Hello everyone!
So I made a snap decision to change the book for tonight's blog post. Why? Well, for no other reason than I felt like it.
Plus it took me FOREVER to get my notes in order for the original one, so I figured I might as well leave them to sit there for a bit, then go back and check them again before I decide to post it all up here.
In the meantime, however, I still need to write about something.
Which is why I decided to write about Neil Gaiman and his Norse Mythology book.
Norse mythology is, for all intents and purposes, as rich and varied as Greek or Roman, but unfortunately we just don't have enough written evidence about what happened back then, what people believed. We have fragments - but the whole is lost to us.
It's a sad story, but what we DO have, well, that's pretty brilliant.
Enter, stage right, Neil Gaiman with his all-in-one account of the gods, Norse Mythology.
I'll admit, I have a non-existent relationship with Mr. Gaiman.
People are going ga-ga over his American Gods, especially with the television series that came out, but let me tell you: I've seen a whole lot of crazy stuff on TV so far (I watch way too many shows), but I've never seen anything quite as insane as American Gods. And I only managed to watch about twenty minutes of the pilot? I think it was twenty. Might have been less. I fast-forwarded through a lot and ended up deciding that, despite having Ricky Whittle and Ian McShane at the helm, this was one show I could cheerfully skip.
Which means I haven't actually picked up any other Gaiman books until very recently.
Very recently being my poor e-reader's demise (or at least hybernation) and me somehow managing by reading e-books on the computer. One of the first I clicked on was Norse Mythology, which I had apparently loaded onto my Kobo but never got to it for some reason or another.
And then of course Vikings season 5 premiered, and Thor: Ragnarok made it to cinemas, and all of a sudden I was once again all over the Norse gods.
As a side-note, I enjoyed Rick Riordan's interpretation with Magnus Chase quite a bit. The link to that blog post can be found below.
To the actual book now:
Gaiman doesn't invent anything new. He doesn't rediscover America and he certainly doesn't want to put HIS spin on the myths and legends. No, what he does is gathers these myths and legends and binds them together, in prose, in one single volume for a leisurely perusal any reader might attemp.
Because, seriously, when I said up there that the Norse myths are notoriously hard to pin down, I wasn't kidding.
They don't actually HAVE a one-volume kind of thing. Instead, it seems to be in multiple places at once, from Prose Edda to the Poetic Edda, the first being a modern interpretation (or at least iteration) of the original Edda written by a Snorri Sturluson.
And then it's just hunting and pecking and trying to find what you need.
As for Gaiman's work (for some reason I keep wanting to write Gamain; I apologise in advance if I don't find all the typos! It's my brain, not you remembering wrongly), it takes us in an arch through the time of the gods. Because the Nordic peoples, just like their Greek or Roman counterparts, equally had a sort of rise and fall, although it should probably be noted that Vikings probably embraced the Valhalla idea better than anyone else accepted death, ever.
Side-note: Valhalla being the vast hall where warriors chosen by Odin will feast and live in the afterlife until it's time to fight to the (second) death during the battle of all battles, Ragnarok.
The book begins with how the gods began (or how the universe began, and honestly, it's one big ew), which includes but isn't limited to a huge bovine licking a block of salt and uncovering sentient beings.
And then of course, because this is Vikings we're talking about, after these beings, aka gods, multiply (aka produce offspring) and Odin comes along, they decide they should probably have a realm to govern so they kill the very first of them and from that they create the nine worlds and the Yggdrasil.
Like I said, ew.
Anyway.
What follows then is an account of the gods and their interactions with one another (and how everyone wants to marry Freya but she wants to marry no one), especially between Odin, Loki, Thor, Heimdallr, and the occasional Sif or Freya come along for a chat.
We do get a bunch of shorter stories about what the gods did in their spare time, like going fishing or having drinking contests with giants, or marrying someone for how beautiful their feet are, not to mention farting out mead after drinking too much of it (I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried, I'm telling you).
For the most part though, we also learn the most about what drives Loki, how he both tricked and helped the gods on numerous occasions, how the gods basically wrote their own demise by not trusting Fenrir Wolf, and after the golden age of the gods is over, we finally come to the last battle.
Ragnarok is the fabled end of days, the interpretation Nordic peoples gave for when the world would end (every culture or faith has one of those), but this one is bloody: pretty much everyone dies.
That is, except a select few.
Vidar, Vali, Modi, Magni, Balder and Hod are the only survivors (or resurrected), and curiously enough the actual ending of Mythology gives food for thought.
The world is peaceful after the battle, the sun is shining, the grass is green ... and they find chess pieces in the grass. Once they arrange all of them in their proper places, they see that on one side, there are the gods, from Odin to Loki, and on the other are Surt and the frost giants and Fenrir and Jormungandr, and the six survivors settle down around the chess board.
Balder moves the first piece, and, as Gaiman concludes: the game begins anew.
It's interesting that despite a world-ending event with Ragnarok, these myths actually see everything as a circle; Balder is the favoured son of Odin who gets killed and is resurrected, and it's telling that out of all the survivors he's the one who moves the first chess piece. And like life being a circle, it's actually also a big chess game. The idea that everything depends on how these deities play against one another is kind of creepy - but equally it's the circle that we keep coming back to.
After devastation, there is life. Even the Vikings believed that.
Which does say a lot about them in general now, doesn't it.
xx
*image not mine
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