A constant problem in the citation of Old Norse texts is the inconsistency of orthographic conventions and normalisation. After some deliberation, I have here chosen to retain the forms used in the editions from which I have worked. Similarly in poetic citations I sometimes quote stanzas by the half-line, and sometimes by the full line with caesura, following in each case the editions in which they appear (Neckel & Kuhn’s edition of the Poetic Edda employs the latter format, for example). I hope the reader will not mind this inconsistency, and will see it not only as an incentive to consult the texts directly, but also as an intentional reminder that the author is an archaeologist and not a philologist. My numbering of poetic verses and prose chapters follows the editions cited.
I have retained the Old Norse nominative forms for personal names, even when modern English equivalents are common. This principle has been applied in all contexts, for humans (thus Eiríkr, not Eirik, Erik, Eric, etc), gods and supernatural beings (thus Óðinn, not Odin, Oden, etc), and places (thus Valhǫll, not Valhalla, etc). The use of the nominative raises obvious problems when these names are rendered in English grammar, especially in a possessive sense. For the sake of readability and in full awareness that it is technically incorrect, instead of dropping the nominative ending I have chosen to compromise with a combination of forms (thus Óðinn’s rather than Óðin’s, etc).
One of the geographical terms used with some frequency in the following pages may be unfamiliar. Sápmi is the name the Sámi people give to their traditional homelands, which today are spread over northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Kola Peninsula in the Russian Federation. While governments might not agree, in the Sámi spiritual consciousness this region is politically borderless.
In an English-language text it is difficult to ‘accurately’ render words from the nine different Sámi dialects within the three larger dialect-groups. A written language has existed in Sápmi for less than 300 years, and was produced under the influence of missionaries and outsiders (in an effort to capture the phonetics of speech, some letters were even borrowed from Czech). The process of orthographic standardisation is still ongoing.
For specific terms I have naturally employed the relevant dialects as appropriate. For the names of the Sámi gods and when a generic sense is required – as with noaidevuohta and noaidi, for which our nearest approximations are ‘shamanism’ and ‘shaman’ – I have employed the North Sámi dialect according to the present literary language. The orthography for this has been codified in the Fenno-Scandic dictionaries by Svonni (1990), Sammallahti (1993) and Jernsletten (1997). It should be noted that these differ slightly from the spellings used in the classic North Sámi dictionary (Nielsen 1932–38).
Finally, the spelling of ‘Sámi’ itself is not uncontroversial. The accented vowel is really only of relevance in a Sámi-language text, so the anglicised and unaccented ‘Sami’ is sometimes used instead. Others prefer to use ‘Saami’, which is phonetically correct. I have chosen to retain the single accented vowel, as this follows the translation policies adopted by the main Sámi cultural centres in Sweden and Norway.