Norse mythology survives mostly in two thirteenth-century Icelandic works, the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda, alongside skaldic verse and sagas. Its cosmos is a great ash tree, Yggdrasil, connecting nine worlds, with the gods of the Aesir ruling from Asgard.
At the center stands Odin, the one-eyed Allfather who trades his eye and hangs himself on Yggdrasil to win wisdom and the runes. His son Thor guards gods and humans alike, swinging the hammer Mjolnir against the giants who threaten the world.
These tales are shadowed by Ragnarok, the foretold doom in which gods and monsters fall together and the world sinks into the sea, only to rise green and renewed. It is a mythology that looks its own ending squarely in the face.
