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Paper short abstract

This paper will discuss mythological references to the sky in the Prose Edda, attributed to Snorri Sturluson (1178/9-1241), written as a textbook for aspiring court poets who wanted to compose and understand the complicated and elitist court poetry which based its imagary on mythological references.

Paper long abstract

In the first part of the Edda a mythical trinity explains to King Gylfi of Sweden how the world came about and tells him ‘great tidings of the sky’. They explain the rainbow as the mythological bridge Bifröst between heaven and earth (Alvíssmál also lists different terms for the same phenomena among men and various mythological beings), and gradually transform the entire sky with the Milky way into the mythological abode of the gods with halls and places ( ‘owned’ by the sun and stars respectively). The text does not specify which heavenly locations are pointed at, but we know that the gods’ names were used about the planets: Mars was called Týr, Mercury Óðinn, Jupiter Thor, and Venus Freyja; and the Hyades was called the Wolf's mouth, located just below the planets’ path in the sky. The mythological vocabulary about the sun- and moon dogs and the sun- and moon halos has survived in modern folklore. The sun dogs are said to be the two wolves that run before and after the sun – similarly the mythological siblings that carry the moon between them on a pole, ‘as can be seen from earth’ in the Edda, could be the moon dogs. In this light the Edda is a unique source, written by an insider for other members of an elitist male culture, about Man’s age old practice of mapping the world with stories, on earth as in heaven – as opposed to a creative text based on poetic ‘sources’.