VIKING LEGENDS & NORSE MYTHOLOGY
INTRODUCTION
For the ancient Scandinavians, death was part of life. Norse society was based on a system of belief concerning the dead, and the gods who ruled the realms between which man passed in life and death.
The purpose of this publication is to both provide resources for further explanation, while bringing the world of the Norse alive in the imagination. Whether your interest is mythical, legend, historical or fantasy, There is something just so captivating about the Norse. From J.R.R. Tolkien to television series like Vikings, the ideas, beliefs, concepts of fate, existence, the understanding of the world has captivated our imagination. We know the Norse through the mythology of giants, gods, men, dwarves and elves. But this is only the popular perception. What lies behind is something much deeper than myths and stories. Legends based on Kings, warriors turning a brave face to fate in times of hardship, turmoil and struggle.
Based on years of research used in constructing one of the most complex mystery-thrillers ever written The Elements, the Viking and Norse seriesdevelops that research into a new kind of publication using eTEXT linking in to the world’s online resources.
VOLUME 2: BLOODLINES OF LEGEND
“In the time when the kings we have been speaking of were in Uppsala, Denmark had been ruled over by Dan Mikilláti, who lived to a very great age; then by his son, Fróði Mikilláti, or the Peace-loving, who was succeeded by his sons Halfdan and Fridleif, who were great warriors.”
The second volume of the Viking Legends and Norse Mythology series covers the Swedish and Danish Kings, about conflicts – and even the spirits of slain warriors who keep on fighting, as witnessed by Hadingus, one of the earliest Danish kings. However, this is not Valhalla. This is not the realms of gods, or even a focus on the sagas. This is the hunt for the real Kings, the real people who influenced history, left to us today as legends.
This book arises from much of the source material gathered over the years. Set in Scandinavia, this has been a quest to write ‘The Lord Of The Rings in the real world’, to envisage and realize a hard-boiled world as anything from fantasy.
This volume 2 is for me an important one. It is concerned with the legendary lines of the Northern Kings, the houses of the Danes and the Swedes, the precursors to the Vikings. These lines are the most important clues we have of where the Anglo-Saxons came from, what set the age of migrations into action, the cult and culture of the warriors who served Northern Kings as well as Eastern Emperors.
Discovering the sources and finding out who these people are has been compared to the deeds we know of the Goths and other Germanic tribes, who collectively brought about the end of the Western Roman Empire. This is with this timeframe we are concerned, the time of the tribes the Romans tell us, who worshipped Nerthus, Mother of the Earth, a name associated with the people called the Vanir, the people of the earth, the cult of which spread from the Danish Iles North, into the lands of Sweden.
In volume 2, I look at bloodlines, the lines of Kings who gave rise to legend and even myth. Of the sources available to us, few are old enough to shed a really bright light. What we have are fragments of older sags, the sagas of the greats from the Middle Ages, but precious little from the Ages itself when such lines of Kings were born into the world. We go back in time to the pre-Viking age, to the time where we know very little, since in an Age when everything committed to script was undertaken by the few, when works perished. We call the times after the end of the Roman Empire the ‘Dark Ages’. These times were not as dark as we would believe, but remain dark to us, since we have so little written material to rediscover the past. From the abundance of records from the Roman era, the written history of northern Europe is reduced to a trickle. The farther north we go, the less the written evidence available. Until, crossing from Germania into Scandza, the lands of the realms of the gods, the trickle stops altogether.
With the vast amount of research now compiled, this second volume in the series is about to start the editing process, due for release at the end of 2018. If you want to receive news about the release consider signing up for the newsletter.