Twelve essays on courage, obligation, endurance and endings — drawn from Norse and Old English literature, and honest about what that literature was, who wrote it down, and who is using its symbols now.
This material reaches us almost entirely through texts written down in Christian societies, centuries after the pagan world they depict. The Poetic Edda survives in a thirteenth-century Icelandic manuscript. Snorri Sturluson, who gave us the most systematic account of Norse myth, was a Christian chieftain writing a handbook for poets, and how much order he imposed on fragmentary material is still argued about. The sagas were composed two or three centuries after the events they narrate. This is literature about a past, not a record of a faith.
Two things about that past belong at the front. It was a slave-holding society funded substantially by raiding. And its honour system was a membership rule — elaborate courtesy between men of standing, very little restraint outside that circle. The deeds its literature celebrates are overwhelmingly killings.
And one thing about the present. Norse and Germanic heroic imagery is heavily used in the iconography of white-nationalist movements. Far-right appropriation is an important and unavoidable modern context for this material — alongside its ordinary use by practising heathens, by scholars, by Icelanders and across a good deal of mainstream culture — and it is not something to write around. There is no ethnic content in anything drawn from these texts; the idea of a pure Germanic inheritance is a nineteenth-century invention with a twentieth-century use, and Icelandic scholars and Norse-practicing heathen groups have objected to the appropriation for decades. The final essay takes this up at length.
What these essays take is a set of postures toward difficulty: meeting what is coming, going forward afraid, holding for the person beside you, spending yourself in a contest you will lose, finishing properly. Each is read alongside the psychology where the two overlap, with the evidence stated at the strength it holds — several of the findings usually cited alongside this material have had difficult replication histories, and those are flagged where they appear.
Read them in order if you want the argument. Or take whichever title describes your week.