The Norse Myths That Shape the Way We Think by Carolyne Larrington (review)

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• The Norse Myths That Shape the Way We Think by Carolyne Larrington
• Tim William Machan

carolyne larrington, The Norse Myths That Shape the Way We Think. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2023. Pp. 304. isbn: 978–0500252345. $34.95.

Near the beginning of this well-written, expansive, and inviting book, Carolyne Larrington observes, 'It might seem that, as journalists like to say, Old Norse myths are currently "having a moment"' (p. 8). But as the book shows, this moment has been happening almost since the Viking age itself, informing multiple media across the centuries with myths that assume context specific shapes and always suggest an intensity of response shared by no other mythic tradition. It may be, Larrington notes, that 'Old Norse myths and legends … offer ways of thinking about the world, about time, history and fate, that we do not find in the more culturally central Greek and Roman myths' (p. 8). And their continued moment also may be rooted in, as she stresses throughout the book, the intensity and familiarity of the human qualities they display: folly, wisdom, hatred, love, envy, vengeance, fallibility. Reasonably enough, Larrington focuses on the Anglophone tradition, but, perhaps because of these familiar qualities, the Norse moment has spanned continents, peoples, and language traditions, making the recent film Thor: Love and Thunder a worldwide box office hit.

Two qualities distinguish The Norse Myths That Shape the Way We Think and will make the book of interest to a wide audience, particularly one of non-specialists. The first is the clarity of its organization, which is no small accomplishment given the scope and discordant nature of primary Norse documents like poems, sagas, and rune stones. Put another way, there is not (and almost certainly never was) a coherent, synoptic mythos but rather scattered riffs on recurrent themes, stories, and characters. Accordingly, the book is arranged around what might be called umbrella topics that will be familiar to (say) viewers of recent medieval Norse film: Valhöll, Óðinn, Þórr, Loki, Vikings and Bererkers, Sigurðr the Dragon-Slayer, Ragnarr Shaggy-Breeches, Vinland, and the Ragna rök. Particular novels, poems, or films might appear in each chapter, but in this arrangement, they are treated not as free-standing works but as participants in larger traditions. The reader thus gets a sense of how Þórr and the rest have been reimagined across time—of the continuities as well as inconsistencies.

The book's second distinguishing quality is its breadth. Focusing on the past two centuries, The Norse Myths explores a range of poems, musical adaptations, novels, and (of late) films that take their inspiration from Viking-age stories. Some of these adaptations, such as Longfellow's 'The Skeleton in Armor' or the novels of George Martin, are familiar but many are not; I at least did not know of the seventeenth-century Dane Thomas Barthol, who wrote three books in Latin about the character of his historical forebearers. Some titles and individuals figure prominently throughout: Richard Wagner, Neil Gaiman, and Game of Thrones, for example. Other modern scholars and popularizers have written about the transformation of Norse materials into contemporary stories, but I know of no other book that has the range this one does. Larrington thus provides a kind of compendium of Norse riffs and thereby a shortcut into primary materials for anyone interested in pursuing the topics further.

Perhaps for a general book directed at a general audience, it would be inappropriate for The Norse Myths to engage fully with the continued political and social ramifications of the appropriation of the Norse material. Not only in the past two centuries but since the early modern period, when English historiographers in a sense discovered [End Page 71] the Norse past, Óðinn and the Viking temperament have played crucial roles in the formation of ethnicity and cultural identity. Someone like William Morris might seem a long way from Richard Wagner, but they shared the notion that the Viking past could be remade in ways to justify an often exclusionary present. These are the same approaches that lead to thinking that is implicitly white supremacist already in the nineteenth century and explicitly so in the past...