The Valkyrie & The Viking

Index of Mythology

This is to be used as an optional reference for mythological information in the story. Names, places, or cultural information that show up in this index should be marked with an asterisk (*). If you haven't actually started the story yet, your best bet is probably to just skip this whole thing for now until you get to an asterisked word you're curious about. Thank you!

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Info on mythology

Norse mythology, in my opinion, is one of the most diverse and complex mythologies in the history of the world, stemming from the equally diverse and complex culture of the Vikings. The first thing to understand, though, is that unlike Greek mythology where the history of the gods was laid out in the Theogony for every Greek to read, Norse mythology isn’t as clear cut, and we don’t even have an extensive layout of their mythology until a historian came along and compiled their poetry two centuries after the end of the Viking Age. There are many different ways to interpret the myths, and the ways I use in this book may not be completely accurate to the true history of the Norse gods. But here are names and places you need to know for this book in order of when they appear, the way I have found them to be reading a lot of ancient Norse texts and studying the Viking culture pretty extensively:

Mist: Mist is a Valkyrie referenced in Skáldskaparmál, an Old Norse poem with a section devoted to naming Valkyries. No other information about her is given in the poem, but Svipul, whose name means “Changeable”, also appears in one of these lists.

Valhalla: This is the place where one half of all fallen warriors would go in the afterlife. There they would be trained by Odin to become stronger warriors, to fight on his side during Ragnarok.

Valkyries: They were goddess-like beings who flew over the battlefields and had dominion over who lived and who died. They also had the role of delivering those they chose to die either to Valhalla or Folkvangr, and serving mead to the warriors in the former. Later on in the Norse history they became goddesses of beauty who guarded the gates of Valhalla, but for the purposes of this story they will only be the first version. Some people equate the Valkyries with the Norns, but once again for the purposes of this story I’m assuming that they are two different kinds of beings.

Valfather: One of hundreds of names for Odin, the king of the gods of Asgard. Translated as "Father of the Slain."

Berserker: The berserkers were actual figures in human history, an interesting aspect of the Vikings not having to do with mythology. They were warriors who would go into uncontrollable fits of rage before a battle, becoming an unstoppable force against anyone who dared stand against them. They weren’t affected by fire or weapons, and their strength became that of ten regular men. They wore wolf pelts into battle rather than the typical iron armor, and that, coupled with their mania, convinced many people in that time that they were shape-changers, or werewolves.