Teutonic Mythology: Gods and Goddesses of the Northland, Vol. 2

Before Marvel gave us Thor, before Wagner conjured his Ring, Victorian scholars were painstakingly reconstructing the lost theology of the North. Viktor Rydberg's monumental 1889 work is one of the great attempts to recover what the old Teutons believed about creation, death, and the gods who shaped their world. This second volume delves into the mysterious realm of Mimer's Grove, the underground fastness of the giant Mimir, where cosmic wisdom flows from a well at the roots of Yggdrasil. Here dwell Lif and Leifthraser, the two humans who survived Ragnarok's fire to become humanity's final survivors. Rydberg traces the dual nature of this realm of the dead, its promise of eternal life, and its role in the Norse conception of regeneration. The book is dense, learned, and unapologetically Victorian in its ambition to synthesize every surviving myth into a coherent system. For readers who have exhausted the popular retellings and hunger for something older and stranger, Rydberg offers a window into how our ancestors imagined the boundaries between mortality and the divine.