The Poetic and Prose Eddas, the oldest sources for information on the Norse concept of the afterlife, vary in their description of the several realms that are described as falling under this topic.

This would have been a burial fitting a king who was famous for his wealth in Old Norse sources.

The term Edda ( Old Norse Edda, plural Eddur ) applies to the Old Norse Poetic Edda and Prose Edda, both of which were written down in Iceland during the 13th century in Icelandic, although they contain material from earlier traditional sources, reaching into the Viking Age.

The books are the main sources of medieval skaldic tradition in Iceland and Norse mythology.

Along with her brother Freyr ( Old Norse the " Lord "), her father Njörðr, and her mother ( Njörðr's sister, unnamed in sources ), she is a member of the Vanir.

However, as with the rest of the Ring, Wagner's account of this apocalypse diverges significantly from his Old Norse sources.

Davidson adds that, on the other hand, various other examples of " certain supernatural women " connected with death are to be found in sources for Norse mythology, that they " seem to have been closely connected with the world of death, and were pictured as welcoming dead warriors ," and that the depiction of Hel " as a goddess " in Gylfaginning " might well owe something to these.

According to the historical sources the ships ' prows carried carvings of menacing beasts, such as dragons and snakes, allegedly to protect the ship and crew, and to ward off the terrible sea monsters of Norse mythology.

There are a number of surviving Old Norse sources that relate to the norns.

The mythological sources of the various pagan traditions are similarly varied, including Celtic, Norse, Greek, Roman, Sumerian, Egyptian and others.

Saint Olga (, also called Olga Prekrasna ( Ольга Прекрасна ), or Olga the Beauty, hypothetically Old Norse: Helga ; in some Scandinavian sources she was called by other names.

While the name Sigyn is found as a female personal name in Old Norse sources ( Old Norse sigr meaning " victory " and vina meaning " girl-friend "), and though in surviving sources she is largely restricted to a single role, she appears in the 9th century Haustlöng from pagan times, written by the skald Þjóðólfr of Hvinir.

In Old Norse sources, beings described as trolls dwell in isolated rocks, mountains, or caves, live together in small family units, and are rarely helpful to human beings.

In Old Norse sources, trolls are said to dwell in isolated mountains, rocks, and caves, sometimes live together ( usually as father-and-daughter or mother-and-son ), and are rarely described as helpful or friendly.

but medieval Icelandic sources have only sparse material on Old Norse Ullr.

The vast majority of loan words did not appear in documents until the early 12th century ; these included many modern words which used sk-sounds, such as skirt, sky, and skin ; other words appearing in written sources at this time included again, awkward, birth, cake, dregs, fog, freckles, gasp, law, moss, neck, ransack, root, scowl, sister, seat, sly, smile, want, weak and window from Old Norse meaning " wind-eye ".

The main sources of information about the Norse voyages to Vinland are two Icelandic sagas, the Saga of Eric the Red and the Saga of the Greenlanders.

After the consolidation of the church and the assimilation of Scandinavia and its colonies into the mainstream of medieval Christian culture in the 11th and 12th centuries, native written sources begin to appear, in Latin and Old Norse.

The runestones are important sources in the study of Norse society and early medieval Scandinavia, not only of the ' Viking ' segment of the population.

Yet other sources derive the word from warg-wolf, where warg ( or later werg and wero ) is cognate with Old Norse vargr, meaning " rogue ", " outlaw " or, euphemistically, " wolf ".

Hilda Ellis Davidson comments that the existence of nine worlds around Yggdrasil is mentioned more than once in Old Norse sources, but the identity of the worlds is never stated outright, though it can be deduced from various sources.

In practice Norse control of the Isles was loose, with local chiefs enjoying a high degree of independence.

" High details that in this realm Hel has " great Mansions " with extremely high walls and immense gates, a hall called Éljúðnir, a dish called " Hunger ," a knife called " Famine ," the servant Ganglati ( Old Norse " lazy walker "), the serving-maid Ganglöt ( also " lazy walker "), the entrance threshold " Stumbling-block ," the bed " Sick-bed ," and the curtains " Gleaming-bale.

Hoy ( from Norse Háey meaning high island ) is an island in Orkney, Scotland.

They promoted the use of Norse mythology as the subject of high art and other ethnological and moral aims.

In Norse mythology, Hliðskjálf is the high seat of Odin allowing him to see into all realms.

Their otherworldly homeland is Jötunheimr, one of the nine worlds of Norse cosmology, separated from Midgard, the world of humans, by high mountains or dense forests.

The tradition of raising high crosses appeared at a time when Norse settlers appeared in the British Isles and met a Christian culture.

In the context of contentious debate over the suitability of Norse mythology as subjects of high art, in which the strong neoclassical training of northern academies, both Swedish and Danish, furnished powerful prejudices in favor of Biblical and Classical subjects, the members of the Götiska Förbundet sought to revive Viking spirit and related matters.

If the earlier England of Anglo-Saxons and Norse was tied to indigenous traditions, the England emerging from the Conquest owed a debt to the Romance languages and the culture of ancient Rome, that was not so important before the Conquest, but was maintained at a high level by the English catholic church and the clerks of England.

Ultimately stemming from Proto-Indo-European religion, Thor is a prominently mentioned god throughout the recorded history of the Germanic peoples, from the Roman occupation of regions of Germania, to the tribal expansions of the Migration Period, to his high popularity during the Viking Age, when, in the face of the process of the Christianization of Scandinavia, emblems of his hammer, Mjölnir, were worn in defiance and Norse pagan personal names containing the name of the god bear witness to his popularity.

The game combines Arthurian lore, Norse mythology and Irish Celtic legends with a dash of high fantasy.

But from his Oxford Genetic Atlas Project genetic data Sykes said that the lack of patrilineal Y-chromosomes from the “ Sigurd ” clan in south Wales ( and very few in other parts of Wales ) is strong evidence against any Norse Viking settlement in Wales, and means that the Viking explanation of Morgan Watkin for the high frequency of blood group A in ‘ Little England beyond Wales ’ is wrong.

A comparable tradition is found on the Isle of Man where high funeral crosses of stone were richly ornamented with the same teeming world of warriors and Norse deities as the image stones of Gotland.

It has served as a standard text in Icelandic high schools and as an introductory text for students of Old Norse.

Recent Y-DNA research has also revealed the genetic trail left by Vikings in the Wirral, specifically relatively high rates of the Haplogroup R1a, associated in Britain with Norse ( Slavic Vikings ) ancestry.

The Poetic Edda, also known as Sæmundar Edda or the Elder Edda, is a collection of Old Norse poems from the Icelandic medieval manuscript Codex Regius (" Royal Book ").

In medieval Norse, the garment was known as vapntreyiu, lit.

The sixteen books, in prose with an occasional excursion into poetry, can be categorized into two parts: Books 1-9, which deal with Norse mythology, and Books 10-16, which deal with medieval history.

The word was adopted into English in the nineteenth century from medieval Icelandic treatises on poetics, in particular the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson, and derives ultimately from the Old Norse verb kenna “ know, recognise ; perceive, feel ; show ; teach ; etc .”, as used in the expression kenna við “ to name after ; to express thing in terms of ”, “ name after ; refer to in terms of ”, and kenna til “ qualify by, make into a kenning by adding ”.

The Norse had a strong sense of naval architecture, and during the early medieval period they were advanced for their time, compared to other European nations ( earlier shipbuilding techniques, for example those of Mediterranean peoples, such as ancient Greece and Rome, were far more sophisticated and varied, especially in terms of joinery ).

The medieval Norse word was Latinized as Ollerus.

The age and origin of these stones is debated, and so far none has been firmly dated or associated with clear evidence of a medieval Norse presence.

The people of medieval Scandinavia are also referred to as Norse, although this term properly applies only to the Old-Norse-speaking peoples of Scandinavia, and not to the Sami.

The linguistic evidence from medieval and later records and Old Norse place-names in Scandinavia and elsewhere also provides a vital source of information for the social history of Viking Age Scandinavia and the Viking settlements overseas.

* Historically, anything relating to the medieval Norse communities in southwestern Greenland ( see History of Greenland )

There are two written sources on the origin of the name, in The Book of Icelanders ( Íslendingabók ), a historical work dealing with early Icelandic history from the 12th century, and in the medieval Icelandic saga, The Saga of Eric the Red ( Eiríks saga rauða ), which is about the Norse settlement in Greenland and the story of Erik the Red in particular.

" Although there is no special reason to doubt the accuracy of this information, it should always be borne in mind that the sagas embody the literary preoccupations of writers and audiences in medieval Iceland, and they cannot always be treated as reliable sources for the history of Norse Greenland.

Medieval Norwegian literature is closely tied with medieval Icelandic literature and considered together as Old Norse literature.

The Vinland Map first came to light in 1957 ( three years before the discovery of the Norse site at L ' Anse aux Meadows in 1960 ), bound in a slim volume with a short medieval text called the Hystoria Tartarorum ( usually called in English the Tartar Relation ), and was unsuccessfully offered to the British Museum by London book dealer Irving Davis on behalf of a Spanish-Italian dealer named Enzo Ferrajoli de Ry.

Erik Thorvaldsson (; 950 – c. 1003 ), known as Erik the Red (), is remembered in medieval and Icelandic saga sources as having founded the first Norse settlement in Greenland.

Old Norse Myths in medieval Northern Society.

In Norway the medieval market town ( Norwegian kjøpstad from the old Norse kaupstaðr ) was a town which had been granted commerce privileges by the king or other authorities.

Kvatrutafl is the Old Norse name for Tables ( the medieval forerunner of Backgammon ).

Hnefatafl was a popular game in medieval Scandinavia and was mentioned in several of the Norse Sagas.

The institution known as leiðangr ( Old Norse ), leidang ( Norwegian ), leding, ( Danish ), ledung ( Swedish ), expeditio ( Latin ) or sometimes lething ( English ), was a public levy of free farmers typical for medieval Scandinavians.