Introduction

Abstract The title, Old Norse Mythology recognizes the fact that the mythology in question is recorded almost exclusively in the manuscripts of Old Norse literary tradition—that is, in manuscripts primarily from thirteenth-century Iceland. Since Iceland had converted to Christianity in the year 1000CE, the scribes who recorded the myths were Christians, and the myths can hardly have been sacred in their eyes. Nevertheless, there were mythographers such as Snorri Sturluson, who composed Edda, a handbook of poetics that includes a synopsis of the mythology, and such as the anonymous redactor of what we now call the Poetic Edda, a collection of mythic and heroic poems, and myths are displaced into history in the Gesta Danorum by Saxo Grammaticus. This chapter discusses the progression from the oral mythology of the Viking Age (c. 800-1100) to the written mythology of the Middle Ages.