Maria Kvilhaug is pure brilliance in her works on the deep meaning embedded in Norse Literature from pre-Christian Europe. To boil her thousands of pages and hours of video down to a manageable size, my understanding of her work is thus;
The Edda Poem's from the Scandinavia of the Middle & Dark Ages contain a very densely distilled sort of Initiation Sequence and set of Moral Values. From other sources, I see this same pattern in works like The Great Books of the Western World series, although the style was much different. The tales from The British Isles such as King Arthur & Merlin also contain similar knowledge disguised in different clothes.
Jumping off from the perspective of someone who has digested over 1,000 hours of information on the subjects of Values and Symbolism in literature such as the Elder & Younger Edda's, I feel there is undeniable evidence she is correct.
Inside the great works of fiction such as The Inferno, there is the common theme of death/rebirth or descending into a Cave of Mountain. Generally speaking, altered states of Consciousness are used by those with courage and certain types of virtues to obtain knowledge or an object which granted them victory back in their ordinary life.
Works such as The Underworld Initiation shine the light on the next level of understanding embedded within this Pattern of theme and substance. Once this road is tread, the experience is known as true. Psychology calls this sort of journey Active Imagination and Inner Work today and it's still used by those interested in a more modern theme.
Across all of History, humans have used these very condensed and profound messages to pass along the information they find most valuable. Works such as this on The Nine Noble Virtues describe how a nugget of information such as the the four words of the subject just mentioned can bring with them a current of information much larger. The analogy of information getting downloaded into the hard drive of a computer comes to mind. Once that information is activated, whatever is contained within comes to the conscious mind.
With this in mind, one can understand that the Subconscious Mind can only contain something which it has observed in some way through the bodily senses in the world. The use of Song and Story were humanities way of combining emotions and truth into new creations that were unique to that particular culture. This is observed on many different levels such as natural cultural groupings along Language & Art themes having distinct styles. Before mass printing, and to an even greater extent, before the modern days of the Internet, a regular human would very rarely see different cultures than their own. Now we have access to the entirety of human culture through the internet as we truly become One Species on a Subconscious level.
The better the line of thought that I have just expressed is integrated into my own conscious mind, I see how important it is to keep the cultural heritage of intact. By teaching stories and art which exemplify the underlying archetypal messages desired by the culture, generation after generation will grow up with a strongly connected Subconscious Mind which allows better communication and understanding between individuals.
In today's environment, current trends are that of even subsequent generations of peoples who can hardly relate to each other, largely because their Subconscious Minds are so vastly different due to quickly changing popular culture. This is something people must understand and work to stop if they wish to shield their own families from the inevitable separation that comes from this current of ever changing culture. The modern age allows for some amazing ability, but it also comes with it's share of danger. As with any other danger, once understood and respected it becomes much less dangerous.