Odin gave an eye at Mimir's well and hung nine nights on the world-tree to win the runes. Here are the tales of the Allfather of Asgard, and of Thor his son, as the North told them.
The chapters of The Stories of Odin come from Asgard and the Gods, the Victorian manual of Norse mythology compiled by the German scholar Wilhelm WĂ€gner (1800â1886) and put into English by M. W. MacDowall in 1880. Working from the Eddas and the sagas, WĂ€gner set the myths out as continuous narrative rather than scattered fragments: the shaping of the world, Yggdrasil and the realms it holds together, the Allfather's journeys in disguise among men, his hunger for wisdom and for the runes, the hall of the chosen slain, the expeditions of Thor against the giants of Jötunheim, and the doom that waits at Ragnarök.
WĂ€gner wrote for readers who had never met these gods before, and it shows in the pace of the telling. His book reached English homes at the moment when William Morris's saga translations were making the North fashionable, and for a great many readers it was the first place they met the Allfather at all.
This edition features:
- The Allfather's own cycle of myths, drawn from the Eddas and the sagas by a nineteenth-century scholar
- The shaping of the world, Yggdrasil, the hall of the slain, and the doom foretold at Ragnarök
- The expeditions of Thor against the frost giants of the east, told alongside his father's wanderings
- Illustrations carried over from the nineteenth-century English edition of Asgard and the Gods
Wine Dark Press presents The Stories of Odin, gathered from one of the books that first carried the myths of the North to a wide English readership.