The Prose Edda – The Mythology That Built Modern Fantasy

52 Books in a Year – Week 7

Welcome back to my 2026 book challenge. 52 Books in a Year…

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 do — 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 and Athelstan… my guy!

Anyway… 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's 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.

So no pressure, Snorri. Can I just add, what a name!

So what is it?

Before we get into the content, it's worth explaining what the Prose Edda actually is — because it's not a novel, and it's not quite an epic in the way Homer or Virgil wrote epics.

It's split 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.

If you're coming to this as a fantasy reader rather than an academic, the Gylfaginning is the one that will hold you. That's 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 put 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. And 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. His brain becomes the clouds.

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 was killed to build it, that the gods themselves are not the beginning but a generation into an already complicated story — that's not just mythology. That's the foundation of how we still construct fictional worlds today.

Tolkien read this. You can feel it in every page of the Silmarillion.

Yggdrasil and the Nine Realms — The World-Building That Stopped Me

This is the part that genuinely excited me most as a fantasy creator.

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 in the centre of everything. Jotunheim, where the giants live. Niflheim, the realm of ice and the dead. Muspelheim, the realm of fire. And several others, each with its own character and inhabitants.

Sitting beside one of Yggdrasil's roots is a well — 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.

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 audacity of the imagination that created this. A tree that holds nine worlds. A dragon eating it from below while an eagle sits at the top. Squirrels running messages between them, apparently stirring conflict. 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 down so we didn't lose it. Thank the Gods! And talking about the Gods…

The Gods

One of the things the Prose Edda does that I didn't expect is make the Norse gods genuinely entertaining.

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's 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's something almost tragic about a god who sees everything and still can't change what's coming.

Thor, here 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's 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. That kind of storytelling — comedy and awe at the same time — is rare and 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 helps the gods and betrays them. He shapeshifts, genders included, with a fluidity that's 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 isn't anymore.

What the Vikings show understood about Loki that the Prose Edda confirms is that he is the most modern character in the mythology. He is complicated in a way that feels almost contemporary. And his eventual fall — his role in the death of Baldr, the most beloved of the gods, 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. Essentially — 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 doesn't bother asking mistletoe, because it seems too young and harmless to matter.

Loki finds this out. And 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. And that moment — one act of spite, one refusal to grieve, and the world loses its most beloved god — sets the countdown to Ragnarök in motion.

That's extraordinary storytelling. That's 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 no one can stop.

The signs arrive first. A winter that lasts three years with no summer between them — the Fimbulwinter. Wars breaking out across the world. Fenrir, the great wolf, breaking free from his chains. 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 — 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 — he gave it away earlier as a romantic gesture — and is killed. Loki and the god Heimdallr kill each other.

The world sinks into the sea. And then — and this is the part I found most remarkable — 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's not just an ending. It's a cycle. Death and rebirth on a cosmic scale.

As a fantasy creator, I find that endlessly useful. The idea that even the apocalypse isn't 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, in this book, written down by one man in 13th century Iceland because he was worried people were forgetting.

Why It Took a While to Get Going

I have to be honest about the experience of reading it, because it wasn't all Yggdrasil and Ragnarök.

The Skáldskaparmál section — the poetry guide — is genuinely hard going if you're not an academic. It's Snorri essentially explaining the metaphors and kennings used in Old Norse poetry, which means a lot 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 of the Prose Edda means it never quite builds narrative momentum the way an epic does. It's closer to a mythology textbook than a story — a brilliant, endlessly fascinating textbook, but a textbook nonetheless. Coming off the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, both of which at least had a narrative spine, the Prose Edda occasionally felt like reading very compelling encyclopaedia entries.

Once it got going though — particularly through the Gylfaginning — it was genuinely rich. The depth of the world-building, the complexity of the gods, the sheer imaginative scale of the cosmology. 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's the DNA of an enormous amount of fantasy that followed.

But beyond Tolkien, the Prose Edda gave fantasy something more fundamental. It gave it the permission to build mythologies from scratch. To construct cosmologies with their own internal logic. To have gods who are complicated. To have endings that aren't truly endings.

As someone who builds fictional worlds — whether in film, writing, or games — reading the Prose Edda is like going back to the source code. You see the decisions that were made, the structures that were invented, and you understand why they keep reappearing. Because they work. 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 isn't 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. It is fragmented, uneven, and the poetry section will 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's 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 (Translated)