A Land of Fire and Ice; An Overview on Viking Literature and Mythology

Abstract

The Norsemen or Vikings came from Scandinavia (Norway, Sweden, Denmark and the islands surrounding the Northern Sea) and were mainly known as traders, explorers, soldiers and settlers. They navigated along the Northern seas and their conquest was extensive until America, including the British Isles, Ireland, Russia and the north of France. Norsemen were depicted as savage warriors, in a misconception highly extended from the 18th century onwards. Although most of the Vikings were illiterate people, they produced a remarkable corpus of written sources, such as the ones which are carved in rune-stones all over the globe. It is really common to find texts written by Christian monks describing their invasions, all battlefield-related, in which these were barbarians. Nevertheless, an extended source of Scandinavian texts have survived until nowadays, such as the Sagas of the Icelanders, in which the skaldic poetry, or poetry recited in the court, was finally transcribed from the oral tradition to a written piece of text. This is just an example of the Viking written legacy, reported by the Icelander called Snorri Sturlunson, in whose works, the Scandinavian or Northern mythology play a major role. Other salient works were the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda.