YMMV / Norse Mythology

• Accidental Aesop: Wolves are wild animals, so don't take that cute puppy home with you; it won't seem nearly so cute when it's grown up and out of control.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Hel is initially described with a body half-white, half-black even though modern interpretations make her half-living, half-dead. However, back in the viking times "black skin" often meant "rotten, decomposing flesh".
  • Basically the entire pantheon is ripe for this, given the many varying descriptions across different works. The stories that were later Hijacked by Jesus also count.
  • Ragnarok. In contemporary views it is the tragic end of the Aesir, but possibly what ultimately leads to the age of man that we know now. In some people's views, the Aesir are Designated Hero gods at best and they have it coming, with Ragnarok's 'tragedy' being Unintentionally Unsympathetic. Then to others, people are missing the point and that it was intentional; as each of the contributing factors of Ragnarok are caused by the Gods' own hubris and actions (Thor having spent centuries harassing Jorgumandr by trying to catch them before they got big enough to fight, Odin having Fenris bound, Loki's punishment, and the many enemies of Asgard the Aesir had antagonised) which themselves were motivated by the fact they had foresight and knew what was destined to happen, it can be interpreted as the Gods suffering from You Can't Fight Fate and/or a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy. They knew they were all going to die, so they acted like jerks to prevent it, but by acting like jerks they set in motion the events that eventually kill them.
• Base-Breaking Character: Over Loki, over whether he's a murderous Jerkass to be avoided or a misunderstood and underappreciated guy who does what has to be done for the greater good, and how big of a role (if any) he actually played in the death of Baldur (which only happens in one of the three different tellings of the story and one of the two that probably is heavily influenced by a Christian worldview).
• Common Knowledge:
  • The term "jotun" is often used to mean "frost giant." To be true, some jotnar were indeed giants and were indeed associated with cold and frost, but a number of others seem to have no such association and were of evidently-ordinary stature. Scholars have noted that the jotnar seem to have been more like a branch of beings that were long-lived and on par with the gods but not divine.
  • The Nine Realms. The term comes up a lot, and if you look online, you'll quickly find lists of them. However, said lists are nowhere in the actual mythology we have—no myth actually spells out what the Nine Realms are. The lists that you see are the result of scholars throwing out educated guesses based on locations mentioned in the Eddas (quite a few of the more commonly-listed Realms are brought up all of once or twice), being quoted by more casual enthusiasts as if they're concrete fact.
• Critical Dissonance: Norse Mythology has always had a bigger influence on popular culture (whether it's superhero comics, grand opera, epic fantasy, heavy metal music, science fiction) than on high culture (say, modernist fiction, arthouse cinema, avant-garde theater) and so on. The one exception is Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle operas which was intended to bridge popular and high culture.
• Designated Hero:
  • Not quite as bad as some other polytheistic religions, but the Norse Gods in the stories (and especially in Neil Gaiman's retelling) are still a bunch of exploitative individuals who profit of other people's labour (all their famous weapons — Gungnir, Mjolnir — were created by the Dark Elves of Svartalfheim), go on about the importance of oaths while using Exact Words and Rules Lawyer to make sure they don't have to be bound by oaths (such as when a "stranger", a Giant in disguise builds a Wall for them which they Aesir make him pay for), loathe being reminded of their hypocrisy, are utter snobs^note Frigg dismissing the Mistletoe and refusing to ask it to spare Balder, and think nothing of abusing their own kind^note Whether it's repeatedly pimping Freya over her own objections, or forcing Tyr to reluctantly trick and sacrifice his hand to Fenrir to bind him and more or less pass their time living in a Fluffy Cloud Heaven and ignoring their problems. This makes Ragnarok feel like a deserved comeuppance more than an appallingly tragic End of an Age.
  • The King and founder of the Norse pantheon Odin Allfather has been known for being as much, if not more, of a Trickster God than the actual God of Mischief Loki. He was known for stealing or scamming valuable and magical artifacts from other races, has been shown to be unfaithful to his wife (usually as a part of one of his schemes), he lies constantly, he spies on others and he would imprison or accuse people for crimes that he thinks they would do for fear that they could do it (as was the case with Loki's illegitimate children). He was also the one who made the rules of the afterlife, with killers and warmongers getting to go to the Norse equivalent of Heaven while everyone else — including those who died of sickness, starvation or old age — had to spend the rest of their afterlives in a cold and uncaring limbo-like Hel.
• Designated Villain: This is most likely a case of Values Dissonance, with Norse mythology not working on the same principles of good and evil as modern society, and most current religions:
  • Being a giant, one would believe Ymir was evil, and Odin, officially a hero, just happened to kill him for no apparent reason. He never did anything evil, actually just gave birth to people, whose descendants would turn out Always Chaotic Evil, while getting nourished by a cow. Giants were however in conflict with the Aesir, so Ymir was killed.
  • Loki, who at least initially had nothing to do with Baldur's death, was Vitriolic Best Buds with the Asgardians, and was their constant Butt-Monkey. Ragnarok looks like The Dog Bites Back when looked at from their point of view; the gods kicked them out of a party then began insulting them behind his back. When Loki confronts them and starts flying back, they get mad and break Odin's blood brother oath with him, choosing instead to bound them inside a cave, tortured for eternity with snake venom, using the entrails of his own son as chains. When the stories were Hijacked by Jesus, many new stories were added that portrayed Loki as having been a villainous figure long before Ragnarok (such as adding the infamous 'Loki murdered Baldur' story) in order to make this Disproportionate Retribution seem justified, but it makes vilifying them seem all the more misplaced.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Odin may have been this to the Norse themselves. Because of linguistic reasons some believe that Odin was a less important death-deity, a couple of centuries later and he replaced Tiwaz/Tyr as the dominant god.
  • Also to the Norse was Freyr, who seems like a footnote in most surviving texts, but was the third most popular deity after Odin and Thor. The three deities are always noted as being the main gods worshiped by the latest original Nordic pagans.
  • There's no consensus on how early or late an addition Loki was to the myths but upon the rediscovery of Norse Myth in the 19th Century, he quickly became one of the most discussed and speculated figures, continuing well into the 20th Century, and this was before the Marvel Cinematic Universe made the Marvel version of him super popular with young women and LGBTQ communities. Somewhere Loki will be gloating, because sneaking in from the margins and hijacking and stealing the spotlight from the Aesir would appeal to his vanity.
  • Loki may actually be a Decomposite Character, because he shares his trickster trait with Odinn. Thus, considering that Odinn himself was a trickster god to begin with, Loki, in theory, may have been singled out as a separate character from a more complex and original Wotan-like trickster.
• Evil Is Cool: The Frost Giants, Midgard Serpent, Fenris Wolf, Hel, Loki, and Surtur the Fire Giant with his Flaming Sword, qualify individually and together. Being more heavy metal than the Aesir seems an impossibility at first glance, but these guys pull it off on Ragnarok.
• Fridge Logic: People listening to the legend of how Loki's bargain with Brokkr have often wondered why they couldn't chop Loki's head in half without touching his neck, or scalping him. One version answers that by having Loki insist that by his head, he meant his whole head, so they couldn't leave any of it behind or they'd have forfeited.
  • Despite his selfish, dishonest, violent, morbid, gray-area behavior, in the more Christianized stories, Odin is portrayed as a benevolent god. And when his infamous cunning, wisdom, and habit of breaking oaths raise questions as to why he's so buddy-buddy with Loki, Odin's made out to be a trusting old fool who only keeps Loki around because he swore a blood oath. Depends on which ones you're looking at; some Christianized stories snark at him rather a lot. Or literally beat him up: in one story he gets decked three times by a mortal woman. (And then pretends to be a female physician to get a chance to rape her.)
  • In the Destripando la historia Baldur video it's noted by a commenter that the fact that only mistletoe could hurt Baldur meant that even Fenrir and Joumangander swore not to harm him and Loki being the only who didn't cry meant that even they mourned him. This means that the fact that Loki's motivation was to avenge his mistreated children be All for Nothing.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Loki is a jotun, which is sometimes localized as troll, and may have inspired the word. During the age of the Internet, the term "troll" took on a whole new meaning: a person who sows chaos and discord (sometimes For Great Justice, sometimes For the Lulz), which is Loki's raison d'être. But wait, it gets better: trolls are known for "flaming" others, and guess what color Loki's hair is? Here's a hint: one of his kennings is "Flame-Hair." Bow before your god, all ye Internet trolls.
  • In the myths, Thor defeated Jotuns/trolls with his hammer. Nowadays, admins defeat trolls with the banhammer.
  • Also, Loki may have invented the net.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Loki may have been a cheating, lying, cowardly, treacherous Manipulative Bastard, but even so, his constantly poor treatment by the Aesir, and his utterly horrific punishment, make it hard not to give him at least a little sympathy.
  • His son Fenrir, while an egotistical Glory Hound, doesn't seem to have actually been evil before he was betrayed by Tyr and bound until the end of time, solely because the Aesir feared his power and destined role in Ragnarök. This is especially true because, since he kept growing afterward, he may not have even been an adult at the time.
• LGBT Fanbase: Due to his genderbending, Loki has become popular amongst genderfluid people. This has made its way into modern derivatives such as Marvel's version of Loki and Loki's relative Alex Firro from Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard.
• Magnificent Bastard: Utgard-Loki is the Jotunn ruler of Utgard castle. A clever deceiver and trickster, Utgard-Loki disguises himself as a sleepy Jotunn named Skrymir to disguise his warning to Thor that he won't tolerate arrogance in his castle. When Thor, Loki, and two other travelers arrive at Utgard, he humiliates them with seemingly impossible challenges hidden by illusions, such as having Loki enter an eating contest with wildfire itself and having Thor wrestle against old age itself taking the form of a frail old lady. Treating the travelers with hospitality despite them losing, Utgard-Loki reveals the truth behind the contests to Thor, and warns him that he will further trick him with deception and illusion should Thor return for vengeance.
• Memetic Badass:
  • Thor. It is often pointed out he is the main reason Asgard stands a chance against the giants at all.
  • Tyr is no slouch in the strength department as well; especially considering he is the only god not afraid of Fenrir, whom even Thor was terrified of, and willingly entered a wager that would result in his hand being eaten without even flinching.
  • On the monster side is Jörmungandr, a colossal pestilent serpent that can circle the entirety of the realm of mortals. He is most often considered the strongest of Loki's children (which is saying a lot) and, though it results in his own death, he is able to take down Thor with just one bite from his toxic fangs.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Jesus promised the end of all wicked people. Odin promised the end of all ice giants. I don't see many ice giants around.
• Misaimed Fandom:
  • Unfortunately, due to the Nazi deification of all things blond and blue-eyed, a disproportionate number of the "fans" of Norse mythology you'll find these days are Wotanists, a neo-nazi white supremacist sect who wish to return the lighter-skinned "to their ancestral religion." How these nutters would react to the fact that Norse mythology is full of Interspecies Romance (such as the marriage between Njodr and Skadi, Loki being a Frost-Giant, Frey falling in Love at First Sight with a giantess), or what can be called the polymorphous perverse (Thor being a Wholesome Crossdresser and a fetching bride as Freya, Loki's fondness for coupling with animals), is anyone's guess. Indeed, Asgard is very ethnically diverse with almost all of its denizens having a mix of Aesir and Jotunn blood and many also including Vanir, Alfar, and human ancestry; this is especially notable given that the Vanir and Jotnar are historical enemies of Asgard.
  • While less serious than the previous one, the opposite case could be made about people who praise Norse mythology and, in general, Norse peoples, as progressive and gender egalitarian, where women fight and are treated like men and there's more sexual freedom. To think that would be a gross oversimplification of reality. While the position of women was certainly better compared to continental Europe, many historians argue for example that the presence of warrior women in Norse culture is greatly overestimated. It's also proven that Norse people loathed men playing the passive role in homosexual intercourse (no source tells us what Norse people thought of homosexual relationships in their platonic sense). Such traits and deeds would have been looked down as being argr or ragr, a hard-to-translate word with the connotations of somebody being unmanly, weak, pathetic, and possibly homosexual (the latter attested by the even more inflammatory form rassragr or "arse-ragr"). The gods themselves shared the same concern, such as Thor fearing that the other gods will consider him ragr after putting on a bride's dress.
  • More to the point, the Norse Gods are described repeatedly in the original myths as vulnerable and mortal, they are afraid of Frost Giants, Trolls and others and rely greatly on powerful weapons and artifacts (such as Mjölnir) to feel safe, have to sacrifice eyes and limbs to achieve their ends (Odin sacrifices his eye, Tyr sacrifices his arm) and of course there's the fact that in the end, everyone dies. Founding an ideology of power and domination based on Gods who are mortal, vulnerable and self-destructive is missing the point.
  • The concept of Valhalla and Sessrumnir. People often talk about how they eat at Odin's table and are served mead by hot Action Girls. But when they are not eating they are fighting. Maiming each other dying and regenerating. Forever, or at least until Ragnarök. Drinking with Odin sounds more like making yourself numb with alcohol to deal with the horror. Or perhaps they liked the neverending fighting.
• Moral Event Horizon: Loki crosses it when he orchestrates the events leading up to Baldur's death and prevents his resurrection by not weeping for him. The rest of the gods were pissed.
• Never Live It Down:
  • There's something about a guy getting impregnated by a horse that people just don't forget.
  • Odin’s often manipulative nature and occasional Dirty Old Man actions. So much so there are quite a few adaptations that make him essentially just a Norse Zeus.
• Newer Than They Think: In many respects, it's one of the newest ancient polytheistic pantheon in history and more importantly, cultural memory:
  • The written sources for Norse Mythology are the Eddas by Snorri Sturluson and Icelandic Sagas which were written down in the 1200s, which makes it, as of this writing, less than a millenia old, younger than The Qur'an, The Shahnameh, Beowulf, Nibelungenlied, The Song of Roland, Arthurian Sagas, and far, far younger than The Mahabharata and The Ramayana, Roman and Greek mythology (which dates back to 5th and 6th Century BCE) and The Bible (Old and New Testaments); indeed, the Poetic Edda implies that the Judeo-Christian God replaced the Aesir.
  • The Semundar Edda or Poetic Edda although collected in the fourteenth century, is reckoned to be somewhat older than the Snorra Edda, though.
  • While the days of the week in the Anglosphere are based on Norse pantheon, it was mostly forgotten and obscure for the entirety of The Middle Ages, and most of the The Renaissance and The Enlightenment. Writers like Shakespeare, Chaucer, Cervantes, Dante, Goethe and Schiller kept making references to the Bible, to the Arabian Nights, to the chivalric cycle of the Middle Ages and especially Greek and Roman mythology but made no references to Norse mythology for source material or poetic reference. German intellectuals deprecated any of the poems and literature deriving from it (Frederick the Great noted that Nibelungenlied was not worth a powder of shot). The Norse myths and the original texts were rediscovered in the late 1600s and 1700s and became popular in the 19th Century, and German and European intellectuals came around to it when Richard Wagner composed the Ring Cycle.
  • Its entry to Pop-Cultural Osmosis can definitely be credited to Jack Kirby and Stan Lee who deliberately created The Mighty Thor to avert Small Reference Pools and avoid the overexposed Greek and Roman Pantheon, and that comic dates from The '60s. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is likewise how most audiences around the world who were broadly familiar with the Greco-Roman classical traditions came to learn of the Norse pantheon. Unlike the Greek and Roman Myths which are well represented in the architecture, vases of antiquity (giving later artists a reference for how Zeus and the other gods, heroes, and figures were seen as by its worshippers), very little material culture survived for the Norse myths, and this gave the Marvel Universe license to define Asgard, the Bifrost, the Nine Realms, its various creatures, its heroes, and its villains for several generations around the world.
• Tear Jerker:
  • Loki's eventual punishment and the agony he goes through, made worse by the fact that, originally, he had nothing to do with Baldur's death, but claimed such among other taunts after the other Aesir didn't invite him to their dinner and spent the time before his arrival talking about him behind his back. The Baldur thing seemed to have been a retcon to make the other gods look less like assholes for it. Also, there's something so sad about him having his lips sewn shut and all the others laughing at him. Then again, even before he was turned into a Satan expy, he was still kind of a dick, and it doesn't seem to hamper him in later myths.
  • Sigyn. By all that's holy, Sigyn. Loki's wife, whom he cheats on with Angrboða (though she may have been a second wife or the whole affair may have been over before Sigyn came into the picture) and is at least implied to have had numerous other affairs. When Loki is punished by way of a Fate Worse than Death, part of this punishment involves one of her sons being turned into a mad and/or starving wolf and kills his brother, whose remains are used to chain Loki in a cave under the earth. She chooses to stay with him down there, and in a basin collects the venom from a snake attached to the ceiling which otherwise would drip into his eyes, helpfully keeping him alive through the centuries until he is able to break free at Ragnarok and wreak vengeance on the Aesir, who as we remember murdered her sons.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: Loki's children, particularly Fenrir. While the Old Norse certainly understood there was an element of irony to Odin creating his own downfall, Fenrir in particular might have started as a God of Evil (see comparisons to the Zoroastrian story of Jamshid and Ahriman) and not the poor wronged puppy most modern audiences see him as.
• The Woobie:
  • Baldur was described as quite a Nice Guy, and lived in fear of dying despite being a god. Despite all the god's attempts to protect him, Loki still found a way to kill him (pretty much just to be a dick). Even worse, he couldn't be brought back from the dead just because Loki refused to cry for him. But that’s in one version that was heavily influenced by Christianity; at least one other version made him a jerk.
  • Sigyn is Loki's wife, and is was always loving towards him despite how badly he treated her. After he was imprisoned under the earth, and condemned to be tied up and have a snake spit venom into his eyes, she tries to ease his suffering by collecting the snake's venom in a bowl. However, she still has to pour it out from time to time, and every time she does he still screams and curses at her.
• Values Dissonance:
  • Thjalfi and Röskva's freedom was effectively given away as blood payment after his father (accidentally) slightly inconvenienced a God. It says a lot of the times that this was treated as fair, and that the arrangement was depicted as working out happily.
  • One of Odin's epithets is "eaglehead". In Old Norse (Arnhǫfði) it sounds badass; rendered in English the "head" suffix sucks away all mystique into pure Narm.
• Vindicated by History: For most of history, the Norse mythology was deprecated by European intellectuals who honored Greek and Roman mythology, as well as stories from the Bible as being of great value. The Eddas that form the source for the mythologies was written by Sturluson for primarily linguistic reasons and as a reference guide towards understanding skaldic poetry and not because he liked the stories. Yet in the 19th, 20th and 21st Century, the Norse myth is considered to be as compelling and moving as other pantheons and its characters Thor, Odin and Loki unleashed a Fountain of Expies in multiple High Fantasy and other genres.

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