EVE Online’s Capsuleer Edda Will Preserve Player History in Blood-Inked Vellum

EVE Online’s strange, very on-brand history project is moving ahead. The Capsuleer Edda, first announced last year by Hilmar Veigar Pétursson, is being written as a mythic record of EVE’s player wars, betrayals, heists, empires, and larger-than-life capsuleers.

The book is being made in the style of Iceland’s medieval Eddas, with text written on vellum and ink that includes blood donated by real EVE players. Two Icelandic writers, Jónas Reynir Gunnarsson and Andri Snær Magnason, are working on the text, which won’t be a straight timeline of New Eden’s history. It’s aiming for something more like saga and prophecy than a battle report.

Magnason described EVE as unusually rich material for a writer: a shared universe with hundreds of thousands of players and more than 20 years of drama behind it. That includes the kind of stories that often travel far beyond the game itself, from massive fleet fights to alliance collapses and long-running player legends.

The Capsuleer Edda will also include its own fictional framing. Its narrator draws from Norse poetic traditions as well as Katia Sae, the EVE player known for visiting more than 7,000 systems. The text also points toward a far-future “Great Event,” set thousands of years beyond EVE’s current timeline, though the writers are keeping that deliberately vague.

Pétursson has also talked about sending the finished book to the moon someday. That part is still more ambition than dated plan, and the source says it won’t happen any time soon. The vellum provider claims the material could last around 5,000 years, which is part of the project’s pitch: preserving a slice of EVE’s player-made history for a very, very long time.

It’s odd, a little theatrical, and probably exactly the kind of thing only EVE could pull off without sounding completely out of place.