Viking mythology and all that goes with it

No, three. There is Gylgaginning, Skaldskaparmal and Hattatal. If you go back about two pages in this thread there's more on this. Basically, Hattatal is very rarely included in any English translations of the Edda because it has been deemed so difficult to translate while still maintaining its meaning as well as its poetic form. A while back, I also realized that most of the English translations on the market only start at verse 90 of Skaldskaparmal, thus leaving out about half of it. I have no clue as to why. Those first 90 verses contain very much pertinent information, so this is very unfortunate. It may have something to do with the different copies being based on different original texts, where some of the original texts are damaged. For example, some of the Codex Regius might be missing a page, which the copy from Uppsala doesn't. That's just a guess, though.
Also, don't confuse one Edda with the other. The authors are different, the purpose for writing the texts down are different, and so one contains mythologies for the sake of retelling the story (Saemundar Edda), whereas the other (Snorri's Edda) is actually a book meant to teach how to write Norse poetry. As such, it outlines various names of various characters and what one might use to paraphrase that person or thing. Gylfaginning is then a good example of how one would write such a text. That would be why one has many more stories than the other (technically speaking, Snorri's Edda only has one story and two teaching texts). Make sense?
 
Celtik, you should take a look at place names for your paper, and look at the way trades-goods were routed throughout Europe. There will be an off-shoot effect in some areas, where some places that had thrived previously turned into ghost towns, while other places sprang up seemingly out of nowhere, because they were places the Norse could easily get to. It also had an effect when the Vatican prohibited Christian trade with non-Christians, not to mention the complete change in culture in Normandy after Rollo and his crew were parked there. That act changed history forever, and in a major way, since the Normans, who were Rollo's offspring and who carried on the legacy of his Norse heritage in an odd way, brought not only a new version of the new faith, but also a whole new political system, to many parts of Europe. That system in itself was the result of the old cultural and military system mixing with the new faith, and in the end, it was this old-new system that eradicated the old Norse rule in Britain once and for all, and which also tied England to France in a way that we still see the effects of today.
 
The way I was taught, was that Bifrost is a word made from two words, Bif- and –rost. Bif comes from ON bifa, which in current Swedish means “bäva”, to shake or shudder (earthquake=jordbävning=earth shake) but also to shimmer or glitter. The ON word rost is “rast” (break, recess) in current Swedish. The original meaning was the distance that a person could travel without taking a break. So, Bif-rost means the shimmering or trembling road, and I think shimmering road makes a lot of sense if one is describing the rainbow. Why do you ask?
 
Because I couldn't decide for myself, and trying to debate myself on an issue is a sure sign of madness. Or will cause madness. One or the other. Quite possibly both! I always seem to hear it as Bi-frost, but read it as Bif-rost. Idle thinking tonight, at a momentary "need something and it's too late to go to the store" impasse with the crafting stuff. So I'm doing what I do best... questioning everything :p
 
Very nice!!

Celtic: It occured to me that there's a very nice stone tablet of Norse origin in St Pauls cathedral, too (speaking of Norse remnants in churches and such). Judging from the style of ornamentation, the grave, or at least the tablet, was made around 1000 AD, and the runes say "Ginna and Toki raised the stone".
 
Nice job, Krigly. Hmm, I bet... no, wait, no more projects. For a while anyway. :)

And what the fuck is Beaf-voice? Beaf isn't in my dictionary :p

And are you sure that wasn't Skwisgaar and Toki? :lol:
 
I wasn't talking only about Egil's family tree, but every character in the entire saga (I should have been clearer).

I'll check the links later, I've become ill and am feeling very shitty at the moment. (Not to mention I'm at work, I don't have internet at home anymore :()
 
Did anyone else watch that "The Dark Ages" program on the History channel last night? I lost quite a bit of respect for the History channel, it was rather inaccurate in places, and suffered from a rather heavy Greco-Roman Christian bias. Need to watch it again so I can remember what was so off... or sleep, one or the other.
 
You don't need hard evidence to prove something wrong, you need it to prove it right. It'd be pretty nifty to see if they can manage to prove he did actually exist, but I'd need a better word on him being divine and so forth then stories written by a couple of vagrants :p
 
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