Some things may strike you as unfortunate. For example, various names are easily confused, notably Hadding, Hunding, and Haakon. I did not presume to change them, or any other important part of my source, but I made an effort to write for clarity. Nor did I pussyfoot very much about the brutality, the ethnic prejudices—especially against Finns—or the status of women—although that was rather higher than it got to be later. These were of the milieu. Most persisted through subsequent centuries. Our own has seen massive resurgences of them. As for people’s feelings about wolves, animals that I too like and admire, that was also the way it was; and there is some reason to think that in fact they were more dangerous to humans before the appearance of firearms than they have been since.

Now and then I must resort to sheer guesswork, most conspicuously in the case of the Niderings. Saxo tells us nothing about them except that they were somewhere in Norway. The ancient name of Trondheim, Nidaros, gave me the idea that they might have lived in that area. Perhaps they were absorbed afterward by the historical Thronds, or perhaps they merely sprang from a linguistic confusion in Saxo’s mind. Apart from this fantasy requiring some real-world geography, it doesn’t matter.

With the cosmic framework I have taken a still freer hand. After all, we have lost much. Lines here and there hint fleetingly at what must once have loomed high, and more heroes than Hadding seem to be gods in disguise Snorri too euhemerizes myths, leaving us to guess what they formerly said—not that the mythology of preliterate peoples was ever very coherent or consistent. We know almost nothing about the war between the Aesir and the Vanir, except that it happened. I found that with a bit of rearrangement and a few minor additions I could unify a number of fragments. To some extent I have drawn on Viktor Rydberg’s nineteenth-century conjecture about the captivity of Njord, Freyr, and Freyja under Hymir. It is written that Odin and Loki once swore blood brotherhood, which helps explain how Loki got away with what he did for as long as he did; but we do not know why. That incident is my own invention. So, of course, is the whole concept of Hadding not as a redaction but as an actual avatar of Njord.

Here names are generally in their current English forms. Among other things, this means that d frequently represents edh, i.e., th as in “that,” especially when following a vowel or at the end of a word. As for other pronunciations, j is sounded like y in “yet,” ag is approximately ow as in “how,” and ei as in “rein.” The rest should be fairly obvious.