The

The Hello and welcome to the history of Vikings.

In today's episode, I'll be joined by Professor Caroline Larrington, Professor of medieval

European literature at the University of Oxford, and official

fellow and tutor at St. John's College. Professor Larrington is a Game of Thrones fan and has

written a book on the series, as well as a marvelous book on Norse mythology called The Norse

Myths, A Guide to the Gods and Heroes. We will, of course, provide a link to that in the description.

Professor Larrington, thank you so much for joining me today.

It's a great pleasure to be here, though.

So we understand Norse mythology as being the religion of the Vikings, and as the characters

in Norse myth as being the gods of the Vikings. So where do we get the Norse myths from?

What are the sort of basic sources for Norse mythology?

Well, we've got two key sources for Norse mythology, and both of them were written down in

the 13th century, both in Iceland. And of course, being written down so late, they were written by

Christians. And these two sources are respectively called the

prose edda and the poetic edda. Now, the prose edda is written by an identifiable author,

a man called Snorri Stuttleson. And what he was interested in doing was writing a guide to

traditional Old Norse poetry. And he realized that in order to be able to understand and to compose the traditional poetry,

you needed to understand the stories about the gods.

And so in the first part of his treatise on Poetics, he gives a quite detailed explanation

of what the myths are all contained in the particularly

interesting framework. And he goes from creation to Ragnaruk to the end of the world and

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