The Heroes of Asgard

Annie Keary was a novelist and children’s writer; her sister Eliza was a poet. In 1857 they set out to do for the Norse material what Charles Kingsley had done for the Greek, and the book they produced held the field in English for the better part of a century.Their method was narrative. Rather than present the gods as a pantheon to be memorised, they told the cycle as a single unfolding story with consequences: the gods build Asgard on a bargain they cannot honour, and everything that follows, down to Ragnarok, proceeds from choices made early and cheaply.The chapters run through the Aesir and the raising of Asgard; Thor’s journey to Jotunheim, where he wrestles old age and drinks at the sea; Frey, who gives away his sword for love and will want it at the end; the wanderings of Freyja; Idun’s apples and the ageing of the gods without them; the death of Baldur and Hermod’s ride to Hel; the binding of Fenrir and the price Tyr pays for it; the punishment of Loki; and Ragnarok, or the Twilight of the Gods.What the Kearys understood, and what keeps the book readable, is that the Norse material is not a set of adventures. It is a tragedy with a long fuse. They let the doom accumulate rather than announcing it, so a reader who begins with the cheerful early chapters arrives at the end having watched it approach.Their Index of Names, with meanings, is preserved. It is a small piece of scholarship in itself, and it explains why the names sound as they do.This edition follows the Macmillan printing of 1909, a reprint of the new edition of September 1906, in a fresh typeset, with the sisters’ preface and introduction intact. The work was first published in 1857. A closing glossary explains the figures, beings, terms and places the tales assume the reader already knows, drawn from the Rosmerta Publishing research on the Norse cycle.