Why Thor's hammer has a stubby handle
In the Norse telling, the short handle on MJOLNIR is LOKI's fault. LOKI had bet his own head that a pair of dwarf brothers could not make treasures to beat the ones the gods had just been given. While they worked, he turned himself into a fly and bit the brother at the bellows — first on the hand, then on the neck, and finally on the eyelid. Blood ran into the dwarf's eye, he let go of the bellows for a moment to brush the fly away, and the hammer came out of the fire a little short.
It won anyway. The gods judged MJOLNIR the best gift of all: it would never miss, always return to THOR's hand after a throw, and could shrink small enough to tuck inside his shirt. LOKI had lost the bet, so he wriggled out on a technicality — they were welcome to his head, he said, but the deal had never mentioned his neck. The dwarves sewed his lips shut instead.
Written down two hundred years later
Nearly everything known about these gods comes from Iceland in the 1200s, around two centuries after Iceland adopted Christianity in about the year 1000. The Vikings carved RUNES on stones, weapons and jewellery, but they left no book of their myths. The stories survived as poems passed from mouth to mouth until Christian writers set them down.
The most important was Snorri Sturluson, an Icelandic chieftain and politician who wrote the Prose Edda around 1220 as a guide for poets, so they would understand the old references. The oldest poems survive in a single manuscript, the Codex Regius, made around 1270. It spent centuries in Copenhagen, and when Denmark handed it back in 1971 it crossed the sea on a Danish navy ship while crowds gathered in Reykjavík to watch it come home.
So the myths reach us through Christian writers, long after the old religion had faded, and nobody can be sure how much changed along the way. That makes a sharp question for a Vikings lesson: how do we know what they believed, and whose version are we reading? Our Vikings puzzle covers the people themselves.
Gods who know how it ends
Greek gods are immortal and stay that way. The Norse gods are not so lucky. They keep young by eating golden apples guarded by the goddess Idunn, and they know that at RAGNAROK most of them will die. The wolf FENRIR swallows ODIN. THOR kills the enormous serpent that circles MIDGARD, walks nine steps and falls dead from its venom. HEIMDALL, the watchman, blows his horn to warn the gods, then he and LOKI kill each other. Fire and flood swallow the world.
And then it comes back. The earth rises out of the sea, green and new, BALDUR returns from HEL, and two humans who hid in a wood through the whole disaster step out to start again. The gods knew this ending all along and went out to fight anyway, which may be the most Viking idea in the entire mythology.