Norse Mythology Quotes

“Cattle die, kinsmen die, one dies oneself in the same way, but a reputation never dies for the one who acquires a good one.”
― John Lindow, Norse Mythology: A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs

“The death of Baldr is one of the most important moments in the mythology.”
― John Lindow, Norse Mythology: A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs

“Thor was probably the most important god of late paganism, as is suggested by the presentation in medieval Scandinavian sources of the conversion as a struggle between Thor and Christ.”
― John Lindow, Norse Mythology: A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs

“In Gylfaginning Snorri uses and expands on these sources, adding, among other things, that the einherjar are “all those men who have fallen in battle since the beginning of the world.” He also sends the einherjar out against the forces of chaos at the last battle but gives no details of their fights and fates.”
― John Lindow, Norse Mythology: A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs

“The conversion to Christianity seems to have been envisioned while it was happening as a struggle between Thor and Christ. Thor and his fellow gods thus exited history at about the time Christ entered it in the north, that is, in the tenth and eleventh centuries.”
― John Lindow, Norse Mythology: A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs

“It is furthermore possible—perhaps likely—that Ragnarök was seen by at least some Christians as the demise not only of the pagan gods but of the belief in and worship of them. Their day would have preceded that of Christ, and it had a fiery and perhaps well-deserved end. Certainly the famous stanza 65H of Völuspá, found in the late-fourteenth-century redaction of the text, supports such a possibility, for it mentions the coming to power of “the powerful one, from on high, he who rules all.”
― John Lindow, Norse Mythology: A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs

“For the Christians of the Scandinavian Middle Ages, the gods would have had a place in historical time both through their euhemerization and through their presence in some of the lives of the saints translated from Latin into Icelandic. According to the notion of the euhemerization that prevailed in medieval Iceland, the gods were originally human beings who had emigrated from the Middle East (Tyrkland) to Scandinavia long ago.”
― John Lindow, Norse Mythology: A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs

“In a cyclical system, however, such a linear progression repeats itself endlessly; each end is followed by a new beginning. Determining the time system of Scandinavian mythology presents special challenges because many of the sources were recorded by Christians, whose notion of time was linear and whose notion of history called for an essentially clear chronology.”
― John Lindow, Norse Mythology: A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs

“The indiscriminate aligning of narrative elements to natural phenomena led to the eventual discrediting of comparative mythology, not least when Andrew Lang, a critic of Max Müller, demonstrated that Müller himself was a solar myth.”
― John Lindow, Norse Mythology: A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs

“Müller’s theory of myth was actually based on the notion of a “disease of language,” the idea that language itself was inadequate to express everything it had to and therefore was a major contributor to the development of gods and myths, which grew out of linguistic confusion.”
― John Lindow, Norse Mythology: A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs

“Although Adalbert Kuhn was an important early adherent of nature mythology, the person most closely associated with it today is Max Müller, a German Indo-Europeanist resident in England who was widely read and very influential for the entire second half of the nineteenth century.”
― John Lindow, Norse Mythology: A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs

“Snorri’s Edda is thus very much a document of its time, the Christian Middle Ages, and also of its place, an island where the older poetry, for whatever reason, was still transmitted.”
― John Lindow, Norse Mythology: A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs

“It is not difficult to imagine that Gylfaginning represents the first encounter between Gylfi and the Asia-men and that Gylfi’s delusion was in accepting that the stories told to him by Hár, Jafnhár, and Thridi were about gods. In other words, it is easy to believe that Snorri wishes us to believe that Gylfi’s meeting with the æsir contributed to their euhemerization.”
― John Lindow, Norse Mythology: A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs

“Snorri sets Thor in that environment; that is, he tells us that there was a historical figure whom the Nordic peoples called Thor who lived before Christ was born and who performed historical acts (it is important to remember that berserks and dragons were not as fantastic to medieval historians as they seem to us) that look very much like some of the myths about Thor that later were to be told by the Nordic peoples.”
― John Lindow, Norse Mythology: A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs

“the “noble heathen” is a stock character. All that conversion required, according to this theory of natural religion, was for Icelanders to regain sight of God. Unlike the pagans whom Icelanders learned about when they translated and read the lives of the early saints of the Christian church, Nordic pagans were not doomed souls in league with Satan. They were merely sheep who had lost their way.”
― John Lindow, Norse Mythology: A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs

“This is medieval speculation on the origin of paganism, and it ascribes to pagans a kind of natural religion, one based on unenlightened observation of the environment.”
― John Lindow, Norse Mythology: A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs

“It is certainly possible that knowledge of the myths survived the conversion to Christianity because of the value early Christian Iceland placed on the skaldic poems about kings and rulers. In other words, it is possible that the continued transmission of poetry about early kings and battles as historical sources required a continuing knowledge of heroic legend and of myth, not as the object of belief or as something associated with cult but simply as stories that people interested in the history of their own culture had to know.”
― John Lindow, Norse Mythology: A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs

“The term “eddic” is a misnomer: Most of these poems are in a single manuscript, and when the learned bishop Brynjólfur Sveinsson first saw this manuscript in the seventeenth century, he perceived a similarity to the book called Edda by Snorri Sturluson and imagined that this manuscript, another “Edda,” had been composed by Sæmund Sigfússon the Learned, a priest who flourished in the years around 1100”
― John Lindow, Norse Mythology: A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs

“Without the authority of a written document, there was no way to compare the versions of a text, and we therefore cannot assume that a text recorded in a thirteenth-century source passed unchanged through centuries of oral transmission. This fact makes it extremely difficult to discuss with any authority the time or place of origin of many of the texts of Scandinavian mythology, especially eddic poetry.”
― John Lindow, Norse Mythology: A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs

“Scandinavia through the Viking Age was for all intents and purposes an oral society, one in which nearly all information was encoded in mortal memory—rather than in books that could be stored—and passed from one memory to another through speech acts.”
― John Lindow, Norse Mythology: A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs

“Of the approximately 4,000 runic inscriptions, most are from the Viking Age; most of these are from Sweden; and most of these are from the provinces around Lake Mälaren, especially Uppland. Most are memorial: They explain who erected the stone, whose death is memorialized, and what the relationship was between the two.”
― John Lindow, Norse Mythology: A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs

“Most runic inscriptions are utilitarian, and despite popular conceptions, they have little to say about mythology or magic.”
― John Lindow, Norse Mythology: A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs

“It is important to stress that carving on wood or stone is a fairly laborious process and that the kinds of things recorded using the runic alphabets tended to be short and of a different nature from texts that can be easily written only in manuscripts.”
― John Lindow, Norse Mythology: A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs

“Before and after the church brought manuscript writing to the north, there was some writing using the native runic writing system. Since in the older runic alphabet there are no horizontal strokes, it is assumed that the system was originally invented for scratching the letters on wooden sticks, whose grain would obscure horizontal strokes. Only special circumstances permit wood to remain undecayed in the ground for archaeologists to dig up centuries later, and as a result most (but by no means all) of the extant runic inscriptions are on stones.”
― John Lindow, Norse Mythology: A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs

“Some lay persons of higher status were also apparently literate, at least in Icelandic, but all writing, whether in the international language of the church or in the vernacular, was the result of the conversion to Christianity, which brought with it the technology of manuscript writing.”
― John Lindow, Norse Mythology: A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs

“Thus Scandinavian mythology was, with virtually no exception, written down by Christians, and there is no reason to believe that Christianity in Iceland was any different from Christianity anywhere else in western Europe during the High Middle Ages.”
― John Lindow, Norse Mythology: A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs

“However, as the two sides approached the althingi in Iceland in the year 1000, it appeared that war would break out. Finally it was agreed that a single arbiter should choose one religion for the entire land, and the lawspeaker Thorgeir, a pagan, was chosen. After spending a night under his cloak, he emerged and decreed that Iceland should be Christian. And so it was. At first some pagan practices were permitted if carried out in secret, but later even this permission was rescinded. However, for reasons that are no longer quite clear, the old stories about the gods were not lost on Iceland. Poems about them lived on in oral tradition, to be recorded more than two centuries after the conversion. Some mythological poems may actually have been composed by Christians in Iceland, and Snorri Sturluson made extensive use of the mythology in his writings.”
― John Lindow, Norse Mythology: A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs

“Most historians accept that Sweden was fully Christian by the beginning of the twelfth century at the latest.”
― John Lindow, Norse Mythology: A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs

“The story goes on, however, to the destruction and rebirth of the cosmos, and everything in it is presented in light of an enduring struggle between two groups of beings, the gods on the one hand and giants on the other hand. These terms are to some extent misleading: Although the group that creates and orders the cosmos is often referred to by words that can best be translated “gods,” the principal word, “æsir,” is explicitly presented by the important medieval interpreter, Snorri Sturluson, as meaning “People of Asia,” and indeed the word often has the feel in mythological texts of an extended kin group or tribe rather than of a collective of deities.”
― John Lindow, Norse Mythology: A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs

“When most of us use the word “myth” in conversation, we refer to something that is not true. When historians of religion use it, they generally refer to a representation of the sacred in words. When anthropologists use it, they often refer to narratives that tell about the formation of some social institution or behavior. None of the definitions, however, will hold directly for the characters and stories this book treats.”
― John Lindow, Norse Mythology: A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs