#Prose Edda

[saphronethaleph]

Who the Edda you

The door to Odin’s study opened with a dramatic thud, which wasn’t quite the crash that Thor could manage but was still quite passable.

“Father!” Loki began, without preamble.

“Loki,” Odin replied, turning around. “You seem upset.”

“Congratulations, you can tell,” Loki replied. “I don’t suppose your all-seeing eye has told you why I’m here?”

Odin frowned, then shook his head slightly.

“I don’t know that,” he said. “I know you went to Midgard recently.”

“Well, of course you’d know that,” Loki agreed. “But I have to ask. Am I adopted?”

Odin winked.

“...what?” he asked, mostly to buy time.

“Because some of this stuff is complete nonsense,” Loki went on, slamming a book down on the nearest table.

Odin saw that it said Prose and Poetic Edda, but Loki just kept going. “I mean, really, complete nonsense. It’s impossible for you to conceive of just how ridiculous this is, I read the whole thing and according to this book’s version of things, Sleipnir is my son.”

Odin stared for a moment, then looked at the book again.

“Sleipnir…” he repeated, slowly. “The horse.”

“Yesss,” Loki confirmed. “I understand your confusion, old man, because I very much share it. Admittedly they do have an explanation, but – that’s not even the only child I have in this book! I also have a sea serpent, a giant wolf called Fenris and a half-zombie woman called Hel!”

Odin coughed.

“They what?” he asked, coughing again. “...where did you even get that book, anyway?”

“Book store, while I was waiting for Thor to finish… being Thor,” Loki replied. “Amazingly enough, they quite like books down in Midgard. And some of the things they mention in it are quite familiar. A lot of names, for example, though it’s astonishing what they get wrong. Heimdall’s in there, he’s described as the whitest of the gods.”

Odin looked at the book, then out the window towards the Bifrost (which wasn’t actually visible from this angle), then back to the book.

“And you’re using this book for information?” he asked.

“I said it got all kinds of things ridiculously wrong,” Loki said. “That’s why I’m asking you. I have to say, though, if some of the details here are correct then I’m very much looking forward to them.”

He picked up the book, and flicked through to one of the pages with a turned-over corner. “For example, according to this story Thor and I go on a heist to get Mjolnir back after someone steals it.”

Odin now looked even more baffled.

“Couldn’t Thor just call it back to his hand?” he said, despite himself.

“I don’t know, but knowing Thor he may have forgotten,” Loki said. “And I was apparently having too much fun with the heist plan to actually mention it to my brother… what with how the plan was to disguise Thor as the most beautiful of the goddesses, and insist on the dowry being Mjolnir.”

He smirked. “I do suspect that I came up with that idea. It has my flair.”

“Aren’t you getting it out of a book, right now?” Odin asked.

Loki’s expression soured.

“Fair point,” he admitted. “Did you really pluck out an eye and impale yourself to gain omniscience, though?”

He gave Odin an askance look. “And if you did, is that an Asgardian thing, a parent thing, or just… you, being yourself?”

“...does that book say I was impaled?” Odin asked.

“To death, actually,” Loki confirmed. “Apparently you got better. I don’t pretend to understand.”

Odin frowned, thinking.

“If there’s some deep, dark secret, do tell,” Loki requested. “I know a huge part of this book is absolute nonsense, but some of it is extremely telling and I’ve even got some ideas from it. I should really try shapeshifting into an eagle and flying around some time.”

He made a face. “Not doing a mare, though.”

“Why not?” Odin said, again trying to buy time to think.

“According to the book – which, again, I know isn’t true,” Loki noted, “Sleipnir came about when you’d hired a giant to build the walls of Asgard but didn’t want to pay him. About two thirds of the work was done by his magic horse, and apparently I seduced the horse.”

Odin nodded, slowly.

“Loki,” he said. “My son. I can tell you that that part of the book is Millennial nonsense.”

Loki blinked.

“...what’s a Millennial?” he asked.

“People born this millennium,” Odin clarified. “So, anyone under nine hundred and eighty years old.”

He paused.

“Oh, and – yes,” he added. “You were adopted, but I wanted to wait until you and your brother were mature enough to accept that.”

“You don’t think I’m mature enough now?” Loki asked, hurt.

“I do know about that time you had a bet with Thor to vanish out of a plane in mid-flight,” Odin said. “And, before you ask, that’s both of you that I mean.”

Loki frowned.

“I concede that,” he said, sounding pained. “All right, I’ll try to process that.”

He picked up the book again. “Though I may need to stay away from mistletoe from now on. Getting involved with that particular plant doesn’t seem to end well for me…”

[ohnoitstbskyen]

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.

[illustratus]

Nótt riding Hrímfaxi by Peter Nicolai Arbo

[pepsimansthickjuicymeatyschlong]

theyre called the eddas cause theyre heavily edda-ted

[loki-was-framed]

[cuties-in-codices]

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

[lokavisi]

I'm trying to figure out what kind of regularly scheduled content I to do (besides just my daily queued reblogs to keep this page active). These are just some ideas I had but I was wondering if y'all have any preferences so I can prioritize. I *could* do them all, but don't want my ADHD excitement to lead to burnout. So we'll start with just one or two for now (depending on the frequency). Leave a comment if you have other ideas or to indicate if you want multiple options. If you're finding this within a week or so of the poll's end, feel free to leave a comment with your choice!

[magicaldogtoto]

Noticed on TV Tropes's page for Kamen Rider Ryuki that the only entry under Kamen Rider Odin's character sheet discussing his name origin (that of Odin of Norse myth) just says "He's named after a god, which rings true considering just how overpowered he can be."

This is true, but I'm here today to say that it goes so much further than that, which I've realized while reading/re-reading the Prose Edda and Poetic Edda.

In the Grimnismal, Odin in disguise as the titular Grimnir gives a list of his numerous names and titles. In particular, Grimnismal 48 has him list "Battle-Merry" and "Battle-Stirrer" as two of them. Both titles point to Odin being a god of battle/war, the latter indicating that he stirs up war. In Ryuki, Kamen Rider Odin is meant to be the Rider stand-in for Shiro Kanzaki, who instigates the Rider War. He notably does this by approaching different people and giving them their Advent Decks, thus stirring them to engage in battle with the other Riders.

One of Kamen Rider Odin's cards is also the Time Vent, which rewinds the events of the Rider War back to the start, erasing everyone's memories (though Shinji manages to hold on somewhat, as shown little more than halfway through the show). This effectively puts the Rider War in an endless loop of Riders fighting, dying, and coming back to life to fight again. Those vaguely familiar with Norse myth may have heard of Valhalla, and of the Einherjar. In Vafthruthnismal, the giant Vafthruthnir describes Valhalla's daily battle as this:

"All the Einherjar in Odin's hall fight each other every day. They kill each other, but then ride back from battle and sit in the evening as friends." (Vafthruthnismal 41)

Valhalla's battle is thus a cyclical one, in an endless loop until Ragnarok. In a way, you can call it one of the oldest examples of a battle royale like the Rider War, with the same fighters dying off only to be brought back to life to fight another day. The Rider War can even be seen to parallel Ragnarok, with how the ultimate end of the war is the winner's ability to rewrite the world as they see fit, much like how Ragnarok is meant to end with the destruction of all the gods, only for a new world to be born from it. Indeed, Odin's whole reason for having battles is to gather warriors for Valhalla--like how Shiro keeps engineering the Rider War for his own goals.

So yes, Kamen Rider Odin is a very appropriately named Rider...

[the-pagan-crow]

Poetic Edda vs. Prose Edda

What are they? What's the difference? And why are they important?

Simply put, the Eddas are collections of stories about Norse mythology. They are the closest thing we have to a primary source for the tales that ancient Scandinavians told. Since the people who originally told these stories passed them down orally, these texts are not 100% accurate. However, as with everything, they are based on truth. Thus, we must look at them with a critical eye.

There are a couple of important differences when looking at the Eddas. The Poetic Edda draws from the Codex Regius and has several versions. The text tells the tales of the Norse gods and heroes, and the stories themselves may date back to the 8th century. However, the Codex was written in the 13th century. The author of the Codex is unknown, and some people believe that it was put together by several people. There are several translations available today.

The Prose Edda, on the other hand, was complied by, or possibly written by, a 13th century scholar known as Snorri Sturluson.

It is important to note that these texts were written down after the Chirstanization of the area. Therefore, there is probably a lot of bias in these tales.

These texts, along with the Sagas, are the best known texts for Norse mythology. This is why most modern Norse Pagans and Heathens read, or want to read, these texts.

Our thoughts on them

We are currently reading (and annotating) a pdf of the Poetic Edda. After that, we will move on to the Prose Edda. We have chosen the Jackson Crawford translation.

We are very excited to dive deeper into these texts! We always keep in mind the potential biases present, and we hope to report back to yall with some insight after reading!

If we made any mistakes, please let us know! We try to research and fact-check as much as possible, but we are human.

[monstergirlgang]

Monster Girl October Tarot day 24: Valkyries from the Poetic and Prose Edda as the Knight of Swords card!

The knight of swords is about action, swiftness, determination, and boldness. Valkyries would fly into every battle to determine death or victory, and preserve the souls of the best warriors for Valhalla.

[broomsick]

Kennings to Loki

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.

[hecatesdelights]

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.

[raffaellopalandri]

Book of the Day - Loki and Sigyn

Today’s Book of the Day is Loki and Sigyn: Lessons on Chaos, Laughter & Loyalty from the Norse Gods, written by Lea Svendsen in 2022 and published by Llewellyn Publications. Lea Svendsen is a writer and expert in the Norse pantheon. She has given many presentations and led workshop-style discussions about Loki and Sigyn and their role in the Heathen practices. Loki and Sigyn, by Lea Svendsen I…

[to-kalon]

so my mother has this habit of just throwing in these random apocryphal facts about mythology and literature and one day we were arguing at dinner about how and when and to what extent loki returns at ragnarök, the end of the world

but my sister and i distinctly remembered that he was punished for the murder of baldr (a story of ultimate tragedy) by having a serpent suspended over him who would drip poison like acid onto him and he was all bound up with his son's guts and then his wife would try to catch the poison in a bowl but the bowl would get full and while she changed it the poison would fall and cause him terrible suffering and he'd cry out and shake the earth in quakes and all the men would pray and pray to be saved but the aesir would think of baldr and grimly turn away. this left a huge impression on me. and i was like, that was definitely the end. it was an eternal torment. that was why it was so striking to us then

and my mother was like. my children. you foolish children. that was not his end. he sails back on a boat of fingernail clippings for his revenge

and we were like??? no way?? a boat of fingernail clippings??? there would be no way we wouldn't remember that. that is way more punk than the whole serpent thing

and we assumed it was one of her weird stories

but she was right.

prose edda confirmed the existence of the fingernail ship !!!!

like, how amazing and unhinged is this passage? 'please be sure not to die with long toenails or fingernails because we sure as hell do not want this freaky-ass nail clipping boat to be launched any sooner than it absolutely has to be'

and i was like, well okay mother but it wasn't in the d'aulaires book you read to us, was it. because that would be insane for kids

but reader — it was !!!

thus concludes the tale of how i was wrong and my mother was right and i deep-dived into this today at the cost of many a useful thing i should have been doing otherwise.

[lokisbeautifulangel]

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