These are notes from a presentation by Ada Palmer at Capricon 46. Any mistakes here are mine, not Professor Palmer’s. The room was crowded and I had to stand, limiting my note-taking ability. Here is the blurb from the convention program:

Why It’s So Easy To Be Wrong About Vikings. We recently realized Heimdall is a tree! A new lost Loki story was discovered on the Faroe islands! It turns out Hel isn’t black on one side after all, she’s blue! Mixing storytelling with the latest discoveries, Ada Palmer discusses recent advances in Norse myth research, both what we’ve found and why it took so long to find it, a history which involves not only the Medieval sources but the nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarly debates, feuds, mistakes, and corrections in this live and rapidly-changing field whose constant new discoveries mean every decade brings new material to draw on for our own Norse Myth fiction projects.

There is some “negative space” in Norse mythology: Places where there must have been a myth, but we have no record of it. Thor is supposed to have killed 22 giants, but we have only three myths about him doing that. Incidentally, there were female giants in Norse mythology.

The literary sources for Norse myths are quite limited compared for those for Greek myths. Much of contemporary scholarship is behind paywalls.

The Poetic Edda has a lot of content from the middle ages, but our current main source dates from the 17^th century and includes a lot of “fanfic.” There is also the Prose Edda by Snorri Sturluson.

Old Norse stories are full of kennings as alternatives to ordinary nouns or names, e.g. “Sif’s hair” for “gold.” Behind each of these kennings is a myth to explain where it came from. Most of these myths have not survived. Snorri does not explain the origins of the kennings.

There is a myth about a man and a woman. The woman’s name is never mentioned, but we know she is part of the story. The reason is the characters are referred to using a particular plural form for mixed gender groups. I love linguistic evidence.

All adult male Aesir are maimed in some way. E.g. Odin only has one eye.

Scholars in the 19^th century were looking for northern rivals to Homer. They tried for force Norse myth into pre-existing molds.

The Nazis were really interested in Norse myths and wrote a lot about them. Hence after World War II this was a field that scholars were reluctant to touch. This has only recently changed, partly because of feminist scholars looking for something new to research.

Fiber arts, a traditionally feminine field, figure significantly in Norse mythology.

Trees are important in Norse mythology. The first humans were created from trees. The fundamental part of the tree is the root system.