Jonas Wellendorf, The Lives and Deaths of the Norse Gods. Studies in Old Norse Literature, 15. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2025, ix, 258 pp.

The field of Old Norse mythology is old, dense, and has mined the extant sources as much as any in any other small textual corpus – i.e., it is difficult to do more than refine known information, albeit rarely, or popularize scholarship for wider audiences. In recent years, this scholarly density has produced various turns away from uncovering new data, so to speak, toward creating new frameworks within which to interpret data, e.g., memory studies. Wellendorf’s previous book framed the Norse gods primarily within the context of their euhemeristic presentation in the sources, while the current volume moves diachronically backwards to speculate about the prehistory of the Æsir, proceeding from the point that what separates the Norse ‘pantheon’ from the Abrahamic traditions and paganism is their fundamental mortality.