Preserving Norse Mythology Through the Eddas

Much of what is known today about pre-Christian Norse religion, including the structure of the Norse cosmos across nine worlds connected by the world tree Yggdrasil, the coming apocalyptic battle of Ragnarok, and the specific characters and relationships among the Aesir and Vanir gods, survives specifically because Snorri Sturluson, writing in Old Norse in officially Christian thirteenth-century Iceland, chose to systematically record this mythological material as cultural and literary heritage rather than active religious belief, since Iceland had formally converted to Christianity around the year 1000. This means virtually all detailed surviving Old Norse mythological material was recorded by Christian authors working from a position of some historical and religious distance from the beliefs being described, a source-critical complication scholars including John Lindow have addressed extensively when using the Eddas to reconstruct actual pre-Christian Norse religious belief and practice. Old Norse runic inscriptions, predating and continuing alongside the later manuscript tradition, provide an independent, if much more fragmentary, epigraphic source for Norse religious and magical vocabulary from the Viking Age itself.