In the lands of the north, where the black rocks stand guard against the cold sea, in the dark night that is very long, the men of the Northlands sit by their great log fires and they tell a tale … ” So began each episode of the 1950s and 1960s children’s TV programme The Saga of Noggin the Nog – one of countless iterations of old Norse myths that have filtered down to us, from the early 13th-century versions written down by the Icelandic scholar Snorri Sturluson all the way to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, via Jacob Grimm, Richard Wagner, JRR Tolkien, Narnia, video games and death metal.
Greek myths may be having a moment in modern fiction, but The Norse Myths That Shape the Way We Think reminds us that Thor, Asgard, Valhalla and the Valkyries are as much a part of western literature and legend as are Athena and Achilles. As a professor of medieval European literature at the University of Oxford and a translator of Snorri’s texts, author Carolyne Larrington is an expert guide to the origins of the stories and an opinionated interpreter of their modern descendants. She explains how an incorrect translation of “drinking horns”, via Latin, resulted in the “madly impractical” idea that Vikings drank mead from their enemies’ skulls, and fulminates about HBO’s decision to have the villainous Euron Greyjoy slay a dragon in Game of Thrones: “An outrageously subversive recasting of the greatest of heroic achievements.”
Larrington takes the myths a theme at a time. Main characters such as Odin and Thor have a chapter to themselves, explaining how depictions of them have evolved from original sources into modern retellings such as Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. Loki and his monstrous children get another, which celebrates their recent starring roles in books by Joanne Harris, Francesca Simon and others, and explains quite convincingly how Loki’s current reputation as a gender nonconforming queer icon is rooted in the early texts. (Even Thor, we learn, once put on a wedding dress and was nearly married to a giant.) Later chapters explain the history of the Vikings and how it intersects with stories of gods and monsters. Ívarr, Halfdan and Ubbi, the sons of Ragnarr the dragon killer, for example, led the Great Heathen Army that arrived in England in 865, fighting in Northumbria and capturing East Anglia and York. Archaeological evidence discovered in Newfoundland in 1960 appears to corroborate the Vinland theory – the idea that North America was settled by Vikings about 500 years before Christopher Columbus turned up.
Each chapter concludes by spelling out precisely how Norse myths pre-empted modern preoccupations: “Ragnarr and his sons have been harnessed to storylines that emphasize migration, cultural assimilation and multiculturalism as well as emerging ideas of national identity and political resistance”; “Yggdrasill [the world tree] symbolizes the natural world existing in a state of harmony that nevertheless cannot be taken for granted: a symbiotic system that may – or may not – withstand all the depredations that humanity inflicts upon it”. Larrington’s interpretations are very much of their time; but so were all the others. As if to illustrate how Norse figures are appropriated and shaped, Larrington refers to the characters by their old Norse names in their old Norse contexts, and by their anglicised (or Germanised) names when she writes about their more modern adaptations. Thus, Óðinn or Odin is sometimes Wotan; Loki can be Logi or Loge; Þórr is Thor. A pronunciation guide at the back of the book reveals that Asgard (Åsgarðr), the home of the gods, should be pronounced OWs-garther. What would be even more useful is a gods’ family tree; it’s hard enough to keep up with how they relate to each other, even without the goddess of death being referred to, on the same page, both as Loki’s daughter Hel, as in the ancient myths, and Loki and Thor’s sister, Hela, as she is portrayed by Cate Blanchett in the film Thor: Ragnarok.
Recent years have seen a rise in the appropriation of Norse imagery by white supremacists, and Larrington explores this in the chapter about Vinland. It seems unlikely that Jake Angeli, who invaded the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 dressed in stars and stripes and a furry hat, had read much of the 13th-century Eirík’s saga (if he had, he might have known that real Vikings never wore horned helmets), but his tattoos suggest that he feels a connection to a white, Scandinavian, Aryan heritage through those early Vinlandian settlers and stories. As Larrington understatedly points out, such ideologies “depend on a highly selective and partial reading of Old Norse Myth”.
Like its predecessors in the series, The Celtic Myths … and The Greek Myths That Shape the Way We Think, this book shows how stories help us to understand who we are and the times we live in. “They mean largely what they are made to mean at different times, and we can never know how they signified in the distant era when they took shape,” Larrington writes. We can’t escape Ragnarok. But in the dark night, around great log fires, there will always be tales to tell.
• The Norse Myths That Shape the Way We Think by Carolyne Larrington is published by Thames & Hudson (£20). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
