This illustration is from a retelling of Norse mythology in the 1930 edition of Annie Keary's The Heroes of Asgard (1857) illustrated by Charles E. Brock. The book is divided into nine stories beginning with the Creation Myth and ending with Ragnarök. The stories are further divided into parts which have illustrated headers and illustrated capital letters. This header in Story 1: “The Aesir” for Part V: “Bifrost, Urda and the Norns“ depicts the wolf Fenrir coming into the feast of the Aesir, while Freyja recoils in fear.
Editor's Note: The third edition of The Heroes of Asgard was published in 1930 as The Heroes of Asgard: Tales from Scandinavian Mythology and was illustrated by Charles E. Brock (1870 – 1938). This is the edition that most readers are familiar with today. The Brock edition contains eighty-five illustrations with sixteen colour plates. The text of the tales remained the same, but the scholarly introduction and the notes of the second edition were eliminated. The Brock edition was republished in 2012, by Dover Publications as Tales of the Norse Warrior Gods: The Heroes of Asgard, but not all of the plates are in colour and several were relocated, i,e., to the front cover and inside the covers. Unfortunately, without the framing conversations from the first edition or the academic apparatus from the second edition, naive readers of the third edition sometimes believe that the retellings represent the cultural and religious beliefs of Old Norse pagans. (Baer, Trish. “A Brief Overview of the Editions of The Heroes of Asgard” The Heroes of Asgard (1930) ).
The MyNDIR site features illustrations from manuscripts and early print books that are not on our Flickr page and can be viewed on MyNDIR: myndir.uvic.ca/. The Flickr page is part of the SSHRC IDG project to add illustrations to the repository from Victorian and Edwardian retellings of Old Norse myths and sagas.
Brock, C. E.. Header for "Bifrost, Urda and the Norns". From: Keary, Annie, and Eliza Keary. The Heroes of Asgard: Tales from Scandinavian Mythology. London: Macmillan and Co. Limited, 1930. 30. MyNDIR: My Norse Digital Image Repository. Ed. P. A. Baer. 2024. Edition 2.6. Victoria, B. C.: Humanities Computing and Media Centre, University of Victoria. 2024.
