Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Norse Mythology: Seven Things You Should Know

Norse Mythology: Seven Things You Should Know

Stovall, Jim

Paperback

Series: I'm No Expert, But:

General Fiction

ISBN13: 9798173678478
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Sep 12 2026
Pages: 122
Weight: 0.28
Height: 0.26 Width: 5.00 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
If you know Norse mythology only from Marvel movies and video games, you already know more than you think - and less than you'd expect. Thor, Odin, Loki: familiar names attached to a story most of us have never actually read.

I'm no expert. But I went looking for the things about this ancient religion that turned out to be genuinely surprising - and I found more than I expected. Like:

Norse mythology wasn't just a set of stories. It was a real religion, sincerely practiced for centuries, with sacrifices, priests, and personal devotion.

Or that almost everything we know about it survives in a strikingly thin body of medieval texts - far thinner than what survives from Greek mythology. Or that Odin, the wise old man of pop culture, was actually a much stranger and more unsettling god - one who traded an eye and hanged himself from a tree for knowledge.

This short book covers all of it - the gods, the myths, and the real, practiced religion underneath them.

Seven Things You Should Know About Norse Mythology is part of the I'm No Expert, But series - short, accurate, curious books for people who'd rather know seven true things about a subject than pretend to be an expert in it. Each one takes about thirty to forty-five minutes to read.

  • Norse mythology was a real, practiced religion - not just a set of stories
  • The entire surviving record fits on a surprisingly small bookshelf, especially next to Greek myth
  • Odin traded an eye, and more, for knowledge - and it still wasn't enough
  • Thor, not Odin, may have been the god ordinary people actually prayed to
  • The Norse gods knew their own world wasn't built to last
  • Loki wasn't always the villain - something changes partway through his story
  • What the Vikings actually believed is harder, and more interesting, than either totally unknowable or just like the movies
You can stop at the description. (Personally, I hope you don't.)

Also from

Stovall, Jim

View All

Also in

General Fiction

View All