðr), Vafþrúðnismál and Grímnismál (Odin's contests of mythological knowledge).

The heroic poems are about Sigurd the Völsung — the Norse cognate of Siegfried — and his entanglement with Brynhild, the Burgundian Gjukungs, and the dragon Fáfnir. They are the source-tradition for both the German Nibelungenlied and Wagner's Ring.

The Edda's verse is alliterative, terse, formulaic. Carolyne Larrington's 2014 Oxford translation is the readable scholarly standard. Jackson Crawford's 2015 Hackett version is the punchier modern English.

Chapter XISnorri's Edda.

The Prose Edda (c. 1220) is a handbook of mythology written by a Christian for Christian poets who wanted to keep composing in the old skaldic style — which depended on a working knowledge of pagan myth (a "shield" might be referred to as "Hrungnir's heel-soles" only if you knew the story of Thor's duel with Hrungnir). It has four parts: a euhemeristic prologue, the Gylfaginning (cosmogony to Ragnarök), the Skáldskaparmál (a kennings-dictionary with the mythological backstory of each kenning), and the Háttatal (a 102-stanza demonstration of skaldic metres).

Snorri's relationship to his pagan material is uneasy. He preserves it because it is the technical substrate of skaldic poetry, but he distances himself in the prologue by suggesting the "gods" were really just clever Asian kings (Æsir from "Asia") whom the credulous mistook for divinities.

Without Snorri, half the cycle is lost. With Snorri, half the cycle is filtered through a 13th-century Christian's literary tact.

Chapter XIIThe skalds.

Skaldic verse — the court poetry of the Norse-speaking kingdoms, c. 800–1200 — is unlike any other Western verse tradition. It is alliterative, but also internally rhymed (skothending and aðalhending), syllabically counted, and saturated with kennings — compressed metaphors that name things obliquely. A "battle" is "the storm of swords"; "a sword" is "the wound's needle"; "gold" is "Sif's hair" or "Kraki's seed"; "a poet" is "Odin's drink-bearer".

To follow a skaldic stanza you have to recognise the kenning-base, recall the myth that grounds it, and unpack the metaphor — all while parsing the convoluted word-order. The dróttkvætt metre — the most prestigious — was a brutal artificial construction comparable to the Greek hexameter or the Persian ghazal in technical demand.

The closest English approximation: read the prose-translations in Whaley's Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages series, or the late Egill Skallagrímsson translations by Bernard Scudder.

Chapter XIIIThe saga tradition.

Distinct from but adjacent to the mythology: the Icelandic family sagas — long prose narratives about feuds, settlements, killings, and lawsuits in early Iceland. Njáls saga is the masterpiece: 159 chapters of escalating feud ending in the burning of the wise man Njáll inside his hall. Egils saga, perhaps Snorri's own work, follows the violent skald-warrior Egill Skallagrímsson. Laxdœla saga, Gísla saga, Eyrbyggja saga.

Their prose is unsentimental, dialogue-driven, almost cinematic — third-person narrators who refuse to enter the characters' minds. The sagas describe pagan-era characters but were written by Christians; the world they preserve is half ethnography, half fiction.

The mythological sagas (fornaldarsögur) — Völsunga saga, Hervarar saga, Hrólfs saga kraka — are the prose retellings of the heroic-cycle material that Eddic poetry handles in verse.

Chapter XIVSigurd and Brynhild.

The heroic core of Norse mythology, distinct from the Aesir cycle but equally important. Sigurd, son of Sigmund of the Völsung line, kills the dragon Fáfnir who guards the cursed gold of the Rhine. He rides through a wall of flame to the sleeping Valkyrie Brynhild and pledges to marry her. The Burgundian queen Grímhildr gives him a potion of forgetting; he marries her daughter Gudrún instead and helps her son Gunnar win Brynhild — disguising himself as Gunnar to get through the flames a second time.

Brynhild discovers the deception. She has Sigurd killed in his bed by Gunnar's brother Guthorm. She immolates herself on his pyre. The cursed gold passes to Atli (Attila the Hun in the cycle's historicising layer), who kills the Burgundian princes for it. Gudrún kills Atli in revenge.

This is the cycle that becomes the German Nibelungenlied (c. 1200), William Morris's Sigurd the Volsung (1876), Wagner's Ring des Nibelungen. Tolkien's Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún (posthumous 2009) is the modern Eddic-style English version.

Chapter XVThe Ring of the Nibelung.

Wagner's Ring took him 26 years and built a custom theatre to perform. He used the Eddic mythological cycle, the Völsung-cycle, and the German Nibelungenlied as his sources, freely re-combining them. Wotan (Odin), Brünnhilde (Brynhild), Siegfried, Loge (Loki), Erda (a Norn-figure), the Rhinemaidens (his invention), Alberich the Nibelung dwarf, the cursed ring he forges from the Rhine-gold.

The Ring is the largest single artistic appropriation of Norse myth in the modern era. It transformed the Norse material from a regional medieval interest into a major Western cultural artefact — and, more darkly, into raw material for German nationalism that the Third Reich exploited.

Wagner's leitmotif technique — short musical phrases attached to characters and ideas, woven and developed across hours of music — became the structural template for the entire modern film score. John Williams's Star Wars themes are a direct descendant.

Chapter XVIThe end of the cult.

Conversion to Christianity was not synchronous across the Norse-speaking world. Denmark under Harald Bluetooth, c. 965 (the Jelling stones commemorate it). Norway under Olaf Tryggvason and Olaf Haraldsson, c. 995–1030 (forcibly, against significant resistance). Iceland by parliamentary decision in 999/1000. Sweden gradually, with pagan resistance into the 12th century at the temple at Uppsala.

The shift is visible in the archaeology: Thor's-hammer pendants give way to crosses, sometimes worn together for a generation; rune-stones with Christian inscriptions multiply; cremation gives way to inhumation. The new faith displaced the old cult but did not erase the literary substrate — which is why, three centuries later, the Eddas were preserved.

The pagan cult survived in folk practice (Yule, well-offerings, the persistence of names: Tor, Frey, Frigg) for centuries. It is not, in some Scandinavian rural memory, fully dead even now.

Chapter XVIIRunes and inscriptions.

The runic alphabet was used for ordinary writing — graffiti, ownership labels, personal letters — alongside its mythological associations. Most surviving inscriptions are practical: "Gunnar made this comb"; "Halldórr was here"; "Ingibjörg loves Erlingr" carved into a stave-church beam. The image of runes as exclusively magical is a 19th-century romantic projection.

That said, the magical use was real. The Eggjum stone, the Lindholm amulet, several bracteates and the Bryggen-find inscriptions show curse-runes, healing-runes, and divinatory uses. Odin's Hávamál stanzas 138–145 list eighteen rune-spells he claims to know.

The Vinland sagas — Eiríks saga rauða, Grœnlendinga saga — describe the Norse settlement of North America c. 1000, and the L'Anse aux Meadows site in Newfoundland confirms it. Not myth: history. The mythology and the historical reach of Viking-Age Scandinavia ran along the same cultural circuit.

Chapter XVIIITolkien's Norse.

Modern fantasy is, structurally, Norse mythology re-imagined. Tolkien took the elves, the dwarves, the wargs, the wraiths, the Ring, the dragon-hoard, the eagles, the broken sword reforged, the rune-script — and built Middle-earth. The dwarf names in The Hobbit (Thorin, Balin, Dwalin, Fili, Kili, Dori, Nori, Ori, Oin, Gloin, Bifur, Bofur, Bombur, Gandalf) are taken almost verbatim from the Dvergatal in Völuspá.

The Ring itself is the cursed Andvaranaut from the Völsung cycle, redone — a ring of gold that brings ruin to its bearer. Smaug is Fáfnir. Gandalf is a wandering Odin-figure with the broad-brimmed hat and the staff. The riders of Rohan are the Anglo-Saxons; the language of Rohan is Old English. Middle-earth is "Miðgarðr" rendered into modern English.

This means fantasy as a genre — Lewis, Le Guin, Martin, Sapkowski, Sanderson, the entire D&D pantheon — is a genre downstream of one Oxford philologist's reading of one set of medieval Icelandic manuscripts.

Chapter XIXThe current Norse moment.

Norse myth has had a 21st-century resurgence on a scale only Greek myth has matched. Marvel's Thor films (2011–2022) put Asgardian iconography into global pop culture. The History Channel's Vikings (2013–2020) and the Netflix sequel Valhalla. The video game God of War: Ragnarök (2022). The Icelandic black-metal and pagan-folk music scenes (Wardruna, Heilung, Eivør).

The literary side: Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology (2017) — a clean, popular retelling of Snorri. A. S. Byatt's Ragnarök (2011) — a wartime English child reading the myths. Maria Dahvana Headley's Beowulf (2020) is adjacent. Hannah Kent's Burial Rites (2013), set in 1820s Iceland, is part of the same renewed attention.

The dark side: Norse imagery has been adopted by white-supremacist groups in ways Snorri would not have recognised. Most Scandinavian and Icelandic scholarship now routinely addresses this; the myth's openness to ideological capture is a feature of its incompleteness.

Chapter XXThe Norse ethic.

The mythology has an ethical centre, expressed most clearly in Hávamál. The world is dangerous, fate is fixed, no one escapes. What you can choose is the manner of your fall. "Cattle die, kinsmen die, you yourself will die. But the one thing that never dies is the dead man's reputation." The aim is orðstírr — fame that outlasts the body.

The ethic is not heroism for its own sake; it is loyalty, hospitality, prudent generosity, restraint in drink, the keeping of one's word. Hávamál spends almost as much space on the right way to be a guest as on the right way to die.

The bleakness of the foreseen end — Ragnarök — does not prompt nihilism. The gods know they will lose; they prepare anyway. The Norse imagination admits no consolation: there is no afterlife in heaven for the worthy, only Valhalla, where you fight all day and feast all night until you fight at the end and lose. This is, on its own terms, a serious philosophical position.

Chapter XXITwenty-five.

• c.1270Poetic Edda (Larrington trans.)Anonymous · IS
• c.1220Prose EddaSnorri Sturluson · IS
• c.1230HeimskringlaSnorri · IS
• c.1280Njáls sagaAnonymous · IS
• c.1240Egils sagaAnonymous · IS
• c.1270Laxdœla sagaAnonymous · IS
• c.1270Völsunga sagaAnonymous · IS
• c.1270Saga of the GreenlandersAnonymous · IS
• c.1200NibelungenliedAnonymous · DE
• 1200Gesta DanorumSaxo Grammaticus · DK
• 1876Sigurd the VolsungMorris · UK
• 1876Der Ring des NibelungenWagner · DE
• 1937The HobbitTolkien · UK
• 1962Gods and Myths of Northern EuropeDavidson · UK
• 1980Myths of the VikingsCrossley-Holland · UK
• 1995The Saga of the Volsungs (Byock)tr. · US
• 2001Viking Age IcelandByock · US
• 2009Legend of Sigurd and GudrúnTolkien · UK
• 2011RagnarökByatt · UK
• 2013Burial RitesKent · AU
• 2014Gospel of LokiHarris · UK
• 2015The Poetic Edda (Crawford)tr. · US
• 2017Norse MythologyGaiman · UK
• 2020Children of Ash and ElmPrice · UK
• 2022Embers of the HandsJarman · UK

Chapter XXIIWatch & read.

↑ The entire story of Norse mythology · an animated overview

More on YouTube

Watch · The myth of Thor's journey to the land of giants · Scott A. Mellor
Watch · Viking mythology · full animated documentary

Read about

Hilda Ellis Davidson's Gods and Myths of Northern Europe (1964). Neil Price's Children of Ash and Elm (2020) for the archaeological context. Carolyne Larrington's Poetic Edda translation. Jesse Byock's Viking Age Iceland. The Eddic and saga literature in good modern translation, in that order.

Chapter XXIIIWhy we still read these.

Three reasons. The first: Norse myth is structurally unusual. Most mythological systems describe a divine order that is presumed to last. The Norse cycle is told in the shadow of an end the gods themselves know is coming. The whole moral economy is shaped by that shadow.

The second: it is the largest body of well-preserved pagan Indo-European mythology that survived the Christianisation of Europe. Greek-Roman is bigger and earlier; everything else (Celtic, Slavic, Baltic, Germanic-continental) survives only in fragments. Norse alone got the encyclopaedist (Snorri) and the manuscript (Codex Regius) at the right moment.

The third: the imaginative furniture — wolves and ravens, mead-halls and longships, the cold north and the burning south, the world-tree and the rainbow-bridge, dwarves and giants and ring-givers — has become a permanent layer of modern fantasy. To read Norse is to read the source code of Tolkien, of Le Guin's Earthsea, of Game of Thrones, of half the global videogame canon, of the Marvel cinematic universe.

Chapter XXIVAn order of operations.

Three ordered suggestions for someone new.

Snorri first

Read the Gylfaginning section of Snorri's Prose Edda. Anthony Faulkes's Everyman translation is the standard. It is a tight, narrative, complete account of the cycle from cosmogony to Ragnarök. About 80 pages of Snorri will give you the entire mythological backbone.

Then the Eddic poems

Carolyne Larrington's Poetic Edda. Read Völuspá, Hávamál, Þrymskviða, Lokasenna first. Skip the genealogical material on first pass. The verse will feel terse and elliptical after Snorri's prose; that compression is the point.

Then a saga

Read Njáls saga in Robert Cook's Penguin or in the Magnus Magnusson / Hermann Pálsson translation. Once you have read one Icelandic family saga, the prose will lock into place and the others (Egils, Laxdœla) will feel native.

Chapter XXVWhere it is now.

The 21st century has been remarkably active for Norse material. Marvel's films grossing many billions of dollars. The Vikings television franchise running for a decade. The God of War games selling tens of millions. Black-metal bands across Scandinavia mining the Eddas for lyrics and Wardruna scoring period-instrument settings of the rune-poems. Hilma af Klint exhibitions reframing northern visionary art.

Iceland itself has reconstructed the cult to a small extent. The Ásatrúarfélagið, the Icelandic neo-pagan association, has been a recognised religious body since 1973 and built the first new pagan temple in Reykjavík in over a thousand years (consecrated 2024). Roughly 1.5 percent of Icelanders now identify with it.

The cycle has stayed open in a way most pre-Christian European mythologies have not. Greek myth survived through canonical preservation; Norse is surviving through continuous re-imagination. Both routes work.

Chapter XXVIThe other Germanic systems.

What we call "Norse" is the Scandinavian — and especially Icelandic — branch of a much wider Germanic mythological tradition. The continental West Germanic peoples — Saxons, Franks, Lombards, Goths — had their own mythologies, cousin to the Norse but distinct. Almost nothing survives.

What we have: Tacitus's Germania (98 CE), the Roman ethnography that names the gods Mercury (= Wodan), Mars (= Tiw), Hercules (= Donar/Thor); the Old Saxon Heliand (c. 830), a Christian gospel-paraphrase that uses Germanic poetic vocabulary; the Anglo-Saxon poetry — Beowulf, the Exeter Book riddles, The Wanderer, The Seafarer — which preserves traces of pagan worldview within a Christian frame; the days of the week (Tuesday = Tiw's day, Wednesday = Wodan's, Thursday = Thor's, Friday = Frige's).

Most of what we know of the continental Germanic gods is reconstructed by extrapolating backward from the better-attested Norse cousins. This is a genuine loss; what we know about Christianised peoples' pre-Christian beliefs is about three percent of what they thought.

Chapter XXVIIThe shape of fate.

The Norse word for fate is wyrd (Old English) or urðr (Old Norse) — what has come to pass, what is in the process of coming to pass. Time in the Eddic mode runs backward into a fixed past, not forward into an open future. The Norns weave; what is woven is fixed; even the gods cannot unweave it.

This is why Odin spends his time gathering knowledge of the future rather than trying to alter it. He hangs himself for the runes, gives his eye for the sip from Mímir's well, takes Mímir's preserved head as counsellor, descends to the seeress for Völuspá — all to know what is coming. Knowing does not change it. Preparation alone is possible.

The grimness of this metaphysic is genuinely distinctive. Greek myth has fates too (the Moirai), but Greek tragedy is interested in the protagonist's hubris in trying to escape them. Norse myth presupposes everyone knows; the heroism is in how one acts within fixed knowledge of one's death.