The Prose Edda – The Mythology That Built Modern Fantasy

52 Books in a Year – Week 7

Right. This one is personal.

I have been obsessed with Viking culture since watching the hit show Vikings. If you haven't seen it, stop reading this and go watch it immediately. I'll wait. Because that show did something to me that very few pieces of storytelling manage. It made me want to understand the world behind it. The gods. The beliefs. The mythology that shaped an entire culture of people who genuinely thought dying in battle was the most honourable exit available to them. Ragnar was brave to question all of it and Athelstan, my guy, don't get me started.

The Prose Edda is where a significant chunk of that mythology lives. Written in 13th century Iceland by a man called Snorri Sturluson, a politician and historian who was apparently terrified that the old Norse myths were being forgotten as Christianity spread across Scandinavia, it is essentially one man's attempt to preserve an entire belief system before it disappeared. And the fact that we know as much as we do about Norse mythology today is largely because of him. That is worth sitting with for a second. Most of what Marvel, Tolkien, and half of modern fantasy draws from when it touches Norse mythology, Odin, Thor, Loki, Yggdrasil, Ragnarök, exists in the form it does because one Icelandic writer in the 1200s decided to write it all down.

No pressure, Snorri. And what a name, by the way.

What It Actually Is

Before getting into the content it is worth explaining what the Prose Edda actually is, because it is not a novel and it is not quite an epic in the way Homer or Virgil wrote epics. It splits into three main sections. The first, called the Gylfaginning, is where most of the mythology lives, the creation of the world, the gods, the monsters, and ultimately the end of everything. The second, the Skáldskaparmál, is essentially a guide to Old Norse poetry, packed with myths and stories used as poetic metaphors. The third, the Háttatal, is Snorri showing off his own poetry, which is exactly as enjoyable as a politician showing off his poetry tends to be.

If you are coming to this as a fantasy reader rather than an academic, the Gylfaginning is the section that will hold you. That is where the world-building lives. And as a fantasy fan, a filmmaker, and someone who thinks about the architecture of fictional worlds for a living, that section floored me.

The Creation

In the beginning there is nothing. Just a void called Ginnungagap, which I think is one of the greatest words ever placed into a mythology, flanked by two realms. Niflheim to the north, a world of ice and mist and cold. Muspelheim to the south, a world of fire. Where they meet in the void, the ice begins to melt. From that melting the first being emerges, a frost giant called Ymir.

Ymir sweats in his sleep and from his sweat other giants are born. A cow appears from the ice, because of course it does, and licks at the frost, revealing a man called Búri who becomes the ancestor of the gods. His grandson is Odin. Odin and his brothers kill Ymir. And from Ymir's body they build the world. His flesh becomes the earth. His blood becomes the seas and lakes. His bones become the mountains. His skull becomes the sky, held up at four corners by dwarves. And his brain... becomes the clouds. So strange, but I love it!

I read that and immediately thought, “This is where fantasy world-building comes from”. This is the DNA. The idea that creation requires destruction, that the world is made from something that had to be killed to build it, that the gods themselves are not the beginning but a generation into an already complicated story. That is not just mythology. That is the foundation of how we still construct fictional worlds today. Tolkien read this. You can feel it in every page and I hear that it is similar language in The Silmarillion which I look forward to reading.

Yggdrasil and the Nine Realms

This is the part that genuinely excited me most as a fantasy creator, and I want to spend some time on it because it deserves it.

At the centre of existence in Norse mythology sits Yggdrasil, an ash tree of incomprehensible size that connects nine different realms. Not metaphorically. Literally. The tree holds the worlds together. Its branches reach into the heavens. Its three roots extend into the realm of the gods, into the realm of the frost giants, and into Niflheim, the world of the dead, where a dragon called Níðhöggr endlessly gnaws at it from below. The nine realms connected by this tree include Asgard, home of the gods. Midgard, the world of humans, literally the middle world sitting at the centre of everything. Jotunheim, where the giants live. And several others, each with its own character and its own inhabitants.

Sitting beside one of Yggdrasil's roots is the Well of Mimir, where wisdom itself lives. Odin trades one of his eyes to drink from it. He gives up half his sight to see more clearly. That trade, that willingness to sacrifice something of yourself for knowledge, defines everything about how Odin is written throughout the Prose Edda. He is not a comfortable god. He is a god in constant pursuit of something just out of reach, which makes him considerably more interesting than a god who already has everything sorted.

As a world-builder, reading about Yggdrasil and the nine realms was one of those moments where you put the book down and just sit there thinking about the sheer audacity of the imagination that created this. How dare these great minds come up with such Gold, where fantasy is woven amongst life lessons in such a fantastical and effortless way? A tree that holds nine worlds. A dragon is eating it from below while an eagle sits at the top. Squirrels running messages between them, apparently stirring conflict just for the sake of it. This is not simple mythology. This is architecture. This is someone, or many someones across generations, constructing an entire cosmology from scratch. And then Snorri wrote it all down so we did not lose it. Thank the gods for that.

The Gods

One of the things the Prose Edda does that I did not expect is make the Norse gods genuinely entertaining. Properly entertaining, not in a Marvel way.

Odin is endlessly fascinating. He wanders in disguise. He hangs himself from Yggdrasil for nine days to discover the runes. He sacrifices his eye. He collects the dead from battlefields not out of honour but because he is building an army for Ragnarök. Everything he does has a purpose, and the purpose is preparation for an ending he knows is coming and cannot stop. There is something almost tragic about a god who sees everything and still cannot change what is coming.

Thor in the original text is not the Marvel version, though you can absolutely see where that version came from. He is enormous, unbelievably strong, and not always the sharpest sword in the armoury. There is a story in the Prose Edda where he is tricked by giants into trying to lift a cat, which turns out to be the Midgard Serpent in disguise. He fails. And rather than this being a humiliation, everyone around him is quietly terrified that he got as far as he did. Comedy and awe at the same time. That is rare and it is brilliant.

Loki is the one who stays with you. In the Prose Edda he is not straightforwardly evil, at least not yet. He is chaos. He solves problems and creates them in equal measure, often simultaneously. He shapeshifts, genders included, with a fluidity that is genuinely surprising in a text this old. He is the father of monsters, including the Midgard Serpent, the wolf Fenrir, and Hel, the ruler of the dead, and still somehow considered a companion of the gods until he simply is not anymore. What the Vikings show understood about Loki that the Prose Edda confirms is that he is the most modern character in the mythology. Complicated in a way that feels almost contemporary. His eventual fall and the punishment that follows is one of the genuinely affecting moments in the text.

Baldr

Baldr is the god of light, beauty, and goodness. Everyone loves him. The gods love him. The world loves him. His mother Frigg goes to every thing in existence and extracts a promise not to harm him. Every object, every creature, every force in the world swears it.

Almost every object. She does not bother asking mistletoe, because it seems too young and harmless to matter.

Loki finds this out. He fashions a dart from mistletoe and guides the blind god Höðr's hand to throw it at Baldr as a game. The gods have been amusing themselves by throwing things at Baldr and watching them bounce off harmlessly. The mistletoe kills him. The grief that follows is immense. A messenger is sent to the realm of the dead to beg for Baldr's return. Hel agrees on one condition. Every living thing must weep for Baldr. And every living thing does. Except one giantess, sitting alone in a cave, who refuses.

The giantess is Loki in disguise.

Baldr stays dead. One act of spite, one refusal to grieve, and the world loses its most beloved god. That sets the countdown to Ragnarök in motion. That is cause and consequence on a mythological scale and it hits genuinely hard.

Ragnarök

And so we arrive at Ragnarök. The apocalypse that everyone in Norse mythology knows is coming and nobody can stop.

The signs arrive first. A winter lasting three years with no summer between them, the Fimbulwinter. Wars breaking out across the world. Fenrir, the great wolf, breaking free. The Midgard Serpent rising from the ocean. The ship Naglfar, built from the fingernails and toenails of the dead, which is genuinely one of the most unsettling images in any mythology anywhere, sailing toward the battlefield.

The gods ride out to meet it. Odin faces Fenrir and is swallowed whole. His son Víðarr tears the wolf apart to avenge him. Thor kills the Midgard Serpent and then dies from its venom, taking nine steps before falling. Freyr fights without his magical sword, having given it away earlier as a romantic gesture, and is killed. Loki and Heimdallr kill each other. The world sinks into the sea.

And then it rises again. Clean. New. The surviving gods return. Baldr comes back from the dead. A man and a woman emerge from hiding and repopulate the world. A new sun rises, born from the old one.

It is not just an ending. It is a cycle. Death and rebirth on a cosmic scale. As a fantasy creator I find that endlessly useful. The idea that even the apocalypse is not final, that destruction contains the seed of a new world, is one of the most powerful structures in all of mythology. And it lives here, written down by one man in 13th century Iceland because he was worried people were forgetting.

Where It Slowed Down

I have to be honest about the reading experience because it was not all Yggdrasil and Ragnarök.

The Skáldskaparmál section, the poetry guide, is genuinely hard going if you are not an academic. It is Snorri explaining the metaphors and kennings used in Old Norse poetry, which means a great deal of the sea can be called the whale-road and here is the myth that explains why. Interesting in theory. Slow in practice. And the overall structure means the Prose Edda never quite builds narrative momentum the way an epic does. It is closer to a mythology textbook than a story, a brilliant and endlessly fascinating textbook, but a textbook nonetheless. Coming off the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, both of which had at least a narrative spine, the Prose Edda occasionally felt like reading very compelling encyclopaedia entries.

Once it got going through the Gylfaginning though, it was genuinely rich. It rewarded the patience it demanded.

What It Means for Fantasy

I cannot overstate how much of modern fantasy lives in this book.

Tolkien is the obvious connection. The dwarves of the Prose Edda, named in a list that includes Gandalf, Fili, Kili, Dwalin, Bifur, Bofur and others, were lifted almost directly into The Hobbit. Yggdrasil echoes in every fictional world tree ever written. The idea of multiple connected realms, of a world-ending battle, of gods who are fallible and mortal and aware of their own mortality, that is the DNA of an enormous amount of fantasy that followed. But beyond Tolkien, the Prose Edda gave fantasy something more fundamental. It gave the genre permission to build mythologies from scratch. To construct cosmologies with their own internal logic. To have gods who are complicated. To have endings that are not truly endings.

As someone who builds fictional worlds, reading the Prose Edda is like going back to the source code. You see the decisions that were made. They worked then and they work now.

Final Verdict

★★★☆☆ (3/5)

Three stars, and I want to be clear about why. The Prose Edda is not three stars because it is not important. It might be the single most important book on this entire reading list in terms of its influence on the genre I love. It is three stars as a reading experience. Fragmented, uneven, and the poetry section will genuinely test your patience.

But the world-building in the Gylfaginning is some of the most imaginative cosmological construction I have ever encountered. Yggdrasil alone is worth the price of admission. And Ragnarök, the audacity of writing an apocalypse with a beginning, a middle, and a hopeful end, is extraordinary.

If you love fantasy, you owe it to yourself to read this. Not because it is a smooth or easy experience. But because almost everything you love in the genre has its roots somewhere in these pages.

Next Up: The Poetic Edda by Carolyne Larrington