And the 44th Spin Number Is....

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 9!

A watery nine for the ICY NORTH SEA

This gives me The Poetic Edda to read by July 5th.  I'm excited about it.  I read the Poetic Edda long ago in college, but somehow that book has disappeared.  (Maybe I gave it to my sister?)  But recently I was listening to a podcast I enjoy, and the guest was an Old Norse specialist who had published a new translation of the Poetic Edda, and I was intrigued, so I ordered it. 

If you're not familiar, the Poetic or Elder Edda is a collection of Old Norse poetry that is the oldest source we have for Norse mythology.  It was actually written down from oral sources a couple of hundred years after the conversion to Christianity, so on the one hand, it's not quite as primary a source as we would wish, but on the other, by then the writers don't seem to have been worried that the old beliefs would have a resurgence, so there isn't a bunch of editorializing about the horrors of paganism. The poems seem to have been written down pretty much as composed centuries earlier, as many of them have archaic language.  They're collected in the Codex Regius, or Book of the King.

The Prose or Younger Edda was written down in the 13th century by Snorri Sturluson in Iceland, and contains prose stories of Norse mythology, often taken from versions of these same poems.  It's an explanatory textbook of skaldic poetry and the most complete source we have.  Read both, plus the Icelandic sagas, and you're doing well for Old Norse sources.

9 is also for the Norse map of the universe

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