The Meaning And Importance Of Nordic Mythology

The meaning and importance of Nordic mythology

Before the Nordics (also known as the Vikings) became. The centerpiece of that religion was what we now call ‘Nordic mythology’: the set of religious stories that gave meaning to the life of the Vikings. These myths revolved around gods and goddesses with fascinating and very complex characters, such as Odin, Thor, Freya and Loki .

The Nordic religion contained in these myths never had a true name;Those who practiced it simply called ‘tradition’. However, the people who continued following the old customs after the arrival of Christianity were sometimes called ‘pagans’, which originally meant ‘people living in the moors’ or anywhere else in the field, and the name has beenleft.

Religions are attempts of humanity to achieve the numinous, and the Nordic religion, of course, it was no exception. Provided a means to do this that was appropriate for the time and place of the Vikings. Although some aspects may seem strange to the modern reader, if we address it with the open mind it deserves, we can recognize in it the common human search for living life in the presence of transcendent majesty and the joy of the sacred. And although a thousand years have passed since the last Vikings deposed their swords, today people are still inspired by the vitality and wonder of the Nordic myths and the gods that inhabit them.

For the Vikings, the world as they found it was delighted, that is, they did not feel the need to seek salvation in the world, but they delighted and marveled at ‘how things are’, including what we know today.

I would call both ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. Their religion and myths did not sweeten the deafness, struggle and injustice of earthly life, but recognized it and praised the attempt to dominate it through the realization of great feats for the benefit of oneself and people. A life full of such facts was what was ‘the good life’ for the Vikings.

The Vikings were assailants, conquerors, explorers, settlers and sailor merchants of the current Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Iceland who ventured throughout the world during the Vikinga era. They traveled as east as Baghdad and as west as North America, which discovered some five hundred years before Christopher Columbus. They spoke ancient Nordic language, wrote with runes and practiced their ancestral religion.

The Vikings were motivated to sail from their countries of origin by universal and timeless human desires: wealth, prestige and power. As in most human societies, those objectives were intertwined for the Vikings;Those who had more wealth normally had more prestige and power, and vice versa. The Vikings sought wealth both in their laptop (gold, silver, precious and similar stones) and in the form of land.

Therefore, we have to thank the Vikings for our current understanding not only of their own pre -Christian religion and mythology, but also that of other Germanic peoples. Thanks to the poems, treated and sagas in ancient Nordic that were written during or relatively shortly after the Viking era, we have a much more complete image of what the Vikings religion was like (despite the many unfortunate holes that,However, they remain at that time). image) of what we do for religions of any of the other pre -Christian Germanic peoples. But because of the little we know about these religions, they seem to have been variations on common issues that were also shared by the Nordics, so we can use Nordic sources to help us rebuild these ancient religions too.