(July 1, 2026 at 4:39 pm)Leonardo17 Wrote: What if these people truly saw what’s happening to our world today and wanted to warn us about it?

I don't think it's reasonable to say that the authors of the Eddas and the sagas knew what would happen in the 21st century. I don't think that was their aim.

We can certainly say, though, that they thought long and hard about what it looks like when an organized destructive force is heading your way, and there is no realistic hope for defeating it. And to this extent what they had to say can be of great interest to people today. 

You are correct to say that the writings of ancient cultures contains all kinds of symbolism. And allegory and metaphor and synecdoche and every other kind of literary trope you can name. These things invite new interpretations which keep the stories relevant. 

Your connection -- between the oncoming of the Great Winter in the Norse mythology, and the inevitable Global Heating in our own time -- makes a lot of sense. We see it coming, we know who's doing it, we know that good people want to stop it, yet we also know that none of the good people can possibly succeed against the powers that bring it about. So we can ask, as the Norse authors did, in the face of certain defeat, what should we do? And I think their answer, that we should keep fighting anyway, despite knowing that we will lose, is not a bad answer. 

There's a reason why we still benefit from reading these old stories. So for example Slavoj Zizek did a close reading of the Greek tragedy Antigone in one of his books. Though the play has been analyzed every which way for a couple of millennia now, his version is well worth reading. Literature like that is pretty much inexhaustible, and each new reading, without erasing the readings that came before, enriches the meaning and depth of the play. 

We sometimes come across people who say they know the real and true and only meaning of an ancient story, and they know exactly what the original author intended, and any other reading is a waste of time. These people are attempting to shut down an important function of literature. 

From the web site you linked to I learned that (according to some authors) after the final defeat of the gods there will be a renewal. It comes across as almost optimistic -- that the hopeless current condition will be wiped away and people can start fresh. It reminds me of something I was told on one of these Internet forums: that Global Heating isn't really so bad, because it won't bring about complete human extinction, only the total fall of human civilization. And then I guess we can make all the same mistakes again, since it seems unlikely that anyone will learn from history.

(July 1, 2026 at 7:08 pm)Angrboda Wrote:

At least one Edda and several Norse sagas have dragons in them. They don't need more.

(July 2, 2026 at 12:56 am)Belacqua Wrote:

(July 1, 2026 at 7:08 pm)Angrboda Wrote:

At least one Edda and several Norse sagas have dragons in them. They don't need more.

I believe it's Leo's post that was referred to, not Norse mythic literature.

Boru

(July 1, 2026 at 4:39 pm)Leonardo17 Wrote: So again: What if these people truly saw what’s happening to our world today and wanted to warn us about it?
 
(This is just an open question, everyone can have an opinion of his own)

They didn't.  Just like the prophecies of the old testament, the eddic myths are then-current social commentary.  They weren't seeing what was happening to us today, they were talking about what was happening to them, then.  Insomuch as we can see similarities between their predicament and our own...it's far more likely that this is our common humanity bubbling up in our endless conflicts...than it is the product of a precognitive author. As above, the man responsible for alot of what we know is snorri sturluson. He was a politician and a folklorist. We do have at least one of the sources he directly quoted from word for word...but most of it was oral history.

Just as a point of amusement..if there were norse precognitives seeing what must then be fated future events it doesn't seem to have helped them much. Their society collapsed and was replaced.