NorsePlay.

John Gardner's novel  Grendel  (1971 CE) is slated for a live-action screen adaptation from Jim Henson Company, and is currently in pre-production. For those of you who haven't read this NorsePlay novel, Gardner retells  Beowulf  from the monster's viewpoint. While spiteful & envious, Grendel as a character is given a more empathetically tragic narrative in his fateful defeat . The book's a successful exercise in internally departing from the story , but it's of course limited by Grendel's death, so you miss out on the latter two-thirds of the original epic poem's plot as a big drawback. The above concept art seems more of a lion-wolf hybrid, which'll be voiced by Jeff Bridges. I'd hope for a practical effects creature from Jim Henson's son Bryan, but have to imagine there might be some CGI augmentation when needed to surpass mechanical /performative limitations. Other notables are Dave Bautista as Beowulf, and Bryan Cranston as King Hrothga

This week NorsePlay won a YouTube Trophy from the esteemed disseminator of Old Norse Philology, Dr Jackson Crawford! While I've left many quite longer, helpful , insightful, and far more erudite comments on his content over the years, I'm glad to get some love back from him. Jackson, my challenge to Crossbows & Catapults still stands , and I would like you to teach me your gunfighter's competitive quick draw techniques sometime you're in Arizona. Hails to you for bringing the Norse Lore to as broad an audience as you do -- NorsePlay loves you back for it. #     #    # Guillermo Maytorena IV knew there was something special in  the Norse Lore when he picked up a copy of the d'Aulaires'  Norse Gods and Giants  at age seven. Since t hen he's been fascinated by the truthful potency of Norse Mythology, passionately read & studied, embraced Ásatrú, launched the  Map of Midgard  project, and spearheaded the neologism/brand NorsePlay.   If you have e mpl

This week's NorsePlay comes from the world of darts with a line of Viking-themed darts complete with shield holder made by Shot Darts! The barrels appear to be highly tactile & partly grooved for easier grip (though this is argued that such a feature in turn makes for a less-smooth release), come in anodized colors, and bomber, taper, or straight in a range of weights depending on which model you get, but all in 90% tungsten. [check out those cool Huginn & Muninn flights!] [whoa, that engraved tip!] While outside of the sewing term of a dart, there isn't an Old Norse reference to darts as we know it now, but the origins are probably the medieval English doing archery, or axes, or spears into the ends of logs with their organically ringed wooden target-like circles & distinct centers, which would way later become the more formal dartboard "clock" we know of once someone wanted to move the action indoors, but decided that battle weapons probably weren't

  There's something definitely Odinic & Icelandic Saga outlaw-ish in Snake Plissken. I mean, sure, the eyepatch & top tier warrior bad arsery. There's also the ticking clock of Ragnarök against which Odin's taking action against and his wandering into the impossibly hostile territory of Jotunheim to bring out knowledge as a Bolverk-ian operative, much as Snake is compelled to go into dystopian America's prison/rebel zones to go rescue/retrieve critical assets that are important to keeping the nation operational. There's also the implication that Snake essentially sacrificed his eye during his tours of duty. While NorsePlay can find no direct throughline from the Norse Lore to director/co-writer Carpenter's anti-hero (and it was Kurt Russell who suggested the eyepatch), it appears as though some hint of metaphysical manifestation's possibly occurred here if you think about it. #     #    # Guillermo Maytorena IV knew there was something special in  th

  " ... ladies beware the stickies in our hair. " As I recently went out for buffalo wings, only to wayyyyy later look in the mirror to notice tiger splotches of orange and some blue cheese dressing in my goatee, I thought of this behind-the-scenes photo of Harald & Halfdan unable to eat ice cream without their beards catching an unfair share of it by unavoidable default. The English would complain about the fastidious Vikings' dress horse & silver-clad ways out-gaming them with their own ladies, characterized by this quote credited to the Abbot of St. Albans: "[...]  thanks to their habit of combing their hair every day, of bathing every Saturday and regularly changing their clothes, were able to undermine the virtue of married women and even seduce the daughters of nobles to be their mistresses. " And yet the above photo's some proof of looking less than A-game when feasting despite how careful groomed a Freyrsman you are. (This also might've m

While at The Mini Time Machine Museum of Miniatures in Tucson, I ran across some curious Barbie Doll scale mythology-based creations by maker George S. Stuart : Taking more inspiration from Wagner's Ring Cycle , there's something uncanny & overexpressed about how the figures are depicted, which is performatively operatic , and this interpretation has alot to say about the endurance of Germanic Romanticism & Victorian ideas , and their specific reception with this artist. One could say the level of immodest reveal here (and hey, they're The Gods, no shame in their game) has more on-loan from Classical  statuary , also hearkens to the cloth-clad illustrations of Lorenz Frølich. Sure, you can't help but look at the Freyr's legs, but also note his vest designs! This might be the very moment his gives his sword away for the love of  Gerðr . And Odin brings new meaning to the term "skyclad". Oddly NorsePlay has featured this cosmic garb on the All-Fath

This week Netflix premieres this promising looking animated Norse Mythology inspired show, Twilight Of The Gods . From creator/director Jay Oliva & co-director Zack Snyder, with the voice talent of Sylvia Hoeks (replicant fatale Luv in Blade Runner 2049 ), there's an intense revenge on the Gods story in the offing. Much like Sony's God Of War games, or Brin's The Life Eaters , the narrative flips the Norse Gods into the role of antagonists. While the Gods in the Norse Lore aren't beholden to the post-Conversion ideas of "good", the needle within entertainment sometime swings quite past a justifiable/explicable grey in turning them into straight-out villains that they certainly aren't, but I love both the aforementioned properties, and given how stirring the above preview looks I want to totally give this new NorsePlay a watch. #     #    # Guillermo Maytorena IV knew there was something special in  the Norse Lore when he picked up a copy of the d'

    In the some cosmological depictions of Yggdrasil, there's an awkward stretching weirdness in order to make the World Tree's roots reach up or around to get to Asgard , Jotunheim , and Niflheim. Franz Stassen's 1920 CE illustration of Yggdrasil from Hans von Wolzogen's Die Edda  has instead turned Yggdrasil into a monumental straddler, majestically arching over and into its three foundational worlds. This places those worlds level & below the axial trunk, here with Niflheim in the right foreground (with destructive Níðhöggr camped on that root), Jotunheim's tall mountains at left, and the last root reaching into Asgard at the back, though we maybe can see its gargantuan godly halls rising through the branches above. This makes for a more tree-centric & structurally elegant arrangement in some respects. Stassen was also noted for his illustrations in Wagner's Ring. If we stop to consider Yggdrasil being organic, subject to external forces, and change

I recently saw an episode of Buck Rogers with the winsome Jamie Lee Curtis & the flyting-winning Gil Gerard being hunted down by a deadly android after a prison escape. I brought it up to an expert cinephile friend to ask if just maybe James Cameron might've seen this 1979 CE BR episode before making The Terminator 1984 CE. He then tells me Harlan Ellison got a settlement from Orion Pictures for The Terminator 's alleged plagiarism of his script on the Soldier 1964 CE episode of The Outer Limits , which Ellison adapted from his own short story  Soldier From Tomorrow (1957 CE). In The Tale Of Thorleif The Earl's Poet  ( Þorleifs þáttr jarlsskálds ), events which happen ~990 CE and written down ~1300 CE, the earl constructs a magical driftwood robot assassin named Thorgard who goes relentlessly from Norway all the way to Iceland to kill a guy at the crowded national meeting in Thingvellir. Thorgard strikes his fatal blow, but not before his mark hits Thorgard, who t

we are all ashlads -- no one is a hero born. ~ kolbítur  by Guillermo the IVth ["coal biter" runic translations from omniglot blog] In many of the Norse Sagas & stories you've got a good-for-nothing momma's boy character who does naught but lay by the hearth fire choosing lazy comfort over helping out on the farm. Then something happens in the story (i.e. like a monster shows up somewhere nearby), and he unexpectedly decides to get up and go meet the greater challenge, implementing a clever plan that far outweighs what people think of his lack of action until that moment where he proves himself a hero. That's the decision one has to make everyday. The Gods have granted you all the days before, will gift you all the days hence, and today to decide to rise to make your dream happen. And it doesn't have to happen all in one day (but if you can, do it), which is part of the clever plan, but you can slay the dragon of self-resistance one slim scale at a time w

In Ibn Fadlan's Risala , days before the end of the amazing Viking ship burning funeral, the voluntary human sacrifice from among the deceased's slaves who essentially then becomes a funeral bride companion by choice, has sex with her dead master's huscarls individually, then on the day-of enters a tent aboard the ship where she has intercourse with six of them: " Then six men went into the pavilion and each had intercourse with the girl. " ~ Ibn Fadlan's Risal a §90   Maybe I've watched far too much Freyr-centric intimate programming, but perhaps instead of running a one-by-one train, there's something more of a concurrent sexual group crescendo for the girl with the final asphyxiation & the priestess' stabbing of her at the moment of breathless orgasm. We're talking a sept-some, which is probably something few get to incidentally have in the course of their lives, so this could be the staging & delivery of a peak experience to gift so

After nearly another year & a half of serious grind, the Map Of Midgard 's layers, entry edits, and backups are completed! This represents a huge trio of steps forward in progress, which puts the salient work left as follows: 1. Expanding & reorganizing the map layers. 2. Copy editing existing mappoint texts. 3. Backing up the GPS & rollover description data. 4. Commissioning an artist, figuring out maps' scale & included mappoints for the physical maps based on that scale. 5. Printing maps. 6. Listing maps. 7. Posting the digital map. While I thought each of those first three items would be done separately, as I started I realized it made more sense just to do two & three at the same time when I had each entry open. More specifically on the digital map, its categories are now expanded & re-organized into 10 layers, and all 1100+ stickpin rollovers are edited & formatted into standardized entries to ensure named locations, the presence of citations,

  NorsePlay is solely presenting this for the fun move-out-of-the-way-space-alien cover art. After finding a synopsis of the novella's pro-conversion miracle usage and apparently ridiculous Martian insect breeding adversaries there's no way I'd bother with reading it (nor did the real author want to sign it as Ivar Jorgensen's actually a pseudonym), yet the visual tropes here (and that Viking's laughing expression as he strong palms that bubble helmet) show the persistence of Norse Romanticism pushing itself all the way into sci-fi . #     #    # Guillermo Maytorena IV knew there was something special in  the Norse Lore when he picked up a copy of the d'Aulaires'  Norse Gods and Giants  at age seven. Since t hen he's been fascinated by the truthful potency of Norse Mythology, passionately read & studied, embraced Ásatrú, launched the  Map of Midgard  project, and spearheaded the neologism/brand NorsePlay.   If you have e mployment/ opportunities in 

While I'd rather celebrate Odin's Geri & Freki , I can't help but admire the amazing hand tooled craftsmanship by Brandon Corral of Swift Hammer Leather's Sköll & Hati . And perhaps every time one takes this wallet out to pay for something, we can note the celestial adversaries near eternally hungering & chasing that which they wish to consume, and reflect whether that purchase will actually satisfy our desires, and to maybe stop trying to possess the proverbial Sunna & Mani and just slow down to enjoy their abundant radiance & the time we are gifted from the Gods instead. [ SwiftHammerLeather on Etsy . And thanks to Brandon Corral for making me aware of his awesome work though his donation to the Southwest Frithmoot .] #    #    # Guillermo Maytorena IV knew there was something special in  the Norse Lore when he picked up a copy of the d'Aulaires'  Norse Gods and Giants  at age seven. Since t hen he's been fascinated by the truthful pote

  What's provocative about @pleiadictarot's well dressed postcard illustration of Yggdrasil is the idea of a trunklike thickness from roots to base of the upper branches. The Norse Lore talks about how much wear the World Tree endures from the cosmic animals and other adverse elements around it, so perhaps having a far sturdier tree with a bottom-heavy root structure would help explain its solid endurance throughout time.  So there's a dragon chewing on the root, but if that root is 100,000+ times larger than the dragon, then Níðhöggr 's wee mouth worrying the tree at its scale is actually not so worrying. #    #    # Guillermo Maytorena IV knew there was something special in  the Norse Lore when he picked up a copy of the d'Aulaires'  Norse Gods and Giants  at age seven. Since t hen he's been fascinated by the truthful potency of Norse Mythology, passionately read & studied, embraced Ásatrú, launched the  Map of Midgard  project, and spearheaded the ne

I read. I read a lot. And I wondered if in the afterworlds all my questions about the Norse Lore, the Níuverse, and everything else would be answered. † And I realized that doesn't happen. The Gods don't know everything. Odin still looks for all the things he doesn't know. And if Odin himself doesn't know then that means the Níuheimar's probably an evolving exponential mystery beyond its Æsir creators. Yggdrasil grows, it gnarls, it spreads, it bears & dies in parts, constantly. While I think I will have access to so much more amazing storehoused knowledge in the afterworlds , there will still be more in that next level to learn, travel to, have adventure, and explore. There will be people from throughout time at the tables of the ancestors to ask questions of, the books of Bragi's Hall with their stories & songs, Valkyries who've witnessed thousands of glorious & horrific battles, dwarves who may begrudgingly barter their skillsets, álfar th

As NorsePlay does a re-watch of Thundarr the Barbarian (1980 CE) with its Conan -meets-post-apocalyptic fantasy/sci-fi, I can't help but think of Ian Stuart Sharpe 's Vikingverse with its Ragnarok event that devastatingly changes the face of Midgard, something relatively similar to " a runaway planet, hurtling between the Earth and the Moon, unleashing cosmic destruction. Man's civilization is cast in ruin. " And with the fact that Jack Kirby did character design on Thundarr also brings to mind the Kirby-inspired pencils of Vikingverse artist Ger Curti:  [p21 of the one-shot  Yggdrasil: In the Beginning comic!] The point of my drawing these two things together is that NorsePlay would like to apply its longstanding social media cred & skaldic might to request that there be a Vikingverse animated cartoon. I know the cybervikingsphere would devour that and ask for thirds, the awesome Vikingverse novels would get bought in astronomical stacks, there would be a

This last weekend I attended my sixth Southwest Frithmoot ! [maps at left, stax of books at right with an iron easel on top to keep the northern Arizona wind from making off with them without bidding (greedy Hræsvelgr)!] The big difference this year is that I went as a vendor with framed copies & prints of The Path Of Odin map ! I first want to thank everyone who pre-reserved framed maps to get at the event, others who bought prints , and everyone who checked it out and had kind feedback to say about the map & questions about the research behind it! You Heathens are a large part of my audience, future users for the Map Of Midgard project , and your enthusiasm & encouragement meant alot to me & the work I do to make that proof-of-concept Odin map happen. But back to the event: For those who don't know, Southwest Frith Moot is the longstanding annual regional Ásatrú/Heathen gathering  hosted by Arizona's Wanderer Kindred's Chieftain Vince & Gythia Dani,