# Talk:Ýdalir

This review is transcluded from Talk:Ýdalir/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.
GA review (see here for criteria)
It is reasonably well written.
a (prose):  b (MoS): 

It is factually accurate and verifiable.
a (references):  b (citations to reliable sources):  c (OR): 

It is broad in its coverage.
a (major aspects):  b (focused): 

It follows the neutral point of view policy.
Fair representation without bias: 

It is stable.
No edit wars etc.: 

It is illustrated by images, where possible and appropriate.
a (images are tagged and non-free images have fair use rationales):  b (appropriate use with suitable captions): 

Overall:
Pass/Fail:  No problems with the article. Though short, it covers the material well, and I presume there is nothing more to be said. Congratulations with another good article Arsenikk (talk) 10:55, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

Hello again Arsenikk! Thanks for checking the article over! It seems you have forgotten to sign your name here though. :) :bloodofox: (talk) 00:31, 3 February 2009 (UTC)


### Ýdalir
@Spritor: you undid my edit so I'm starting a discussion here. I removed the popular culture per our guidelines at WP:BALANCE and MOS:POPCULT. Specifically, Neutrality assigns weight to viewpoints in proportion to their prominence in reliable sources (modern popular culture is not relevant or given any weight in the academic study of Norse mythology) and Cultural references about the article's subject should not be included merely because they exist. There is no reason for an article about Norse mythology to be 1/3rd about modern video games. ArtemisiaGentileschiFan (talk) 03:32, 15 November 2025 (UTC)

@ArtemisiaGentileschiFan: I'm the person who added this content, as a bid to save this article from being redirected entirely.  See Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/Ýdalir/1.  Yes, there is a reason for an article on Norse mythology to be 1/3 about modern video games: because there's almost nothing to say about the topic's relevance in Norse mythology, which is charitably unknown, less charitably zero.  The original, OG "Norse mythology" topic is...  one word in one source.  That's literally it.  That and some scholars making wild ass guesses.  The article should frankly not exist at all if that's all there was to say about it, because what we have is an entry on a "Glossary of terms in Old Norse".  Have you read the other sources?  You should.  I would say the absolute best overall source we have is Orchard's Dictionary of Norse Myth and Legend, which has like...  two sentences.  Taking a step back, it's very possible that this was one guy writing something and making it up, and this never was a core "part" of Norse myth for anyone else.  We don't know, and it's unlikely we ever will.  Luckily, the term does have some later relevance.  I would wager to guess that more people played Fire Emblem 4 than there were masters students in Icelandic carefully parsing every obscure word in the Eddas.  So, this is a case where the Norse mythology relevance is so low it's easy to challenge with just about anything.
More generally, I couldn't disagree more even for topics that are better covered.  History didn't stop in 1500.  It'd be like demanding an article on Christianity exclude all denominations from the Protestant Reformation onward because they aren't "original".  By far the most influential source in popular understanding of Norse mythology is...  Richard Wagner, who wrote the Ring Cycle in the second half of the 1800s, including flat making stuff up that was accepted into the canon because it sounded cool and was decent at making sense of what was going on.  And then others were inspired by his idea of Norse mythology, all the way down to the Marvel Universe's take.  If Ydalir became better known for an entirely different reason due to a stroke of luck in the 1990s, so be it.  SnowFire (talk) 05:10, 15 November 2025 (UTC)
@SnowFire: Hi, thanks for the reply. I personally don't think that the use of a word in a Japanese video game is quite relevant in any way that's not tangential. It's true that there is not much written about Ýdalir, but that doesn't mean we need to pad the page out with tangential trivia IMO. I think there's nothing wrong with it being a small page about a small subject. And I do understand what you mean regarding newer culture interacting with mythology like with Wagner, but I don't think the small use of the word in Fire Emblem is really comparable to major modern uses of Norse mythology like Wagner or even Marvel. The use of mythological elements in Wagner's operas or Marvel comics is major and has had large-scale impacts on public perceptions of Norse culture, while the use of Ýdalir in Fire Emblem is trivial at best IMO. ArtemisiaGentileschiFan (talk) 05:19, 15 November 2025 (UTC)
I couldn't agree more that the FE / anime usage is quite minor; every random reference to Odin or Thor or Freya in a piece of media would be major overkill in the main article on those topics, and perhaps relegated to a short mention in a list of "XYZ in culture".  That said, while they are low-tier, they are usable if we are in the true depths of Wikipedia: the ideal of a WP:NOTPAPER encyclopedia that covers everything that can be covered, even very small stuff.  These are from sources that are valid in WP:VGRS and the like.  It's usable material, and the only reason it doesn't show up in major articles is that it'd be WP:UNDUE (rather than unreferenced).  But to give another borderlands of notability analogue - take one of Wikipedia's many many articles on sports players of minuscule notability.  A random "human interest" story in a reliable source about how they used their money from their Olympics silver medal to help their brother-in-law's used car business in a reliable source might well make it in, when that would never fly in a the main article on a more notable topic.  This article is the Norse mythology equivalent of a guy who showed up at the Olympics once and didn't win a medal, so basically anything sourcable goes.
Anyway, I went back and checked Orchard, and I was wrong above.  It's not two sentences; it's one sentence.  Reproduced in full here:
Ýdalir (‘yew-dales’). According to the thirteenth-century Icelander SNORRI STURLUSON, drawing on a reference in the eddic poem GRÍMNISMÁL, the aptly named dwelling-place of the archer-god, ULL.
Sorry about coming off a tad ruffled above; it was because of the edit summary / section header as "cruft".  It's minor but genuinely more relevant than one sentence + some stray comments on scholarly wild guesses that maybe this name is related to a town name on Great Britain.  SnowFire (talk) 22:22, 16 November 2025 (UTC)