Popular Culture

Film and Television

Marvel's Thor character was introduced in comic book format in 1962 by Stan Lee, Larry Lieber, and Jack Kirby, and transferred to the cinematic format with Kenneth Branagh's "Thor" (2011). The Marvel version is a free adaptation that retains the core names, Thor, Loki, Odin, Asgard, but fundamentally reshapes them into figures suited to a modern superhero format. Loki is transformed from the shifting trickster figure of the source texts into a more straightforwardly antagonistic role, while Odin is stylised into a patriarchal authority figure stripped of the ambivalences that characterise his mythological form.

The television series "Vikings" (History Channel, 2013-2020) took a different approach, attempting to depict a historical Viking Age setting with mythological elements woven in. The series moved freely between historical figures such as Ragnar Lodbrok and mythological elements, reaching a broad audience for whom it became the primary entry point to the Viking Age. Historians and archaeologists have identified numerous anachronisms and inaccuracies in costume and social depiction, but the series unquestionably awakened popular interest in the period. "The Last Kingdom", based on Bernard Cornwell's novel series, offered a complementary view of the Viking Age from an Anglo-Saxon perspective.

Common to most cinematic interpretations is that they extract individual elements from mythology and place them within dramatic structures shaped by modern narrative conventions. The aim is rarely to render the mythology as such, but to use its motif-cluster as a recognisable cultural reservoir. The result is a layer of popular-cultural assumptions about Vikings and Norse gods that exists alongside, and often in competition with, the actual source text tradition.

Games and Literature

Video games have become one of the most influential media for the dissemination of Norse mythology. "God of War" (2018) and its sequel "God of War: Ragnarök" (2022) deserve particular attention for their ambition to engage with the source material. The game's creators, including director Cory Barlog, consulted mythological experts and strove to render a society's religion and cosmology with respect, even within a format that demands dramatic simplification. The game introduced the concept of Fimbulwinter and figures such as Freyja, Mimir, and Brok to a global audience of millions of players.

"Assassin's Creed Valhalla" (2020) chose a more historicising approach, placing the player's character in a detailed Viking Age society with mythological elements presented as visionary experiences rather than literal reality. The survival and building game "Valheim" (2021) took a more fabulous approach, creating an entirely mythological game world populated by beings from the Nordic tradition. In literature, Neil Gaiman's "Norse Mythology" (2017) reached an enormous readership with its accessible retelling of the Eddic myths in contemporary prose.

J.R.R. Tolkien's influence is a chapter of its own. Tolkien was Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford (1925-1945), then Merton Professor of English Language and Literature (1945-1959), and studied Old Norse literature throughout his life. His fictional works draw deeply from Nordic mythology: Gandalf is shaped after Odin's wanderer figure, the Ents recall giant-beings in Nordic cosmology, and Tolkien's creation of an original mythological universe in "The Silmarillion" is inconceivable without the Old Norse models. His work has in turn shaped the formal vocabulary of the entire modern fantasy literature genre.

Music

Music's relationship to Old Norse tradition extends from Wagner's legacy to contemporary genres with deep roots in the Nordic cultural sphere. Within metal music, a style known as Viking metal emerged in the 1990s, with bands such as Bathory, Enslaved, Amon Amarth, and Månegarm as central figures. The genre is characterised by references to the Viking Age, Norse gods, and Nordic nature, and ranges stylistically from the melodic to the extremely heavy.

Wardruna, founded by Einar Selvik in 2003, has taken a more distinctly reconstructionist and musically experimental approach. Selvik studied the Old Norse musical tradition and created a sound based on ancient instruments such as the lyre, tagelharpa, and jaw harp, combined with vocal techniques inspired by the recitation of the skaldic tradition. Wardruna's music featured in the "Vikings" series and thereby reached a broad international audience. Heilung, a Danish-Norwegian-German ensemble, works from similar archaeological and reconstructionist premises and fills arenas across Europe and North America.

It is important to distinguish between commercial aesthetics and more seriously oriented projects. Many bands and artists use Viking Age and mythological imagery as stage costumes without deeper familiarity with the source material. Wardruna and Heilung represent a different direction, in which the musical process is closely bound to an intensive study of archaeological finds, textual sources, and reconstructed instruments. Both phenomena coexist in a contemporary musical landscape in which Old Norse culture has become a global cultural brand.