Books like Loki's Wolves

I knew the basics of the Norse Gods and Goddesses, but told in the perspicacious words of a master storyteller like Gaiman, really painted the ruined walls with all the color needed!

I love processing what the minds who birthed these Gods must have thought, dreamed, meant, and saw!

This is a classic Middle Grade book that was first published in 1975 and still holds strong. Neil Gaiman himself endorsed it, so you know it’s going to be a fantastic mythology-based book! This is one of those stories that drops so many clues and hints that when you get to the end, you’ll want to read it again to catch everything you missed.

Riordan had me at Norse mythology. Love it! Written in the usual tongue-in-cheek humor I’m used to with the author’s style, I loved the way he rebranded Norse myths to fit into the young adult genre he’s so famous for writing. It begins as homeless Magnus Chase (cousin to Annabeth from The Lightning Thief) is plucked from the real world (he literally dies) and taken to Hotel Valhalla, where he’s put through the gantlet over and over again (and dies many times in the process) until he teams up with an unlikely (and likable) diverse cast of characters who embark on a journey to recover his birthright—the Sword of Summer. However, what Magnus doesn’t count on is finding out the truth about who he really is, and his place in Asgard. 

When it comes to learning about Norse mythology, you can’t beat the original source material. If you are a bit of a history nerd like me, it’s fascinating to read a translation of the original Old Norse poems. These poems can be found in a text called the Poetic Edda, which has several different translations. I like the Henry Adams Bellows translation, as well as Dr. Jackson Crawford’s. Crawford has YouTube videos that taught me a lot while I was writing my book, so that’s worth checking out, if you’re interested.

This is a vigorous retelling of the last battle of the Norse gods and their enemies, how the gods tried to avert their doom, how they first met those who would kill almost all of them, and what happened after all the slaughter and destruction. The book has the size and format of a typical picture storybook but its powerful illustrations of threat and attack make it more suitable for an older audience.

This was another one of my favourites for learning about the Norse gods and the Norse religion. I found the information about the different gods, where their names came from, and how they were worshipped invaluable, as well as the detailed information about the different worlds the Vikings believed in and those who lived on those worlds.

This book was great for learning about how the Scandinavian people viewed their religion and how it affected their lives and their views on magic and the cosmos. I found it useful to learn about their afterlife and how the Vikings viewed it. It’s another book I regularly revisit when writing my novels.

In a world saturated with Greek Mythological Retellings, The Witch’s Heart is a breath of fresh (cold) air from Valhalla.

Angrboda—a woman who made a recent appearance in the God of War PS4 games—blazes across this book as the mother of monsters! Odin's wrath leaves her powerless, and her only escape route? Off to a remote forest she dashes. Enter Loki, that sly trickster, stumbling upon her and—bam!—love sparks, birthing three whelps, each harbouring their own cryptic fate.

It's a Norse mythology remix with a modern twist and a brand-new leading lady—epic, heartbreaking, and full of oomph! And if every time you see Loki, you see Tom Hiddleston's mischievous grin, you aren’t alone.

Jackson Crawford’s lectures on Norse mythology make a wonderful accompaniment to any bit of hobby-doing. It fits, I think, with the venue these stories would have originally been told, something to pass the time, to make work of the hand and eye go by a bit faster. What better to help inspire some fantasy making, like painting miniatures or knitting something more elaborate than stories of gods and heroes of a bygone age, when magic was real, and the gods and giants battled around us? I started with Dr. Crawford’s YouTube lectures on all things Old Norse and came to appreciate his engaging style and masterful depth of the subject. He brings the stories to life and reveals the language as it may have been spoken. He puts the myths in their contexts. I view any day that I haven’t learned something new as a bit of a waste and… show more.

Kevin Crossley-Holland published excerpts from his Norse Myths as a book for children. But as a child’s first introduction to the tales, it might be too poetic. I’d recommend, instead, Norse Mythology for Kids by Mathias Nordvig.

Nordvig retells the myths as your wise uncle might—if he happened to be Loki, the trickster god. For Nordvig not only blends different versions of a tale, but he also adds bits he thinks our original sources shouldn’t have left out.

Into that “mist world” at time’s beginning, for instance, Nordvig inserts a loon who helps the goddess Jord build the Earth. It’s a tale I’m familiar with from Native American mythology, but as Nordvig asserts, the Norse stories “are still alive.” And to keep them that way, we need to make them our own.

Poul Anderson is best known for his science fiction, but he was also one of the great fantasy and historical fiction writers of the 20th century, as well as a founding member of the Society for Creative Anachronism. His fantasy and historical fiction novels tended to focus on the Viking Age and/or Norse myths, and War of the Gods is my favorite of these. It is a rousing novelization of Book 1 from Saxo Grammaticus’ Gesta Danorum, one of our foremost sources of Norse mythology. War of the Gods takes Saxo’s brief story, uniquely positions it against the background of the mythological war between the Aesir and Vanir, and expands the tale from its short foundation to be an action-packed novel that remains faithful to its original inspiration.