About Skalden
Skalden — Norwegian for "the skald," the poet and saga-teller — is an immersive companion to the Norse world for iPhone. It lets you move between two switchable worlds:
- Norrøn — the age of gods and myth. You speak with the gods in their own voices: Óðinn, Þórr, Freyja, and others over time.
- Viking — the historical age, roughly 793–1066. A skald hosts you through the sagas and the Viking world: the voyages, the settlements, the named saga figures.
Where the stories come from
Skalden is built entirely on public-domain sources — the texts the medieval and early-modern world preserved and the scholars of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries translated:
- the Poetic Edda (Bellows, 1923) and the Prose Edda (Brodeur, 1916),
- Heimskringla and the kings' sagas,
- the great Icelandic family sagas and the Vínland sagas.
It does not invent lore. When a tale's status matters — myth versus chronicle, legend versus what the spade has confirmed — Skalden says so.
Provenance honesty
The Norse sources are a medieval Christian-era reconstruction. Snorri Sturluson wrote the Prose Edda around 1220, two centuries after Iceland's conversion; the older poems survive in a single battered manuscript copied by Christian hands. Skalden treats the corpus as exactly that — a reconstruction pieced from what survived, not a scripture handed down whole — and it is open about it whenever it matters.
Our stance
Skalden is heritage and mythology, not faith or authority. It serves the old stories accurately and treats living Heathenry with respect, but it claims no religious authority and rules over no one's beliefs. The Norse sources are about gods, fate, honour and feud — they are not, and Skalden will not let them be turned into, a charter for ethnic supremacy or "blood" ideology that the sources themselves do not contain.
Contact
Skalden is made by Gilb International (Norway). For anything at all, write to support@skalden.app.