If you’re interested in something a little more crunchy, here’s a journal article I found on my hard drive (I saved it for some reason, but who knows?) briefly addressing the possibility that the popular notion of “Norse Mythology” is kind of an artificial construct, and doesn’t necessarily reflect the real-life beliefs of the regular folk living in northern Europe.
I’m not enough of a scholar in this field to know whether the author here carries any weight, or what the response of other scholars is to these ideas, or whether there’s a consensus one way or another. What is interesting (as with lots of work of this type) is the bibliography at the end, which I may pillage for other things to read in the future, should I find time.
Anyway, I’m posting it here as an example of mythological scholarship, and of more serious academic writing, if you’re interested in seeing either of those!
