The Hunger of the Gods draws heavily from Norse mythology and the heroic traditions of Old English epic poetry, particularly the myth of Ragnarök and the poem Beowulf. In Norse mythology, Ragnarök is a prophesied apocalypse detailed in poems like the Völuspá from the Poetic Edda. It describes a final, cataclysmic battle where the gods—including Odin, Thor, and Freyr—are destined to die fighting monstrous beings like the wolf Fenrir and the world serpent Jörmungandr. This eschatological event directly inspires the novel’s backstory of the Guðfalla, or “gods-fall,” a divine war that shattered the world and left behind the bones of dead gods. The plot is set in motion by the freeing of the dragon-god Lik-Rifa, an event that parallels the unleashing of monsters that heralds Ragnarök. The novel’s structure, which centers on warrior bands like the Bloodsworn and the Battle-Grim, is influenced by the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, set in 5th- and 6th-century Scandinavia but composed in England between the 7th and 10th centuries. In this epic, Beowulf is a hero of the people known as the Geats who offers his service to Hrothgar, the king of the Danes. Hrothgar’s community has been repeatedly attacked by the monster Grendel. Beowulf kills Grendel and later slays Grendel’s vengeful and even more dangerous mother. The poem is seen as a central example of the epic tradition in that it features a hero who travels far from home and undertakes dangerous tasks largely to prove his valor. The heroes and warbands in Gwynne’s Bloodsworn Saga undertake similar quests, facing supernatural beings who—like the monsters in Beowulf—represent the conflicts between order and chaos and between humanity and nature. This literary context frames the novel as a modern successor to ancient heroic and mythological traditions.