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Heimskringla (Icelandic pronunciation: [ˈheimsˌkʰriŋla]) is the best known of the Old Norse kings' sagas.It was written in Old Norse in Iceland.While authorship of Heimskringla is nowhere attributed, some scholars assume it is written by the Icelandic poet and historian Snorri Sturluson (1178/79–1241) c. 1230.
By the 1950s, it had become fashionable among some scholars to dismiss the writings of Snorri Sturluson on Norse mythology and other subjects as mere literary inventions without any foundations in earlier traditions. Turville-Petre disagreed, and believed that Snorri Sturluson's writings were based on genuine material.
Norse mythology is primarily attested in dialects of Old Norse, a North Germanic language spoken by the Scandinavian people during the European Middle Ages and the ancestor of modern Scandinavian languages. The majority of these Old Norse texts were created in Iceland, where the oral tradition stemming from the pre-Christian inhabitants of the ...
Much of the foundation of his theory, they point out, is based on similarities between names of figures from Norse mythology and geographical place-names of the present time in the Pontic steppe and Caucasus. Comparison of these names is done with disregard of linguistic theory, according to the reviewers. [3]
Norse mythology, stories of the Norse deities, is preserved in Eddic poetry and in Snorri Sturluson's guide for skalds, the Poetic Edda. Depictions of some of these stories can be found on picture stones in Gotland and in other visual records including some early Christian crosses, which attests to how widely known they were. [108]
In the Middle Ages many Faroese poems and stories were handed down orally. These works were split into the following divisions: sagnir (historical), ævintyr (stories) and kvæði (ballads, often set to music and dance). These were eventually written down in the 19th century, providing the basis for a late but powerful literature.
The sagas were originally written down in the 13th and 14th centuries, but they are believed to have been passed down orally for many years before that. [11] Runes are letters of several related alphabets historically used by various Germanic peoples, including the Norse. [12] In Nordic folklore, runes hold significant cultural and mystical ...
Odin, in his guise as a wanderer, as imagined by Georg von Rosen (1886). Odin (/ ˈ oʊ d ɪ n /; [1] from Old Norse: Óðinn) is a widely revered god in Germanic paganism. Norse mythology, the source of most surviving information about him, associates him with wisdom, healing, death, royalty, the gallows, knowledge, war, battle, victory, sorcery, poetry, frenzy, and the runic alphabet, and ...