NORSE MYTHS

GODS, GODDESSES, HEROES AND MONSTERS BROUGHT TO LIFE These stories don’t get any less odd, or charming, as we learn about the nine worlds and their

AUTHOR MATT RALPHS ILLUSTRATOR KATIE PONDER PUBLISHER DORLING KINDERSLEY PRICE £16.99 / $21.99

RELEASE OUT NOW

Norse mythology is pretty trendy right now, what with the Marvel Cinematic Universe popularising a handful of characters from ancient Viking lore in big-budget cinema. Names like Thor and his hammer Mjölnir, the mischievous Loki and the world of Asgard will be familiar to millions of Marvel fans. If the movies are a toe-dip into the icy waters of Scandinavian legend, Matt Ralph’s Norse Myths is an ice dive into these wild and frequently weird stories.

The author prefaces the book by telling us that although these tales were first written in the 13th century, like most myths they were passed down by word of mouth across generations of Vikings for an unknown number of centuries before they were committed to paper. They have evolved over hundreds of years of retellings, but they’ve lost none of their character and weird allegories along the way: Ralphs tells us about how at the beginning of everything, frost giants emerged from a world of ice called Niflheim and a giant cow licked the salty ice to create a god called Buri, who married a giant and gave birth to other gods – his grandson was Odin, the famous god of wisdom, death and a few other things.

These stories don’t get any less odd, or charming, as we learn about the nine worlds and their inhabitants on the giant ash tree Yggdrasil. We get a real idea of how the Vikings viewed events or objects that they had no scientific understanding of through metaphorical ideas. Perhaps the melting of the ice in Ginnungagap, with life springing out of it, was how the Vikings interpreted the glaciers retreating from their homelands in times gone by.

In the last section, Ralphs gives us a bit of much needed background to the Vikings, their beliefs and traditions for a fuller understanding of the origin of these myths. It’s a fantastically illustrated book too, conveying all the wonder, horror and awe that these people must have experienced in their chilly but beautiful world when they dreamt up these stories.