The Norse sky

Almost everything we know about how the Norse saw the sky comes from Iceland, and from after the conversion. Snorri Sturluson wrote his Prose Edda around 1220; the poems of the Poetic Edda survive in a single manuscript of about 1270, the Codex Regius. Both were written down by Christians. Add a few sagas, an Icelandic reckoning text of the 12th century and the star names country people used much later, and that is most of the evidence. It tells of wolves chasing the sun and moon, of a giant’s eyes and a frozen toe set among the stars, and of a sky that ends at Ragnarök.

What it does not contain is a horoscope. No Norse source describes a zodiac, sun signs or birth charts, and the ‘Viking zodiac’ you find online is a modern invention. The pages below keep to what the old texts say, and they say who later added what.

The topics

• Sköll and Hati: the wolves that chase the sun and moon

  Two wolves run after the sun and moon, and at the end of the world they catch them. Whether anyone thought they caused eclipses is another question.

• Thiazi’s eyes: a giant’s eyes among the stars

  A god throws a dead giant’s eyes into the sky, and they become two stars. The Edda does not say which two.

• Aurvandil’s toe: a frozen toe that became a star

  Thor carries a man home in a basket, one toe freezes, and Thor makes a star of it. The name may be far older than the story.

• Old Norse star names and how old they really are

  Odin’s Wagon, Frigg’s Distaff, Loki’s Burning: lovely names, but some are far younger than they sound.

• The northern lights in Norse sources

  The Valkyrie armour story is Victorian. The oldest Norse text on the northern lights is a sober attempt to explain them.

• The gods in the English days of the week

  Four English weekdays carry the names of old gods. They are translations of Roman ones.

• Runic calendars, Norse months and the two seasons

  A wooden stick that finds every Sunday and new moon for nineteen years, and a year with only two seasons.

Throughout these pages, what a medieval text says is named with its source, and what a scholar or a later writer guessed is marked as a guess, with the name and the date.