Books like The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún

This book is essentially an anthology of some of the best stories ever told.

It includes sagas as well as several tales, shorter anecdotes the Icelanders told. I love the Icelandic landscape, and it comes startlingly alive in the pages of this book.

One of the best is Egil’s Saga. In terms of fantastic events, it exceeds most fantasy written today. Others are realistic and give a feel for what life was like for ordinary people in early medieval Iceland. 

I love literature that is elaborate, strange, and profound. I love books that don’t give their secrets away right on the surface. This taste has been nurtured by the stories in this book. I try to understand what the Icelanders for whom these stories were written thought of them: these were the themes of their quotidian existence.

The sagas were being written at the same time as Chaucer and Dante… show more.

I loved this book when I was young.

It weaves the whole Norse mythic pantheon into one long, coherent saga. I wanted to live in that world, which I recognized as being far more beautiful than the world in which I lived. Also, the illustrations by Pogany are masterpieces that I would just sit and admire.

When I returned to this book as an adult, I felt all of its charm was still there. The prose is simple but poetic. I was particularly taken by the retelling of the Sigurd legend. The fierce love of Brynhild the Valkyrie and the force of the doom that overtook Sigurd left a lasting impression on me.  

This book taught me the history of the Viking Age.

It was written in the thirteenth century to tell the story of the kings of Norway from the beginning till that time. It was well worth the read. I was swept into the stream of Viking history and lived vicariously the lives of the Norse kings and warriors. The descriptions of Norse battlefields, naval combats, and courtly intrigue are vivid and compelling.

By the way, Snorri was quite a controversial figure in his time, so much so that the Norwegian king had him murdered. But his writing has survived.

It’s no exaggeration to say this book changed my life. 

I quickly became immersed in Norse mythology when I read this book. The poems in this book are the source for most of what we know about Norse myths, and it also contains many lays detailing the legends of the heroes, most notably Sigurd the Volsung.

When I read this book, I saw in a fossilized form a past culture whose values were far different from those of the culture in which I lived; it was like finding I had a sibling I’d never known about, and I felt a strong connection to it. When reading the heroic lays, I encountered men and women who were motivated by compassion and bravery. The characters and their psychological needs were like those I found in Homer, Sophocles, and Shakespeare.  

The poems may seem strange and hard to grasp at first, but those… show more.

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 book I love purely for the photographs of archeological treasures and historical paintings. It’s in the format often referred to as a “coffee table book.” However, even though you may be tempted to page through it only to look at its impressive graphics and illustrations, the content is very much researched and informative. I especially like the sections on magical creatures and how Norse mythology has influenced our modern world and more current fiction.

This Old Norse poem was part of the collection of works included in the Poetic Edda, written around 1300 CE and collected by Snorri Sturlusson. It centers around the god Odin and includes advice for life and love, the story of Odin’s self-sacrifice on the World Tree of Yggdrasil, and eighteen spells Odin claims to know. The book provides revealing details about life in Viking times, but my favorite part is the section on spells, which include healing, manipulating metal so weapons do less damage, escape artistry, redirecting curses, calming winds, and even resurrection. Hávamál isn’t as popular as some of the other poems, but it’s worth a read for the insights into the god Odin and what makes him tick.

Snorri did not write his Edda in a vacuum, and the mythological and heroic poems collected in the thirteenth century Codex Regius (and a handful of other manuscripts) provide a snapshot of the sort of raw material from which his book was constructed. The apparent antiquity of these poems (quite how old remains a matter of debate) led to them being labelled the ‘Elder’ Edda and, although in their preserved form they are products of the Middle Ages, they powerfully evoke the strange and esoteric world of northern antiquity. In content the mythological poems encompass, amongst much else, Völuspá (the prophetic vision of a sorceress revealing the breaking and rebirth of the world at Ragnarök and the events that will precipitate it), Hávamál (the gnomic wisdom of Odin, including an account of his self-mortifying pursuit of occult knowledge) and Lokasenna (in which the god Loki provides a definitive example of… show more.

Poetry remains very important for Icelanders, also as an everyday practise. There are farmers in the country today who compose poetry based on the landscape of their home and the sagas that played here hundreds of years ago, and about 40% of all published books in Iceland each year are poetry collections. Gerður is a highly successful poet and playwright, and her long poem Bloodhoof is an outstanding example of how contemporary Icelandic writing is still firmly rooted in the literary heritage of the country. The poem retells the classic Norse tale of the abduction of beautiful giantess Gerdur by the god Freyr, but from the perspective of the giantess in a distinctly feminist voice.  

While Snorri wrote in his native Old Norse in Iceland, unbeknownst to him, a Danish writer remembered as Saxo the Grammarian ('Grammaticus') was writing a monumental history of the Danish kingdom in Latin. Since the old gods were held to be the ancestors of the royal families of medieval Scandinavia, Saxo spends quite a bit of time in the first nine books of 'The History of the Danes' retelling their stories. Many fans of Norse mythology who read the Eddas still never approach Saxo's work, which in fact has been mined in recent centuries for many rich details that are preserved nowhere else. Like Snorri, Saxo tries to "rationalize" the old gods into becoming misguided or deceitful human beings from the distant past, and he does a more thorough job of it, but even through this veneer, it is hard not to recognize the same characters that we know from… show more.