Poetic Edda

Heathen cosmology is quite complex and rich in both symbolism and meaning.

The majority of sacred stories are preserved in the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda, both dating from 13th century Iceland.

Remnants of the heathen religion also survived in Anglo-Saxon histories and healing manuscripts, as well as the Icelandic sagas.

Current scholarship in the fields of archaeology, history, linguistics, and anthropology continue to increase knowledge of the pre-Christian world.

It is the chief holy sanctuary of the gods, their primary abode.

There, by Udra's well, the gods pronounce judgment every single day.

In the Griminismal, which is the tale in the Poetic Edda, Odin refers to Yggdrasil as the best of trees.

Traditionally, it is seen as a great ash tree with the branches rising higher than the eye can see, with immense girth and large, thick roots.

Hello everyone.

I'm gonna be singing Fjolsvinn's Lay from the Elder Edda.

Otan garthahansa up of koma torsa tutarsut.

Sutager quat.

In its first part, called Gylfaginning , a Swedish king named Gylfi travels in disguise to the Hall of the Gods and asks three mysterious figures called High, Just as High, and Third about the beginning of the world, the gods and their deeds, and the end of all things.

Their answers form the fullest account of Norse mythology that survives, The second great source is a collection of poems known as the Poetic Edda.

Most of them survive in a single small manuscript, written in Iceland around the year 1270, and known as the Codex Regius, the Royal Book, because it was later kept for centuries in the Royal Library in Copenhagen.

It was returned to Iceland in 1971, where it was carried ashore in Reykjavik and greeted by enormous crowds, and it is kept there today.

And they declared their fates.

and they carved on wood, perhaps meaning that they cut runes into the tree, or into staves of wood, marking out destinies.

In another poem of the poetic Edda, the first lay of Helgi Hundingsbane, the Norns come in the night to the birthplace of a hero, and twist the strands of his fate, and fasten them across the sky from east to west.

The image of fate as a thread, spun and woven by women.

It is my take on my rewrite, basically, of the first 80 some stanzas of the Hava Mall.

The Havamal is a poem that exists in the Poetic Edda, which is a collection of poems and stories where we get most of what we refer to as Norse mythology or Nordic mythology, the Nordic story world.

The Hava Mall originally is a poem full of practical wisdom in the first part of it.

You know, those first 80 some stanzas on how to live in a world that is harsh, where you've got to rely on each other, where you may not always be able to trust everybody, where, you know, you've got to be a friend.

was put into basically like these two poem books, I guess you can call them.

One of them, they're called the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda.

And both of those books, almost like the Bible, is the Old Testament, the New Testament.

This is like the Prose Edda and the Poetic Edda, however you say it.

And so it's really cool in that way, but it's not a complete work.

So I don't know if there's more information out there that is missing, um, that nobody will ever get their hands on because this goes way back.

They also loved them, learned from them, and were in some essential sense made of the same material, however reluctant either side might have been to admit it.

What we know of all this comes down to us mainly through two collections of Old Norse literature, the Poetic Edda, A gathering of mythological and heroic poems preserved in a 13th century Icelandic manuscript known as the Codex Regius.

The Prose Edda, written by the Icelandic scholar and chieftain Snorri Sturluson around 1220.

That retells and elaborates on the older mythological material in flowing prose.

watching the world below with the full and terrible understanding of what was coming, and yet knowing did not change the outcome.

The gods understood this too, went on living as they always had, feasting in their great halls, riding out on their errands and their quarrels and their wars, while somewhere underneath it all the future lay already written, as fixed and patient as stone.

The old poems, and especially the Voluspar, The Prophecy of the Ceres, one of the most remarkable poems in the Poetic Edda, described the coming of Ragnarok in a way that was less like a warning and more like a long, slow inevitability, something that could be seen approaching from very far away if you knew how to look.

The seeress who speaks in that poem has been woken from her deep rest to tell Odin what she knows.

And much of what survives was written down in Iceland during the Middle Ages, after Christianity had spread there.

And there's two origin books, these Eddas, Poetic Edda and this Prose Edda.

And yes, they all contain all these different poems about gods and heroes.

And yeah, it explains some of these origin myths.

We're going way back before Marvel to tell you one of the famous North poems that was written down in Iceland during the 1200s.

It tells how Thor's hammer was stolen and how he got it back.

It was written in the poetic edda that I referenced before, and it's called The Theft of Thor's Hammer.

One morning, Thor discovered that his hammer was missing.

That phrase, the 11th Civilization, is not something you'll find written in Old Norse.

It's not in the Poetic Edda.

It's not in Snorri Sturluson's writings from the 1200s.

It's a modern label, a modern lens people have placed over an old and genuinely strange text.

Fragments, poems, prose retellings, names carved into objects, a few descriptions written by outsiders, and medieval manuscripts copied down centuries after Scandinavia had officially become Christian.

So before we start counting worlds, looking for survivor civilizations, or asking whether Ragnarok leads to some hidden 11th age, we need to know what evidence we are actually standing on.

The central source is a collection of Old Norse poems now called the Poetic Edda.

The name sounds ancient, but the book itself is medieval.