Prose Edda Review

Perhaps it is the omnipresent influence of ancient Greek culture that drives the continued popularity and emphasis upon Thor in discussions of Norse mythology, even aside from the influence of a certain comic-book adaptation of the character as an alien superhero.  Zeus and Thor are often depicted as analogous, and since Zeus was the ruler of the gods in Greek mythology, Thor adopts a similar pride of place in the imagination, just as Herodotus described numerous religions using the same names and ideas transplanted onto other cultures.  This can obscure the unique structure of the northern mythology which so fascinated Tolkien, Gaiman, and many others.  While I did not read the prose Edda (also referred to as the younger Edda) in the original ancient Norse, as Tolkien did, it is still a window to that fascination.

Speaking of Tolkien, actually reading the Edda gives new emphasis to just how influential it (and other, related works, like the poetic Edda and the Volsunga Saga) was on The Lord of the Rings and the idea of a new mythology of “northernness” such as Tolkien sought to evoke.  The nature of dwarves, even the names of many of the figures, will be familiar to any reader of Tolkien’s books, as will, to a lesser extent, the nature of elves, and the role of humans.  Indeed, that feature which often considered the most significantly unique about Tolkien’s mythology is paralleled in the Edda: the idea that humans are not the main players on the stage.

Indeed, we are almost more of an accident.  In most mythologies, some amount of deliberate effort went into creating humanity.  In Genesis, humans are actually created twice.  In other stories we might be molded from clay, or imbued by some special power, but in the Edda, we are…licked out of salt by a cow created to sustain an ice giant.  Even in American mythologies like that of the Haida, which tend to depict humans in a coequal fashion with the rest of the natural world, rather than distinct from it in the way Western mythologies and religions emphasize, there is more care depicted in the creation of humankind.  Perhaps this is a testament to the harshness of the environment in which the stories of the Edda originated.

Like so many creation stories across the world, the prose Edda includes a flood story, but this is the first I’ve read in which the flood came before humanity existed at all.  Instead of Noah building an ark, one of the ice giants builds an ark for his family and uses it to escape the great flood, and this is how the ice giants as a species survived.  Considering the ice giants are often portrayed as the enemy (or at least the rival) of the gods, and a major antagonist player in Ragnarök, the northern apocalypse, this is especially fascinating.  It’s easy to see why so many storytellers find this mythology so distinctive and compelling.

It’s a shame, then, that we can never truly understand it.  Too much has been lost, and too much requires a context we no longer possess.  This is where I laud the efforts of Bringhurst, Zolbrod, and others to preserve existing oral traditions before they disappear, and it is also where I disagree with the assessment in A Story as Sharp as a Knife that the West lacks such an oral tradition.  The mythology the Eddas reflect, which I do not call specifically Norse because its applicability likely stretched across a far wider region and may even have interplayed with Celtic traditions, is the product of such a unique and dynamic tradition.  If writing down these stories fossilizes them, in a sense, then the difference is that the mythologies of recently extant oral traditions are younger, better preserved, and perhaps more complete fossils than we have to study of those which have been passed down to us only as fossils from hundreds of years in the past.  Exacerbating the difficulty, the Christian (and other) traditions sought to deliberately expunge the ideas the Eddas seek to preserve for significant and critical stretches of time.

The version of the younger Edda I read includes a kind of historical analysis or historiography attempting to link the stories and mythologies of the Eddas to real historical figures and events with their roots in the Greco-Roman world.  In this telling, Odin becomes a king in exile who spreads, deliberately or inadvertently, a tale to rouse the various lands to which he comes against the civilization which exiled him.  I question if there is any basis in fact to this idea – the similarities to Troy, Crete, Rome, et cetera seem like a stretch at best, and little concrete historical evidence is cited – and it also misses the point.  However the stories may have originated (and the reappearance of the flood story in so many world religions that both did and did not have contact with each other lends credence to the idea that there is foundation in history for many of the myths we tell) is not how the stories evolved.  Just as there is no one, true version of a myth except that which happens to be fossilized and preserved, there is no solid line between the truth and the telling.

At a glance, the Edda is not so different from other mythologies, like those of Greece, Egypt, Sumer, and so forth.  It can even be said to have similarities with certain elements of the Judeo-Christian tradition.  A glancing view, though, is really a way of looking at a subject through the lens of a previous understanding, rather than acquiring a new and independent understanding of the subject.  More thorough examination reveals the younger Edda, and the larger mythology of which it is a part, to fill a unique role that we can only begin to comprehend from what has come down to us through the centuries.  No doubt I’ll return to the subject again when I read the elder Edda.  For now, I encourage you to put aside your preconceptions about Thor, Loke, Odin, and the other elements which have come into the popular imagination, and try to engage with them on their own terms as they appear in the younger Edda.