Norse Mythology

What's inside (8 sections)

1. Before the beginning: ice, fire, and the first killing
2. The eye in the well and the hammer in the forge
3. Loki's children, Thor's wedding dress, and the stolen mead
4. Thor keeps losing, and it keeps being funny
5. Balder dies, and Loki runs out of friends
6. Ragnarok, and what survives it
7. Key takeaways
8. FAQ

I picked up this book because I kept running into the same problem. I knew the Norse gods from films and comics, where Thor shouts and Loki smirks, but I could not have told you who Mimir was or why Odin only has one eye. Gaiman had the same itch. In his introduction he explains that he fell for these myths as a boy, reading Roger Lancelyn Green's retellings, and that he later threaded Norse figures through his own fiction, most visibly in American Gods. This book was his attempt to sit down with the old stories, in translations of the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda and the scholarship around them, and tell them straight, in his own voice, from the beginning of the world to its end.

The cast he gives us first is small on purpose. Odin, the All Father, who hungers for wisdom and will pay anything for it. Thor, his son, enormously strong, straightforward, red bearded, quick to reach for his hammer and slow to spot a trick. And Loki, the blood brother of Odin, clever and funny and dangerous, who gets the gods out of trouble and into worse trouble, often in the same afternoon. Around them stand Frigg, who sees the future and says nothing; Heimdall, who watches and listens to everything; Tyr, the brave one handed god; Freya of the Vanir, beautiful and much desired; Balder the beloved; and a crowd of giants, dwarfs, and monsters who keep the plot moving.

Gaiman's prose here is plain and quick. Short sentences. Dry jokes. He calls the giants what they are, big dangerous neighbors, and he lets the gods be petty, vain, and funny. That tone is the whole gamble of the book: treating myth as story first, with the gods as characters you could imagine meeting. It works best when the stories are allowed to be strange. Sometimes it means a tale lands a little lightly, with less weight than you might want. But as an entry point, it is hard to beat.

Before the beginning: ice, fire, and the first killing

Long before there were people, or gods worth the name, there was Ginnungagap, a great empty gap. To the north of it lay Niflheim, a world of ice and mist with a poisoned spring at its heart. To the south lay Muspelheim, a world of flame guarded by the giant Surtr with his burning sword. Where the ice and the fire met in the middle of the gap, the frost melted, and the drops quickened, and the first living thing took shape: Ymir, a frost giant, huge beyond measure.

Ymir fed on milk from the cow Audhumla, who had formed from the same melting ice. Audhumla fed herself by licking the salty ice blocks, and as she licked, the shape of a man emerged from a block. His name was Buri, and he was beautiful and strong, and his children and grandchildren became the first gods. Bestla, daughter of a giant, married Buri's son Bor, and their three sons were Odin, Vili, and Ve.

What happens next sets the tone for everything the gods do afterward. The three brothers kill Ymir. They have to; there is no other way to get a world. From his flesh they make the earth, from his blood the sea, from his bones the mountains, from his skull the dome of the sky, from his brains the clouds. They set the sun and moon in their courses and fixed the stars. Then they built Asgard for themselves and Midgard, the walled middle world, for the people who did not exist yet.

People arrive almost as an afterthought, which feels right for these myths. Odin and his brothers find two fallen trees on a beach, an ash and an elm, and shape them into the first man and woman, Ask and Embla. Odin gives them breath and life. Vili gives them understanding and the power to move. Ve gives them speech and hearing and sight. The gods give them a home, and Midgard gets its people, and the stories can begin in earnest.

Gaiman tells all this quickly, almost briskly, and I liked that. Some retellings slow down here to explain every symbol. He just lays out the facts of the case: ice, fire, a giant, a murder, a world. The oddness carries itself. A cow licking a man out of ice should not need decoration.

Then he gives us the shape of the universe, and it is worth pausing over, because every later story depends on it. At the center stands Yggdrasil, the world ash, so vast its branches cover the sky and its roots reach into deep wells. It holds nine worlds. Asgard, home of the Aesir. Vanaheim, home of the rival Vanir gods. Jotunheim, land of the giants. Midgard, ours. Alfheim of the light elves. Svartalfheim of the dwarfs, who are master craftsmen. Niflheim, Muspelheim, and Hel, where the dead who do not die in battle go.

The tree itself is alive with small business. The Norns, three sisters named Urd, Verdandi, and Skuld, tend it and shape fate. An eagle sits at the top. The dragon Nidhogg gnaws at the roots. The squirrel Ratatosk runs up and down carrying insults between them. Deer graze on the leaves. It is a whole ecology, and Gaiman clearly loves describing it. This chapter does quiet work: it makes the cosmos feel like a place with weather and neighbors, which matters when the neighbors start stealing hammers.

The eye in the well and the hammer in the forge

Odin wants wisdom the way other gods want hammers or apples. He will pay for it in pieces of himself. Under one root of Yggdrasil lies Mimir's well, and Mimir, who guards it, lets no one drink without a price. Odin plucks out one of his own eyes and drops it in. He drinks, and sees further than before, and wears the empty socket as the cost of the deal. I found this one of the strongest scenes in the early pages, because Gaiman refuses to dress it up as noble. Odin does not agonize. He pays, the way you pay a ferryman, and walks on half blind and better informed.

The war between the Aesir and the Vanir gives him Mimir's head as well. When the two tribes of gods make their truce, they trade hostages, and Mimir goes to the Vanir as Odin's man. The Vanir decide they have been cheated in the exchange, cut off Mimir's head, and send it back. Odin preserves the head with herbs and spells, and from then on he consults it when he needs counsel. So the wisest of the gods carries a severed head around and asks it questions. Gaiman reports this without flinching, which is exactly right. The myth is grotesque, and smoothing it would be lying.

But the fun of the early book is Loki, and the chapter of the treasures shows why he is almost the main character. It starts as a prank. Loki sneaks in at night and shaves Sif's head while she sleeps, cutting off all her golden hair for no reason except that he thought it would be funny. Thor is ready to break every bone in Loki's body. Loki talks fast, as always, and promises to replace the hair with something better: real gold that grows like hair.

To deliver, Loki goes down to Svartalfheim and the sons of Ivaldi, the finest dwarf smiths. They make three wonders: Sif's golden hair, which takes root and grows; Skidbladnir, a ship for the god Frey that always finds its wind and can be folded up like cloth; and Gungnir, a spear for Odin that never misses. Then Loki, unable to leave a good position alone, bets his own head with another dwarf, Brokk, that Brokk's brother Eitri cannot make three gifts to match. Eitri sets to work with Brokk at the bellows, and Loki turns himself into a fly and bites Brokk's neck until the blood blinds him, trying to spoil the forging. Even so, Eitri produces Gullinbursti, a boar with golden bristles that pulls Frey's chariot; Draupnir, Odin's arm ring that drips eight new rings every ninth night; and Mjollnir, Thor's hammer, short in the handle because of the fly bite, but so powerful it can level mountains and always returns to the hand.

The gods judge Mjollnir the finest treasure of all, which means Loki loses the bet and owes Brokk his head. Loki escapes by arguing the letter of the bargain. Brokk may have his head, he says, but not his neck, and cutting one without the other cannot be done. The gods, laughing, allow the technicality, though they let Brokk sew Loki's lips shut for the trouble. This is Gaiman at his best in this book: quick, amused, letting the comedy and the menace sit side by side. You understand in a single chapter why the gods keep Loki around and why they will one day chain him to a rock.

The master builder story runs on the same engine. A stranger comes to Asgard with his stallion Svadilfari and offers to build a wall around the gods' home so high and strong that no giant can breach it. His price is the sun, the moon, and Freya herself. The gods refuse until Loki argues that they can accept if the work must be finished within a single winter, with no help, since no one could do that. The builder nearly does it. With three days left and only the gate to finish, the gods turn on Loki and threaten him with a painful death unless he fixes what he talked them into.

Loki's fix is memorable. He turns himself into a beautiful mare and lures Svadilfari away into the woods for the crucial nights. The builder, robbed of his horse's labor, misses the deadline, flies into a rage that shows him for the giant he is, and Thor pays him with a hammer blow. Loki returns months later leading an eight legged foal: Sleipnir, the fastest horse that ever lived, who becomes Odin's mount. Gaiman tells the whole thing with a straight face and lets the reader sit with the strangeness. Loki the trickster, mother of a horse. Nobody in the story finds this as odd as you would expect, which is part of the joke and part of the point. In these myths, shape and sex are costumes, and Loki changes them the way other gods change cloaks.

Loki's children, Thor's wedding dress, and the stolen mead

Loki's children with the giantess Angrboda are the bill coming due for everything clever and careless in the earlier chapters. There are three of them, and each is a disaster in a different shape. Fenrir, a wolf who grows larger and more frightening every day. Jormungandr, a serpent. And Hel, a girl who is half healthy flesh and half dead blue black tissue. The gods steal the children and try to manage them. Odin throws the serpent into the sea, where it grows until it rings the whole of Midgard and can bite its own tail. He gives Hel authority over the dead who die of sickness and age, and she rules her cold hall with a hungry dish called Hunger and a starving knife. And the gods keep Fenrir in Asgard, where only Tyr is brave enough to feed him, until the wolf grows so strong that no chain holds him.

The binding of Fenrir is one of the great scenes of the book. Twice the dwarfs forge mighty chains, and twice Fenrir snaps them like thread. Then the gods have them make Gleipnir, which looks like a ribbon and is woven from six things that do not exist: the footstep of a cat, the beard of a woman, the roots of a mountain, the sinews of a bear, the breath of a fish, and the spittle of a bird. Fenrir suspects a trick and agrees to be bound only if one of the gods puts a hand in his mouth as a pledge. Tyr steps forward without speeches. When the wolf cannot break free and the gods laugh with relief, Fenrir bites the hand off. Gaiman gives Tyr's courage one plain sentence and moves on, which lands harder than any speech would. The wolf stays chained on an island, drooling the river that runs from his jaws, waiting for the end of the world. Everyone in the story knows he will get loose then. They do it anyway.

From dread the book swings to farce, and the swing is deliberate. Thrym, a giant king, steals Thor's hammer and buries it eight miles deep, and says he will only return it if Freya comes to marry him. Freya refuses with fury. Heimdall, of all gods the most clear sighted, proposes that Thor go in her place, dressed as the bride, with Loki as his bridesmaid. Thor hates the plan. He goes along because there is no hammer without it.

The wedding feast is the funniest passage in the book. Thor in a dress eats an entire ox and eight salmon and drinks three barrels of mead. Thrym is startled by his bride's appetite. Loki, quick as ever, explains that Freya has eaten nothing for eight days from excitement. Thrym is startled by the burning eyes under the veil. Loki explains that Freya has not slept for eight days from longing. Then Thrym calls for the hammer to be laid on the bride's lap to bless the marriage, Thor's fingers close around the handle, and the comedy ends in slaughter. Gaiman has Thor kill Thrym and the wedding guests with the satisfaction of a punchline. It is brutal and funny at once, and the mixture is very Norse.

The mead of poetry belongs to Odin, and it is the grubbiest of his acquisitions. When the Aesir and Vanir made peace, they sealed it by spitting into a vat, and from their mingled spit came Kvasir, the wisest being alive. Two dwarfs, Fjalar and Galar, murdered Kvasir and brewed his blood with honey into a mead that makes a poet or scholar of whoever drinks it. Through murder and blackmail the mead passes to the giant Suttung, who hides it under his daughter Gunnlod's guard. Odin, calling himself Bolverk, works a summer for Suttung's brother, talks his way into the mountain with an auger and a snake shape, charms three nights from Gunnlod, drinks the mead in three draughts, flies home as an eagle with Suttung chasing him as another eagle, and vomits the mead into vats in Asgard. Some drops fall behind him on the flight, and that spilled share is what bad poets drink, which is Gaiman's favorite kind of joke: an insult built into cosmology. I admired how frankly the book shows Odin's methods here. He seduces a lonely girl, steals her father's treasure, and leaves. The story treats it as cunning worth celebrating. You are allowed to feel uneasy about that, and I did.

Thor keeps losing, and it keeps being funny

The middle of the book belongs to Thor's failures, and they are the most human stories here. Thor is the strongest of the gods, and away from home he keeps meeting problems that strength cannot solve.

The journey to the land of the giants starts badly. Thor and Loki take shelter with a farming family and share Thor's goats, Tanngrisnir and Tanngnjost, who can be eaten and brought back to life from their bones if none are broken. Loki talks the farmer's boy Thjalfi into sucking the marrow from a bone. Next morning one goat is lame. Thor is furious enough to kill everyone in the house, then settles for taking Thjalfi and his sister Roskva as servants. Already the hero looks less heroic than advertised, and Gaiman does not soften it.

On the road they meet Skrymir, a giant so large that his glove serves them as a hall for the night, and then they reach the hall of Utgard Loki, where the contests begin. Loki enters an eating match against Logi, and loses, because Logi is wildfire and eats the trough as well as the meat. Thjalfi races Hugi, and loses, because Hugi is thought, and no one outruns thought. Thor drinks from a horn and cannot empty it, because its far end sits in the sea, and his great draughts lower the level of the ocean, which men call the tides. He tries to lift a gray cat and can only raise one paw, because the cat is the Midgard serpent, and the earth moves when it arches. He wrestles an old nurse named Elli, and she brings him to one knee, because she is old age, and in time she fells us all.

I found this the most moving chapter in the book. Gaiman plays each reveal straight: Thor did wonders and still lost, because the game was rigged by beings larger than strength. Utgard Loki explains all this in the morning, admits he used illusion because he feared Thor's hammer, and vanishes with his whole castle before Thor can strike. Thor walks home knowing he lowered the sea and lifted the serpent of the world and will get no credit for it. There is something honest in that ending. Effort counts, and nobody claps.

Thor's fishing trip with the giant Hymir runs the same pattern at higher stakes. The sea god Aegir wants a cauldron big enough to brew for all the gods, and Thor and Tyr go to fetch Hymir's great kettle. Thor eats two of Hymir's oxen at supper, rows the boat despite Hymir's warnings, baits his line with an ox head, and hauls the Midgard serpent itself up from the deep, with venom and fire in its eyes. Hymir cuts the line in terror. Thor keeps the cauldron by main force, carrying it off while Hymir's household stares. The hammer god stares down the end of the world and blinks first, or rather his companion does. Gaiman tells it as adventure, but the serpent sinks back down to wait, and the reader knows this appointment is only postponed.

Two quieter stories round out the middle, and both are about gods behaving badly over women and apples. Idunn keeps the apples that keep the gods young, and Loki, caught by the giant Thjazi in eagle form, promises to deliver her to save his own skin. The gods age overnight: their hair grays, their joints ache. Loki borrows Freya's falcon skin, carries Idunn home in the shape of a nut, and outflies Thjazi, whom the gods burn at the walls of Asgard. Thjazi's daughter Skadi comes for compensation, and the gods pay her with a husband chosen by feet, which turns out to be the sea god Njord, a mismatch of mountain woman and ocean man that fails gently; with her father's eyes set as stars; and with laughter, when Loki ties his testicles to a goat and shrieks until she smiles. It is an odd, lopsided settlement, and Gaiman lets it stay odd.

Frey's love for the giantess Gerd is sadder. Frey sits in Odin's high seat, which he should not do, sees Gerd's shining arms from afar, and falls into a lovesickness that silences him. His servant Skirnir agrees to go woo her in exchange for Frey's great sword, the one that fights by itself. Skirnir rides through fire, offers apples and rings, and when Gerd refuses all gifts, threatens her with curses that wither and isolate: old age, thirst, humiliation, a life shrinking toward nothing. She yields and agrees to meet Frey in nine nights at Barri. Gaiman presents the wooing with all its menace intact. Frey gets his bride and loses the sword that could have saved him at the end. The book never says this outright here. It does not need to. You remember, chapters later, that he goes to his last battle unarmed.

Balder dies, and Loki runs out of friends

Balder is the best loved of the gods: bright, kind, beautiful, the son of Odin and Frigg. When he starts dreaming of his own death, the dreams frighten everyone. Frigg goes through the world and takes an oath from every thing that it will not harm him: fire, water, iron, stone, sickness, beasts, birds, poison. Only the mistletoe is left out, too young to swear, too harmless to matter. Then the gods make a game of it. They throw things at Balder and watch them bounce off. Spears stop. Swords turn. It is their favorite sport, watching the beloved son prove he cannot be hurt.

Loki finds the loophole. He learns from Frigg herself, disguised as a helpful old woman, that the mistletoe never swore. He cuts a twig, shapes it into a dart, and puts it in the hands of Hod, Balder's blind brother, guiding Hod's aim as a favor, so the blind god can join the game. The mistletoe flies straight through Balder and kills him. The laughter stops. Gaiman writes the silence after the killing in a few short lines, and it is chilling precisely because the book has been so noisy until now.

What follows is grief with machinery. Hermod rides Odin's horse Sleipnir down to Hel to beg for Balder back. Hel, Loki's daughter, sets a price: if everything in the world weeps for him, he goes free. Everything weeps. Men, gods, stones, trees. All except one giantess in a cave, Thokk, who says dry eyed that she wept dry at Balder's funeral and will weep no more. Thokk is Loki in disguise. So Balder stays dead, and Hod's hands stay bloody, and Frigg's labor comes to nothing because of one refusal. Odin has a son, Vali, born for vengeance, who kills Hod. It changes nothing. The book lets the waste stand. Nobody learns anything, which feels true to grief.

Loki's punishment is the darkest chapter, and Gaiman earns it by holding back his jokes. At Aegir's feast, drunk and unwelcome, Loki insults every god in turn, naming their shames: their cowardice, their infidelities, their secret hungers. The gods sit through it until Thor arrives and threatens him with the hammer, and Loki slips away to hide as a salmon in a waterfall. The gods catch him with a net, which is a nice touch, since Loki invented nets. They take his sons Vali and Narfi, turn Vali into a wolf, and watch him tear Narfi apart. Then they bind Loki to three sharp stones with Narfi's own entrails, which harden into iron bonds. Skadi sets a venomous snake above his face to drip poison on him. His wife Sigyn stays beside him holding a bowl to catch the venom, and when the bowl fills and she steps away to empty it, the drops fall on Loki and he writhes, and the earth shakes. That is where earthquakes come from.

I admired this section and found it hard to read in the right way. Gaiman makes you feel Sigyn's tired loyalty without turning her into a saint, and Loki's pain without turning him into a hero. The gods' justice is real and it is also monstrous, using children as material. Nobody comes out clean. The chapter ends with Loki bound and the world waiting, and the waiting is the point. Every chain in this book has an expiration date.

Ragnarok, and what survives it

From the first pages Gaiman tells you the end is coming, and in the final chapter it arrives all at once. This is the book's most impressive piece of writing, a long rolling sequence of doom told in plain words that gather force as they go.

It starts with cold and hunger. Three winters come back to back with no summer between, the Fimbulwinter, and men turn on each other. The bonds loosen. Fenrir breaks Gleipnir. Jormungandr heaves itself out of the sea and floods the land. Loki breaks free and steers the ship Naglfar, made from dead men's nails, with Hel's legions aboard. The giants march. Surtr rides from Muspelheim with his flaming sword, and the sky splits with his light. Heimdall blows the Gjallarhorn, and the gods wake and arm, knowing they will lose.

The pairs meet as foretold, and Gaiman stages each duel like a bell tolling. Odin rides out first in his golden helmet with Gungnir in his fist, and Fenrir swallows him whole. Vidar, Odin's quiet son, plants one foot on the wolf's lower jaw, grips the upper, and tears him apart. Thor kills the serpent with his hammer, takes nine steps back from the venom, and drowns in its spit. Frey, swordless since his wedding bargain, falls to Surtr. Loki and Heimdall kill each other. Tyr and the hound Garm kill each other. The sun is swallowed. The stars fall. The earth sinks into the sea, and fire eats the sky.

Then, in the book's gentlest passage, the earth rises again, green and new. Balder walks back from the dead with blind Hod beside him, brothers reconciled. Vidar and Vali survive. Modi and Magni, Thor's sons, survive, and they carry Mjollnir among the new grass. Two humans, Lif and Lifthrasir, who hid through the ruin in the wood of Hoddmimir, come out blinking into the morning and begin the slow work of filling the world again. The gods find the golden chess pieces of their fathers in the grass and remember the old games. Gaiman ends not with triumph but with continuance. The world does not get saved. It gets started over, by the young and the returned dead, with toys in the grass.

That ending reframes the whole book, and I sat with it a while. These were never stories about winning. The gods know their fate from the Norns' first telling and march toward it anyway, feasting and joking and squabbling on the way. There is courage in that, and also a kind of carelessness that the book never quite excuses. Odin's bargains cost others more than him. Thor's temper breaks things that stay broken. Loki's wit curdles into cruelty. Gaiman loves them and shows their bills. That double vision is the book's real achievement.

A fair criticism, then, because the book invites one. At about three hundred pages it is a swift read, and swiftness costs texture. The lesser gods rarely rise above one trait: Heimdall watches, Tyr is brave, Freya is desired, Hod is blind. The women get the worst of it. They are prizes, victims, mourners, and temptresses far more often than actors. Gerd is bullied into marriage. Gunnlod is used and left. Sigyn holds a bowl. Even Frigg, who does more than anyone to save her son, works entirely through pleading and oaths. Some of this is in the source material, and Gaiman is retelling, not rewriting. Still, a modern reader will notice who gets interior life and who does not, and the answer is mostly Odin, Thor, and Loki.

The style can also run thin in the quiet chapters. Gaiman's short sentences and flat jokes suit farce and doom, the wedding feast and Ragnarok both sing, but the love story of Frey and the apple theft sometimes read like plot summaries with dialogue. Readers coming from the novels may miss his usual layering. And anyone wanting scholarship, notes on sources, or the variant versions should look elsewhere; this is a storyteller's book, with no apparatus and no hedging. Take it for what it is: a clear window onto strange old tales, told by a professional who loves them, best read in a few sittings with the cold outside and something warm at hand. I closed it knowing the myths at last, and liking the gods less and the stories more, which seems about right.

FAQ

Is Norse Mythology part of a series?

No. It is a standalone retelling of the old Norse myths, from creation to Ragnarok. It shares gods with American Gods but is a separate book.

What is the best way to read Norse Mythology?

Start with the creation and Yggdrasil chapters, then read straight through. The stories build on each other and end with Ragnarok and the new world.

How long does Norse Mythology take to read?

Most readers finish it in a few sittings. At about 300 pages of short plain chapters, it moves fast and works well read in order.