Despite its title, the focus of Old Norse Mythology is not upon the stuff of Norse mythology, as folklorist and Scandinavianist John Lindow explains in his preface, but upon “how particular historical and intellectual circumstances formed conceptions about it” (viii). For the content of the mythology, many other resources are available, including Lindow’s own Norse Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs (Oxford 2001).

Norse mythology, or Old Norse mythology as Lindow calls it here, is now primarily a literary mythology, known to us today from written texts, artifacts, and images. Most of these texts were written not while the Nordic peoples were still pagans, but centuries after they had converted to Christianity. None were canonical. As in the case of Greek mythology, multiple versions of stories and contradictions between them abound. (It may be helpful to point out that scholars of Nordic antiquity mean by “mythology” the corpus of Old Scandinavian myths. Unlike, say, classicists, they do not include heroic legend under this rubric. Accordingly, heroic legends are scarcely mentioned in the present work.)

The introduction provides a basic orientation to the study that follows. An oral mythology during the Viking Age (ca. 800-1100 A.D.), Norse mythology was transformed to a written one in the Middle Ages. Early evidence for it includes the Germanic names of the days of the week (for example, Thursday < Thor’s Day), descriptive passages in Tacitus’s Germania, the many theophoric placenames (that is, containing the name of a deity, such as the Danish town of Odense, which originally signified “Odin’s sanctuary”) in Scandinavian lands, and the survival of early mythological poems in whole or part in two manuscripts from thirteenth-century Iceland, the so-called Poetic Edda and Snorri’s Edda. One of the verse forms, known as “eddic,” is relatively straightforward, whereas a second kind, commonly called “skaldic” though Lindow prefers to call it dróttkvætt, is a particularly complex form characterized by strict meters and an extensive use of kennings.

In his first chapter, “From Cosmogony to Cosmic Eschatology: The System of Old Norse Mythology,” Lindow provides the reader with an overview of the mythology—its characters, setting, and notable events. Main players include the giants, beings who can be but are not necessarily huge in size; the Æsir, who constitute the principal family of gods, and the Vanir, a rival family with whom they make peace; dwarves, male craftsmen who forge precious objects; and elves. The giants function as the principal opponents of the gods, the two groups having a relationship of “negative reciprocity,” meaning that the gods take mates and other items of value from the giants, whereas the reverse is rarely the case. Among the sites of the mythic action are Midgard (“middle enclosure,” where humans live), Asgard (“divine enclosure,” where the Æsir have their dwellings), and Jotunheimar (“giant homes”). A sketch of mythic history takes us from the origin of the cosmos to the death of the god Baldr and so to the mythic present; still to come is Ragnarøk, the final battle between the gods and the giants and their various allies that concludes with the collapse of the universe. This chapter is mostly retelling, but Lindow gently weaves in interpretive reminders such as that since the gods and the giants are ultimately kinsmen, the killing of one by the other creates an insoluble social problem.

This initial, expansive chapter is followed by a tightly focused chapter, a case-study of a single story: “Old Norse Mythology as Sacred Narrative: Thor’s Fishing Expedition.” According to Lindow, the myth of Thor’s fishing for the World Serpent was probably the most widely known myth of the most venerated god during the Viking Age. The sources for the story include skaldic verse, eddic verse, a prose telling by Snorri Sturluson, and illustrations carved into rock. Since some of the evidence, especially the skaldic verse, is quite difficult for the non-specialist, the reader is grateful to have the author’s expert guidance.

In chapter 3 (“Old Norse Mythology and Learned Medieval Speculation”) Lindow moves on to consider how it was that Christians transmitted a knowledge of pagan gods and their doings, that is, of a rival religion and its traditions. In short, why do we know as much as we do about this mythology? The answer, in short, is the theory of religion and myth known as euhemerism that was popular in learned circles during the Middle Ages. According to this perspective, pagan gods were actually human beings who came to be worshipped. Thus, they were historical persons. The mythographer Saxo Grammaticus, in his Gesta Danorum (History of the Danes), composed ca. 1200 A.D., describes Odin and Thor as sorcerers, masters of the arts of illusion, who traveled to the North from Byzantium, ensnaring different peoples to worship them as gods. Similarly, the Icelandic mythographer Snorri Sturluson, in his Edda (ca. 1220 A.D.), declares that the Norse gods, the Æsir, came to Northern lands from Troy in “Asia,” whence their name. They were chieftains skilled in magic who caused people to take them for gods. In short, euhemerism made the pagan gods non-threatening by redefining them as exceptional human beings. More difficult than how is the question why elements of the old religion were recorded and transmitted. Lindow proposes a number of possibilities, ranging from the undeniable entertainment value of the stories to the notion that for Nordic peoples to lose their mythology would be to lose their past.

Chapter 4, “Old Norse Mythology and Ideology (and Entertainment),” sketches ideological uses to which Norse mythology has been put over time. Lindow begins with the Indo-Europeanist Georges Dumézil, according to whom the mythologies of the various Indo-European peoples, including the Scandinavians, expressed, or at least reflected, what he viewed as a tripartite social structure. Of course, this reflection, if present, would have been more-or-less equally present in other Indo-European mythologies as well. Translations of and retellings based upon Norse mythological texts begin to appear in Iceland, Denmark, and Sweden in the 1600s. A work on Northern antiquities published in French by Paul Henri Mallet in the following century was particularly influential in acquainting persons outside the North with the ancient culture. Lindow goes on to list and discuss the use of the mythology by Danish and Swedish romantics, by German antisemitic nationalists, by Northern European and American white-supremacists, by philosophers and novelists, and so on, ending with modern comic books.

The conclusion consists of a brief overview of the preceding chapters, and makes the summary point that since dróttkvætt poetry was needed for the celebration of kings and other important persons, and since eddic poetry was necessary for an understanding of its kennings, one needed the old myths, but Christian sentiment required that they be de-sacralized. That is how and why the old myths survived the Christianization of the North.

The book concludes with annotated “Suggestions for Further Reading” and, following that, what appears to be a sort of bonus section entitled “Resources,” in the first part of which the author translates a number of mythological texts, among them the eddic poem known as Lokasenna, and in the second part surveys the sorts of material artifacts that sometimes are brought into discussions of Old Norse myth. The book is amply illustrated with black-and-white photographs, although the details are not always easy to discern.

The format of Lindow’s book is novel and, for this reader, a welcome innovation in a presentation of a written mythology. Half of the book (chapters 1 and 2) is devoted to the content of Norse mythology, distributed over one extensive and one intensive chapter, while the other half (chapters 3 and 4) is devoted to the later reception of that mythology, first the crucial Middle Ages when it was recorded and passed on, and then its many uses in the modern period.

It remains to say that Old Norse Mythology is the inaugural volume of a new series, World Mythology in Theory and Everyday Life, edited by folklorists Tok Thompson and Gregory Schrempp. With the publication of John Lindow’s book, the series is off to an auspicious start.

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[Review length: 1353 words • Review posted on April 8, 2021]