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Starvard University · Mythology
Travel from Mount Olympus to the halls of Rome and the roots of the great Norse world tree, guided by Thomas Bulfinch and the old tales of the Prose Edda.
Hello, my name is Finn, and I'm going to help you understand this course.
Here it is, explained like you are 10:
Long ago, before science could explain thunder, the seasons, or the sea, people told stories about mighty gods and brave heroes. The Greeks told of Zeus and his family on Mount Olympus. The Romans borrowed those tales and added stories about how their city began. Far north, the Norse told of a giant tree holding up the world, one eyed Odin, mighty Thor, and tricky Loki. In this course you will hear the best of these stories, learn who is who, and start spotting myths hiding in words, stars, and movies all around you.
Our guide is Thomas Bulfinch, a kind Boston banker who spent his spare time making old myths easy for everyone to read. His book, first published in 1855, gathers the Greek and Roman tales and then the northern myths of Scandinavia into one friendly volume. For the Norse stories we can also listen to an older voice: Snorri Sturluson, an Icelandic writer of the Middle Ages, whose Prose Edda saved the tales of Odin and Thor from being forgotten. Bulfinch wrote for ordinary readers, not professors, so every story in his book is told plainly, in order, and with the confusing parts gently explained.
You do not need to believe a single myth to love this course. You only need to enjoy a good story and wonder why people kept telling it for thousands of years. We will travel in a simple order: first why myths exist at all, then Greece, then Rome, and then the far north, so you always know where you are on the map. Keep a list of your favorite gods and heroes as you go, because the last lessons bring them all together at once. By the end, names like Hercules, Thursday, and the planet Venus will feel like old friends, because you will know the tales behind them.
The whole course in brief
What you will be able to do after this course
The eight lessons
Lesson 1
Thomas Bulfinch opens his great collection with a simple observation: mythology is not a pile of old mistakes. It is the literature of people explaining their world before science existed, and enjoying the explanation. Why does thunder roll? Zeus is angry, or Thor is driving his chariot. Why do the seasons turn? Because, as you will hear in this course, a daughter spends part of every year in the underworld, and her mother grieves. A myth is an answer wearing a story's clothes.
Myths do other jobs too. They teach values: the Greek hero who grows too proud is punished, and the Norse god who breaks an oath pays for it. They explain customs and names, which is why our months, planets, and weekdays still carry gods inside them, from Mars in March to Thor in Thursday. And they hold a people together. Romans hearing about Aeneas, or Icelanders hearing Snorri tell of Odin, were hearing who they believed themselves to be.
So read myths the way Bulfinch invites you to: neither as history lessons nor as nonsense, but as the beloved stories of real people. Ask of every tale three questions. What does it explain? What does it teach? And why was it too good to stop telling?
Lesson 2
Above the clouds on Mount Olympus, Bulfinch tells us, sat the great family of Greek gods, and learning them is mostly a matter of learning their jobs. Zeus, called Jupiter by the Romans, rules sky and thunder and keeps rough order among the rest. His wife Hera, or Juno, guards marriage and never forgets an insult. Poseidon, or Neptune, shakes the earth and rules the sea with his trident, while Zeus's brother Hades, or Pluto, reigns quietly over the dead below.
The next generation fills out the household. Athena, or Minerva, sprang fully armed from Zeus's head and rules wisdom and crafts. Apollo drives the sun's chariot, shoots a far reaching bow, and patronizes music and prophecy. His twin sister Artemis, or Diana, hunts by moonlight. Ares, or Mars, loves war itself; Aphrodite, or Venus, was born from sea foam and rules love and beauty; Hephaestus, or Vulcan, the lame smith, forges wonders in his mountain workshop; Hermes, or Mercury, with winged sandals, runs messages and mischief alike; and Dionysus, or Bacchus, brings wine and theater.
Notice the pattern that makes Greek myth so readable: the gods are powerful but never perfect. They quarrel, boast, fall in love, and hold grudges, rather like a royal family with weather powers. That is why their stories still work as drama.
Lesson 3
Between gods and ordinary people stand the heroes, stronger and braver than us, but mortal, and Bulfinch gives them his best chapters. Perseus was sent by a scheming king to fetch the head of Medusa, whose gaze turned men to stone. With gifts from the gods, winged sandals, a mirrored shield, and a cap of invisibility, he approached the monster backward, watching her reflection, and struck safely. On the flight home he rescued the princess Andromeda from a sea monster, a rescue painters have loved ever since.
Theseus, prince of Athens, volunteered to sail to Crete among the youths offered to the Minotaur, the bull headed monster hidden in the Labyrinth. The princess Ariadne gave him a ball of thread, the famous clue, so he could unwind his way in and wind his way out again after the fight. Heracles, whom the Romans called Hercules, was the strongest man alive, set by an enemy king to perform twelve enormous labors, from strangling the Nemean lion to cleaning the Augean stables in a day and fetching the golden apples of the Hesperides.
Three heroes, three styles: Perseus wins with borrowed tools and cleverness, Theseus with courage plus a simple plan, and Heracles with strength and endurance. Greek parents told these stories to say what a life well spent looks like.
Lesson 4
Not every myth is about war. Bulfinch tells two love stories so fine that artists have never stopped retelling them. Orpheus could charm animals, trees, and stones with his lyre. When his wife Eurydice died of a snake bite on their wedding day, he walked living into the underworld and sang for her, until even the rulers of the dead wept and agreed to let her follow him back, on one condition: he must not look behind him until both had reached the upper air. Love nearly won. At the very edge of the light, afraid she was not there, he looked, and lost her a second time.
The tale of Cupid and Psyche ends happier, after harder work. Psyche, a mortal girl whose beauty offended Venus, was wed to an unseen husband who visited only in darkness. Urged by jealous sisters, she lit a lamp while he slept and saw that he was Cupid himself, the god of love. He fled, and Venus set Psyche impossible tasks: sorting a mountain of mixed grain, gathering golden wool, carrying water from a guarded spring. Helped by ants, a river reed, and an eagle, she completed them all, and the lovers were reunited and married on Olympus.
Read the two stories as a pair. Orpheus fails one test of trust in a single moment; Psyche passes years of tests one by one. Greek love, Bulfinch shows us, is proved by patience more than by passion.
Lesson 5
Rome wanted a noble family tree, and its poets built one out of Greek timber. When Troy fell, the Trojan prince Aeneas escaped the burning city carrying his old father on his shoulders, wandered the seas through storms sent by the goddess Juno, loved and left Queen Dido of Carthage, visited the underworld, and at last reached Italy, where his descendants would rule. Bulfinch devotes some of his longest chapters to Aeneas, because Rome's national epic, Virgil's Aeneid, made this refugee prince the grandfather of an empire.
The founding tale itself is rougher. Romulus and Remus, twin sons of Mars, were set adrift as babies on the Tiber, washed ashore, and suckled, so the story says, by a she wolf. Grown to manhood on the hills by the river, they quarreled over their new city's site and name, and Romulus, in the grim heart of the legend, killed his brother and gave the city his own name: Rome. The Romans kept both halves of their inheritance proudly, Aeneas for duty and Romulus for toughness.
Rome also adopted the Greek gods wholesale and gave them Roman names, which is why this course teaches both. When you meet Jupiter, Juno, and Mars, you are meeting Zeus, Hera, and Ares wearing Roman dress and Roman seriousness.
Lesson 6
Cross now from sunny Olympus to the cold north, where Bulfinch's later chapters and Snorri's Prose Edda picture the universe held together by a tree. In Bulfinch's words, "The mighty ash tree Ygdrasill was supposed to support the whole universe." Its three immense roots reach into Asgard, home of the gods, into Jotunheim, land of the giants, and down to dark Niflheim. Beside the roots sit springs and wells of fate and wisdom, tended by the Norns, while a dragon gnaws at the lowest root and harts browse the branches above.
Around and within the tree, Norse storytellers arranged the nine worlds. Asgard crowns the top, reached from Midgard, the walled middle world of human beings, by Bifrost, the rainbow bridge. Elves have their bright home, dwarves their forges under the earth, giants their wild country at the edges, and the dead their realm of Hel. Everything is connected, everything can be traveled, and, importantly, everything is temporary: the tree itself trembles in the old poems when the end approaches.
The Edda frames this cosmos as a conversation. A Swedish king called Gylfi, traveling in disguise as Gangleri, questions three mysterious hosts about the beginning of the world, how fire from Muspell and frost from the yawning gap first met and made the giant Ymir, from whose body the world was built. Norse myth begins, as it ends, with wonder.
Lesson 7
Three figures dominate the Norse tales, and you can learn the north by learning how they differ. Odin, the All Father, rules the gods of Asgard, but his real hunger is wisdom. The Edda tells how he gave an eye for a drink from the well of wisdom and hung wounded on the world tree to win the runes. Ravens fly out daily to bring him news of the world, and slain heroes feast in his hall, Valhalla, training for the last battle he knows is coming.
Thor, his son, is the defender everyone loves: immensely strong, quick tempered, and armed with the hammer Mjolnir, which returns to his hand and makes the thunder when he rides his goat drawn chariot across the sky. Bulfinch retells Thor's visit to Jotunheim, where the giant king's illusions humble even Thor: he wrestles an old woman who is really old age itself, and tries to lift a cat that is really the world serpent in disguise. Strength meets things it cannot beat, and the story loves him for trying.
Then there is Loki, the trickster, shape shifter, and troublemaker, sometimes the gods' clever helper and sometimes their enemy. It was Loki who, in the Edda, fathered the wolf Fenris and the great serpent that circles the world. Every Norse tale needs him, because without mischief there is no story.
Lesson 8
Norse mythology is the only great mythology in this course that tells its gods, in advance, exactly how they will die. Bulfinch gives the doom its own heading: Ragnarok, the Twilight of the Gods. First, he writes, will come a triple winter with no summer between, when snow falls from the four corners of the heavens and war and discord spread over the universe. Then the earth trembles, the sea leaves its basin, the wolf Fenris breaks his fetter at last, the Midgard serpent rises from the sea, and Loki, released from his bonds, joins the enemies of the gods.
The hosts meet on a great plain. In the Edda's telling, Odin rides out against the wolf, Thor faces the serpent he has fished for and fought before, and the bright god Frey meets Surtur, the fire giant whose sword flames before and behind his army. Heroes fall on every side, fire consumes the world, and the earth sinks beneath the sea. It is the bravest ending in mythology, because the gods march to a battle they know they cannot win, and march anyway.
But Snorri does not close the book on ashes. The Edda tells of an earth rising green from the waters, of a few gods surviving, and of a new human pair sheltered through the fire who repeople the world. Ragnarok is an ending with a beginning folded inside it, which may be the most northern idea of all.
Sources
This course is taught from classic texts that are free for anyone to read. Every method in the lessons traces back to one of these books.
Graduation
You started with thunder and a question, and you finish knowing the families of Olympus, the founders of Rome, and the gods beneath the world tree. These tales have survived three thousand years because every teller found them worth passing on. Now you are one of the tellers. Retell one story this week, to a friend, a child, or a class, and the mythology stays alive. Congratulations, storyteller.
Keep learning
This course is part of Starvard University, striving for greatness.
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