The Viking Spirit: An Introduction to Norse Mythology and Religion by Daniel McCoy

Author:Daniel McCoy [McCoy, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, azw
Published: 2016-06-06T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15: The War of the Gods

The earliest source that tells a version of the story of the first war in the cosmos is The Prophecy of the Seeress from the Poetic Edda, which contains it in an abbreviated and very vague form. Snorri Sturluson gives two more partial accounts in his Prose Edda, and a fuller one in The Saga of the Ynglings.

All four of these accounts are mutually contradictory on various basic points. It’s difficult to tell whether this is due to misunderstandings or creative liberties on the part of the authors of those sources, or whether they simply recount different versions that were current in the Viking Age. The following retelling is necessarily a synthesis that picks elements from each in order to form a single, coherent narrative. Where possible, I’ve made a point to include parts of the various versions that are corroborated to some degree by scattered allusions elsewhere in Old Norse literature, and to leave out uncorroborated elements that conflict with the corroborated ones.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.