A Viking Dark Fantasy Author Explains
Here’s a question I get asked a lot: how do you research Norse Mythology for a Viking dark fantasy series?
The short answer is: very carefully, and with a deep suspicion of whatever you thought you already knew.
Because here’s the thing nobody tells you when you first fall in love with Norse mythology: a lot of what gets taught as Norse mythology isn’t actually Norse mythology. It’s something else dressed up in a horned helmet, presented with total confidence, and passed around until everyone accepts it as fact.
I’ve been researching the Norse world since I was around twelve years old. That’s when I first had the idea for A Tale of Scorched Ash and Elm, and I needed to understand the world I was building. I grew up homeschooled with a broadband connection and an iMac, which meant I had unlimited time and unlimited access to rabbit holes. And the rabbit hole I fell into — Norse mythology, the Eddas, the sagas, the gods — is one I still haven’t entirely climbed out of.
What I found at the bottom of that rabbit hole surprised me. So let’s talk about it.
The Difference Between Classical Myth and “Myth”
When scholars and researchers talk about Norse mythology, they mean something specific: stories that are academically accepted, archaeologically or anthropologically supported, and demonstrably told by pre-Christian Scandinavian people.
The bar for that is actually evidence. Physical evidence. A runestone, an inscription, a carving that proves someone, somewhere, believed this thing and told this story.
A great example of this sourcing is the story of Thor’s fishing trip with the giant Hymir, where he wrestles the Midgard Serpent, Jörmungandr, and punches his foot through the boat in the effort. We know this story is old because there is a runestone (in Norway or Sweden, I believe) that depicts exactly that scene: Thor with the serpent wrapped around the stone, his foot going through the hull. That’s archaeological confirmation. That’s classical myth.
Non-classical myth is everything else: the retellings, the additions, the stories that came later, invented or embellished by poets, monks, or the German fairy tale writers of the 18th and 19th centuries. These stories are part of what we call “Norse mythology” today. They’re just not the old part.
And they’re not a small proportion of what gets passed around. They’re a significant chunk of it.
The Real Source: The Eddas
The only sources that come close to capturing actual pre-Christian Norse belief in any systematic way are the Eddas. There are two: the Poetic Edda, a collection of Old Norse poems, and the Prose Edda, written down by a 12th-century Icelandic scholar named Snorri Sturluson.
Snorri is important. He was first-or-second-generation from the conversion of Iceland to Christianity, which meant he’d grown up hearing stories from parents and grandparents who remembered the old traditions. He traveled, collected stories, and recorded them—and as far as we can tell, his work wasn’t heavily interfered with by the Christian scribes who might have had reasons to change things. Scholars can usually identify when additions were made after the fact, and they weren’t made to Snorri’s core texts until much later.
The Eddas are your best access point to real Eddic myth. The Icelandic sagas and early Norwegian folk traditions extend this; figures like Völund the smith, the dwarf Dáinn, and the gods themselves appear in saga literature in ways that feel consistent with Eddic material and that we can date, at the latest, to the end of the Viking Age around 1180 AD.
These are the texts I work from. These are the stories I trust.
The problem, as always, is translation. Every time you read a translation of an Old Norse text, you are reading someone’s interpretation of what word to use, which connotation to privilege, which cultural assumption to carry over into a modern language. I talk about this with people when we discuss biblical translation too — you can’t fully trust that your English Bible says exactly what the original text said, because translation is inherently interpretive. The Eddas and sagas are no different. The translator’s choices matter enormously, which is why I recommend reading more than one.
My recommendation: Dr. Jackson Crawford’s translations are meticulous and genuinely respect the language and the worldview of the people who told these stories. Penguin Classics editions are widely accessible and generally solid. And if you want to go deeper, the Viking Society for Northern Research publishes free translations online with notes, which let you see the translator’s thinking as you read.
The Victorian Problem, Or: Why Freya Gets the Worst of It
Now let’s talk about what happens when mythology escapes the hands of historians and falls into the hands of the 19th century.
Two gods get particularly badly distorted by the Victorian and early modern retelling tradition. Thor gets simplified into a big dumb hammer guy. And Freya gets it worse; she gets flattened into the Norse equivalent of Aphrodite, repackaged as the goddess of love and beauty and questionable decisions, and her actual character gets buried under layers of other people’s assumptions.
Let me walk you through the Brísingamen story as a case study in how this happens.
What Most People Know
In the version of this story that circulates widely, Freya discovers a beautiful golden necklace—the Brísingamen—crafted by four dwarves. She wants it desperately, because Freya loves gold above all things. The dwarves agree to give it to her in exchange for spending one night with each of them. She does this, returns to Asgard full of shame, and is caught sneaking back by Loki. Loki tells Odin. Odin is furious. Freya is punished.
It’s a morality tale about a woman who debases herself for vanity and answers to a male authority figure for it.
If you read that story and something felt off, you were right.
What the Text Actually Says
The earliest surviving version of this story is called the Sörla þáttr, and here’s the critical detail: in that text, Odin is not a god. He is a human king. Freya is his concubine or mistress. The story is a medieval parable about a jealous lord, his unfaithful woman, and the shame she brings on herself. Loki is Odin’s human advisor. The whole thing is designed around medieval moral frameworks about female behavior and male ownership of women, because it was written to perpetuate those values, not to record ancient belief.
There’s no evidence this story existed before the Sörla þáttr. Some scholars think monks invented it wholesale. Others think it may derive from lost oral tradition. Either way, it is almost certainly not a pre-Christian Scandinavian story about the goddess Freya.
And then the 19th century got hold of it.
German fairy tale writers—the same cultural moment that gave us Grimms’ fairy tales—took this already-suspect story and turned it into something even further removed from its roots. In one Victorian-era retelling, Freya is married to a man named Óðr, who is deeply upset by her greed for gold. The dwarves are replaced by a giantess who demands Freya perform terrible chores for four nights instead (because you can’t have dwarves sleeping with women in a children’s story). Freya earns the necklace, comes home, and her husband is so disgusted that he leaves her. She chases after him weeping tears of gold. Those golden tears, falling across the earth, explain the coming of winter and spring.
It’s a creation myth explaining seasonal change, lifted wholesale from Greek mythological tradition, where Demeter’s grief over Persephone explains the seasons, grafted onto a Norse story, polished to a romantic sheen, and handed to European children as ancient wisdom.
That is the story that became “Norse mythology” for generations of people.
Why This Matters for Fantasy Writers
If you’re writing in the Norse or Viking space, this matters practically. Because your readers will have one of two relationships with this material: they’ll know only the Victorian/pop culture version and trust you to match it, or they’ll know the historical scholarship and trust you to respect it. Neither group is better than the other, but they are different audiences, and how you handle the mythology signals which conversation you’re in.
When I write Leifthasir’s Saga, I am explicitly in conversation with the Eddas and the sagas. The magic system is rooted in what seiðr actually was in the primary sources. The social structures—the Thing, the jarl system, the role of the völva all come from historical and archaeological research, not from pop culture shorthand. The gods appear as the complex, politically entangled, morally ambiguous figures the Eddas describe, not as their Marvel approximations.
That means Freya, in my world, does not apologize for wanting things. She teaches seiðr to the dark elves, to the Vanir, to anyone she deems worth teaching, because that’s what the Ynglinga saga tells us she did. She holds power as a Vanir goddess, not as Odin’s property. Her character is rooted in what the actual texts suggest about who she was, not what the Victorians decided she should have been.
The Brísingamen story, as I engage with it in The Forge, begins from an entirely different place. Freya retains full sexual agency. The shame narrative is gone. What remains is the interesting part: a powerful woman who wants something and decides on her own terms how to get it.
That’s not a revision of Norse mythology. That’s a closer reading of it.
Where to Start Your Own Research
If this has made you want to dig into the real sources, good. Here’s where I’d point you:
Dr. Jackson Crawford’s translations of the Eddas — thoughtful, rigorous, and written for a modern reader without dumbing anything down. His YouTube channel is also genuinely excellent for context.
The Penguin Classics editions of the Prose and Poetic Eddas — widely available, generally solid, and a good starting point before you move to academic translations.
Viking Society for Northern Research free publications — online, free, and include translation notes so you can follow the scholarly reasoning. This is where you go when you want to understand why a translator made a specific word choice.
Kevin Crossley-Holland’s The Norse Myths — worth reading as a gateway, with the understanding that Crossley-Holland himself will tell you it’s a retelling of retellings. He works to strip away the worst of the medieval Christian lens, but he’s still working from secondary material. Read it as literature, not as a primary source.
The most important thing I can tell you is to read with suspicion—not cynicism, but genuine critical attention. Ask where the story comes from. Ask who wrote it down, when, and why. Ask what assumptions the translator was working under.
The stories that survive that scrutiny are extraordinary. They are strange and violent and funny and morally complex and utterly unlike anything the Victorians would have invented on their own.
Those are the ones worth telling.