Norse Folklore

Norse folklore is the body of traditional belief, story, and ritual that grew up among the Germanic-speaking peoples of Scandinavia, Iceland, the Faroes, and the wider Viking diaspora. It is preserved in two of the most important medieval texts of northern Europe — the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda — in the great family sagas of Iceland, in the ballads and folktales of later centuries, and in the living customs of rural Scandinavia and Iceland that have survived into the present day.

This page is part of the wider survey of European Folklore. Within it, two further articles explore particular aspects of the Norse tradition: the berserkers of the sagas and the three Norns who spin fate.

The Sources

The Norse tradition is unusual among the folk traditions of Europe in being preserved with unusual richness in written form. The Icelandic Poetic Edda — a manuscript of the late thirteenth century — contains a collection of anonymous heroic and mythological poems of much greater age, dealing with the gods, the heroes, and the fate of the world. The Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson, written about 1220, is a kind of handbook of Norse mythology and poetics, written down by a chieftain who feared that the older knowledge was being lost. Together these two works preserve the cosmology of the pre-Christian North: the nine worlds, the gods of Asgard, the giants of Jotunheim, the dwarves of Svartalfheim, and the strange, twisting paths of the world tree Yggdrasil.

Alongside the Eddas stand the sagas of Iceland: family stories set in the settlement period (the ninth and tenth centuries) and the early commonwealth (the tenth and eleventh centuries), full of honour, feud, exile, and the slow workings of fate. The saga writers often claimed to be recording the words and deeds of their great-grandfathers, and the best of the sagas — the Egils saga, the Njáls saga, the Laxdæla saga, the Grettis saga — have a literary quality that has been compared to the Greek tragedians.

The Gods of Asgard

At the head of the Norse pantheon stand the Æsir, the gods of war, kingship, and the sky. Odin, the All-Father, is the god of war, of poetry, of magic, and of the dead. He is the lord of the slain, who gathers the bravest of the warriors to him in Valhöll (Valhalla) and prepares them for the final battle of Ragnarök. He is also a god of cunning and of wisdom, who gave up one of his eyes at the well of Mímir for a draught of the cosmic knowledge, and who hung for nine nights on the windswept tree, wounded by his own spear, to gain the secret of the runes.

Thor, his son, is the thunder god, the protector of Midgard (the world of humans) against the giants. He wields the hammer Mjölnir, wears the belt of strength, and is famous for his appetite. Freyja and Frey are the twin gods of fertility, beauty, and plenty, and to Freyja the dead were brought who were not taken to Valhalla — she rides the féte of the slain from the battlefield, and her name gives us the German Freitag and the English Friday.

With the Æsir stand the Vanir, a second group of older gods of fertility and prosperity, of whom Njörðr, Freyja, and Frey are the chief. The war between the Æsir and the Vanir, told in the Ynglinga saga of Snorri Sturluson, is an old story of the conflict between sky gods and earth gods, and it is one of the deepest mythic memories of the North.

Loki and the Trickster

Among the Æsir, but not of them, stands Loki, the trickster, the helper, the enemy. He is the father of the wolf Fenrir, of the world-serpent Jörmungandr, and of Hel, the half-blue, half-flesh lady of the underworld. He is also the one who, in the Prose Edda, brings about the death of Baldr, the shining god, by tricking his blind brother Höðr into throwing the mistletoe dart. For this crime he is bound beneath a rock with the entrails of his son, and there he writhes in torment until the day of Ragnarök, when he breaks free and leads the hosts of the abyss against the gods. The role of Loki in the wider pattern of the European trickster is one of the great themes of Norse mythology, and it is examined in detail in the survey of trickster figures.

The Nine Worlds and Yggdrasil

The Norse cosmos is structured around the great world tree, Yggdrasil, an immense ash that holds together the nine worlds. At its summit is Asgard, the citadel of the gods. Beneath that, in the middle, is Midgard, the world of human beings. Below that are the worlds of the giants (Jotunheim), of the dwarves (Svartalfheim or Nidavellir), of the elves (Alfheim), of the dead (Hel, ruled by the half-flesh goddess of the same name), and the world of fire, Muspelheim, which is the source of the southern heat. The tree itself is the scene of constant struggle: the goat Heiðrún feeds upon its leaves, the dragon Níðhöggr gnaws at its roots from below, the squirrel Ratatöskr runs up and down the trunk carrying insults between the eagle at the top and the serpent at the bottom. The Norns sit at the well of Urd beneath the tree, weaving the threads of fate.

The Creatures of the North

The Norse bestiary is rich and strange. Trolls haunt the mountains, the bridges, and the caves, and they are the great enemies of the church bells and the ringing of the holy iron. Elves (the álfar) live in the hills and the mounds, and they are not the sweet fairies of later Victorian imagination but powerful beings, neither wholly good nor wholly evil, who must be propitiated. Dwarves (dvergar) live under the earth and are the great smiths of the world, the makers of Mjölnir, of the ring Draupnir, and of the ship Skíðblaðnir. The huldra (or huldre) of the forests is a beautiful woman with a cow’s tail (or, in some versions, a hollow back) who lures men into the woods. The nixie of the rivers sits by the water’s edge and sings; the mare of the night sits upon the chest of the sleeper and brings the terrible dream.

The draugr is the dead who walks: a corpse that rises from its mound to kill the living, to ride the roofs of the houses in the night, and to guard the treasure that was buried with it. The berserkers — the great warriors of the saga age who fought in a fury granted by the gods — are examined in detail in their own article, and they belong to a wider European family of ecstatic warriors that also includes the ulfheðnar of the Norse tradition and the wolf-warriors of the continental Germanic world.

The Calendar of Blót and Seasonal Festivals

The Norse year was divided by the great sacrificial feasts, or blót, of which the most important were the Winter Nights (vetrnætr), held in October, the Midwinter blót at Yule, the sigrblót of summer, and the alfarblót of autumn. Each was an occasion for a great feast, for the slaughter of cattle and the offering of blood, and for the assembly of the free men of the district. Many of these older festivals have been absorbed into the Christian calendar but retain their older forms: the Yule log, the Yule boar, the Yule lads of Iceland, the midsommar festival of Sweden, the Sankt Hans of Denmark, and the Jonsok of Norway all carry older meanings beneath their Christian or secular dress.

The festivals were, in the older sense, moments when the rules of the world were suspended. At the Winter Nights, the dead walked and the elves were abroad; at Yule, the wild hunt rode; at Midsummer, the plants gained their power and the sun was turned. The Christian overlay, as elsewhere in Europe, did not displace the older sense so much as translate it.

The Skalds and the Oral Tradition

The Norse tradition is preserved through a remarkable oral medium: the skaldic verse of the Viking and medieval North. The skald was a poet at the court of a king or a chieftain, and his task was to praise his lord in verses of extraordinary technical complexity. The skaldic forms — the dróttkvætt and the kviðuháttr — are among the most demanding in any European literature, and they are examined in detail in the oral storytelling of the Norse skalds. A good skald had to be master of a deep kennings, of the court genealogies, of the heroic legends, and of the metrical forms. The skaldic tradition is part of a wider European heritage of oral storytelling that includes the Irish filidh and the West African griots.

Runes and Magic

The runes are the alphabet of the older North, used from about the second century until the conversion. They were not only a writing system but a sacred technology, the gift of Odin himself. Each rune has a name and a meaning, and the act of writing a rune was, in the older sense, an act of power. The rune poems of the ninth and tenth centuries preserve the names and meanings of the runes in verse, and they show how a single sign might stand for a letter, a sound, a god, a tree, a day, and a kind of magic. Rune-stones, raised as memorials by the wayside, are one of the great physical monuments of the Norse world.

Iceland: The Living Memory

The conversion of Iceland to Christianity in the year 1000 did not put an end to the older stories. Indeed, the Icelandic commonwealth (the Þjóðveldið, 930–1262) and the later Norwegian-ruled Iceland became the great repository of the older knowledge. The sagas were written down in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries by people who had grown up with the older tales; Snorri Sturluson wrote his Edda in a country where the gods of Asgard were still talked about as a real, if older, faith. The result is a tradition that has been preserved in unusual depth, and Iceland itself has become a kind of museum of the older North.

The Wild Hunt and the Dead

A theme that runs through the Norse tradition, and connects it to the rest of Europe, is the Wild Hunt: a procession of the dead that rides through the winter sky, led by a horn-blowing hunter who is often identified with Odin. In the Norse tradition the Hunt is called Odens jakt (Odin’s Hunt) or Asgårdsreia (the ride from Asgard). The dead ride by, the hounds bay, and the wind rises. To see the Hunt is a sign of death, or of a great change in the weather. The same tradition is remembered in the German Wildes Heer, the French Chasse Artus, the English Herla’s Host, and the Scandinavian Julebukk. The Wild Hunt belongs to a wider European family of processions of the dead that is examined in the wider survey of European Folklore.

Modern Echoes

Norse folklore has been an extraordinary source of inspiration for modern literature and culture. The ring cycle of Richard Wagner, the comic-strip and the cinema of the twentieth century, the table-top role-playing games of the present, the fiction of Neil Gaiman, the music of Wardruna and Heilung — all draw on the same older material. Iceland still observes the older calendar, with the Jólabókaflóð (the Yule book flood) at Christmas, the Þrettándinn (Twelfth Night) in January, the Sumardagurinn fyrsti (first day of summer) in April, and the festival of the viking in June. The old gods and the old stories are not, in the North, a thing of the past.

In this section

The Norns and Fate

Viking Berserkers in Sagas