The Norse Myths [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION ^ sources and survivals ^Obinn [Odin] was a man remarkable for his wisdom and in all accomplishments. His wife was called Frigida, and we call her Frigg. Odinn had prophetic abilities and so did his wife, and from this knowledge he discovered that he would become extremely famous in the northern part of the world, and honoured above all kings. For this reason he was eager to journey away from Turkey, and he brought a great multitude of people with him, young and old, men and women, and they brought many precious things with them. But wherever they went in the continent, so many splendid things were said of them that they seemed more like gods than men. SNORRi STURLUSON, PROLOGUE, Prosc Edda {c. 1230)si snorri sturluson and the clever asian migrants siWho were the Norse gods? Migrants from the Near East, journeying up through Germany to reach the promised Scandinavian homeland: humans like you and me, but smarter, handsomer, more civilized. Or so claimed one Christian writer, a medieval Icelander who recorded many of the myths and legends that have survived from the Scandinavian north. Medieval Christian scholars needed to explain why their ancestors worshipped false gods, and thus one widespread theory was that the pre-Christian gods were demons, wicked spirits sent by Satan to tempt humans into sin and error. But another very effective theory was the one put forward by Snorri Sturluson in the quotation above: the so-called gods were in fact exceptional humans, immigrants from Troy, an idea known as euhemerism. For Snorri Sturluson, the thirteenth-century Icelandic scholar, politician, poet and chieftain who left us the most complete and systematic account of the Norse pantheon, the idea that the