Poetic Edda: Did you mean...?

Norse mythology, the stories of gods and heroes from in and around the Viking Age (c. 790 - c. 1100 CE) in northern Europe, has provided us with some of the most famous figures in world mythology. Here, in this collection, we look at such...

The story of the trip in Giantland with Loki and the story of the fishing of the World Serpent, as told in the Prose Edda with comments. Articles on Norse myth here: https://member.worldhistory.org/user/irinamaria.manea/

An illustration portraying Sif, a golden-haired goddess in the Norse pantheon. She was associated with earth but was married to Thor, the god of the sky and thunder. Sif is a relatively little-known figure who appears mainly in the Poetic...

Norse cosmology divided the universe into nine realms. The center of the universe was the great world-tree Yggdrasil and the nine realms either spread out from the tree or existed in levels stretching from the roots down and, marginally...

Alcohol played an integral part in Norse culture. People drank ale more than water because the brew had to be boiled as part of the process and so was safer to drink. The Norse of Scandinavia had four main types of fermented beverage: ale...

Athens, Greece, with its famous Acropolis, has come to symbolize the whole of the country in the popular imagination, and not without cause. It not only has its iconic ruins and the famous port of Piraeus but, thanks to ancient writers, its...

In ancient Greece, dance had a significant presence in everyday life. The Greeks not only danced on many different occasions, but they also recognized several non-performative activities such as ball-playing or rhythmic physical exercise...

Aristotle of Stagira (l. 384-322 BCE) was a Greek philosopher who pioneered systematic, scientific examination in literally every area of human knowledge and was known, in his time, as "the man who knew everything" and later simply as "The...

Ancient Mesopotamian warfare progressed from companies of a city's militia in Sumer to the professional standing armies of Akkad, Babylon, Assyria, and Persia, and from conflicts over land or water rights to wars of conquest and political...

The Greek Archaic Period (c. 800-479 BCE) started from what can only be termed uncertainty, and ended with the Persians being ejected from Greece for good after the battles of Plataea and Mykale in 479 BCE. The Archaic Period is preceded...