NEW Spring 2025 - Norse Mythology

Norse mythology proliferates in the modern cultural and political imagination, from modern revivals of pagan religions to Marvel movies and comics featuring the Norse Gods. Uniquely among Western cultures, Norse mythology has come down to us in medieval sources that were compiled and written on Iceland in Old Norse in the thirteenth century. Archaeological evidence from Scandinavia and dating from the centuries before the wide adoption of Christianity in the North, which took place from ca. 970 to 1050 C.E., provides tantalizing glimpses of belief systems about the supernatural and its place in the human life world and about the nature of heroism that differ markedly from our own. Throughout the course, we also consider modern and contemporary uses and abuses of Norse mythology and ponder what it is about these stories that allows them to persistently resonate across time.  We will consider whether the virtue-focussed explanations of heroism and mythology that are characteristic of our times find any purchase in the medieval texts. We will use Norse mythology as a gateway for examining contemporary assumptions about cultural concepts such as religion and writing, and we will explore theoretical models that help us make sense of the persistence of myths and legends across time and space.

The narrow focus of Norse Mythology is on two books, each written—or written down—around eight hundred years ago in a language spoken or understood at the time by some 30,000 people living on a remote island in the North Sea, the outermost margin of the Christian European world towards which they faced. These two remarkable books are so utterly unique that they have a singular name: They are known as Eddas. We are going to read and discuss the Eddas together over twelve weeks so that we can encounter their world of story—a primal, violent, alien world of beginnings and endings, of gods, giants, and heroes, of force, struggle, and toil, but also of light, knowledge, and heroics—on its own terms. Not in Old Norse (those of you interested in learning this language, which was the ancestor tongue of modern Danish, Faroese, Icelandic, Norwegian, and Swedish, please email your professor), but in the next best thing: in trustworthy, contemporary, and philologically sound English translations. We will be guided by academics whose scholarship has contributed to our store of knowledge illuminating the Eddas and the languages, beliefs, and values they represent; by the philologists who have rendered the Eddas expertly into reliable, trustworthy English translations; by the historians who have studied the imprint left by the Norse in the writings of those who encountered them; and by the archaeologists whose studies of the material remains of the Viking world can illuminate some small part of the deeper past represented in the Eddas.