SOURCE: "Historical Introduction," in Gods of the North, Thames and Hudson, 1955, pp. 1-46.

In the following excerpt, Branston provides the historical context and description of the Norse people and culture, particularly in Iceland.

Mythology is every man's business; whether it be of the private kind called psychology or the collective kind which manifests itself in stories of the gods.

A myth is like a dream; it is a direct expression of the unconscious mind, and the events of a myth, its characters and symbols are to the human race as the events, characters and symbols of his dream are to the individual. Like a dream the myth may ignore the conventional logic of space and time relationships, of events following one after another in a causal sequence. Nevertheless, a dream has a meaning which can be made plain; and so has a myth. It is not easy to...