The nordic folklore was mostly oral until the 13th century. We do not have manuscripts dating to the early ages of the Vikings and Scandinavian peoples and their expansions. Their fantastic tales and sagas started being transcribed long after Christianity had supplanted the pagan ways of the Northern folk. The sources are hence mostly interpretations of the Nine Worlds, the Cosmos, the deities, and the humans they ruled. If you wish to know more about the mythical fables, the book of Neil Gaiman, an award-winning English writer of Polish origins, titled "Norse Mythology", is a good place to start. This book hit the shelves in 2017 and I recently listened to it while stuck in traffic. The author himself narrates it in a very captivating and splendid way. I always struggled to hit the pause button, and many times, I would remain in the car after reaching my destination just to listen to another 5 minutes of the story being told. For a visual person like me, listening to this Audible book was a delightful experience, creating lifelike imageries in my head and I would, at various instances, have to force myself to get back to my surroundings. It is indeed enchanting to get exposed to the lineage of Odin, the Aesir, the Giants, and the Dwarfs, and to finally understand what Ragnarok is all about: the apocalyptic destruction of the worlds and their rebirth. This goes against my spiritual upbringing, where villains are punished, and a deity is a supra being with an elevated thought or rhetoric that doesn't have "humanly reactions or discourse". My mind picked on the many similarities that can be drawn with Greek mythology or even more recent religious/divine visualizations, and I wonder could these different perceptions just be one and the same? Can the different consciousness levels transcending our differences one day unite us all as a single race, the human one? This is some food for thought... Meanwhile, enjoy the book, in either format or watch the series "Vikings" if you feel like a more dramatic dip into the legendary.
