Norse mythology

Norse mythology survives chiefly through the Poetic Edda and Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda, written down in medieval Iceland from older oral tradition. It is a mythology with an expiry date: gods, giants, and monsters are all bound toward Ragnarök, the final battle in which most of them die and the world burns before being reborn. That fatalism gives its figures a gravity the Olympians never carry.