NorsePlay.

The Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur translation (1916 CE) of the Prose Edda names the leather cord that Brokkr uses to sew Loki's mouth shut as "Vartari". By breaking this cord's name down into its two Old Norse component parts, I’ve discovered something quite telling: " Var " can mean "pledge", while "Tari" can mean "to kill by repeated stabbing". If we look at Loki's role in the "Gifts For The Gods Contest" story from Skáldskaparmál (§35), he loses his head to mastersmiths Brokkr & Sindri after the Gods pick their gift  Mjölnir as most valued over all those crafted by the competing dwarven Sons Of Ivaldi . Yet the dwarves cannot chop off Loki's head without touching his neck, a technicality that Loki fends the fatal claim off with. Cheated by Loki's logic, Brokkr then grabs Loki's head and sews his lips shut with the aforementioned leather cord, repeatedly stabbing around his lips with an awl to thre...

  After buying this book a year & a half ago , NorsePlay finally gets into the text inside this crazy Thor versus this Jormungantic starship cover, and we were not disappointed. Project Millennium  (1987 CE) by Curtis H. Hoffmann is a strong-handed conceit where a real war is set up to celebrate the 1,000-year anniversary of Muspell's Planet who has hired the megacorporation E.C. (which actually just stands for Entertainment Company [obvi-simple, right?]) to stage the battle in 100 years. The android who handles such under-the-table questionable high-cost private arrangements sets up two A.I. computers to head up each side, make armies, and square off. Now here's where the NorsePlay comes in: One computer decides to take on the identity of Snorri Sturluson, and because of this, begins vat "growing a force of mutant fighters" based on the Æsir ! The other computer decides to avatar as King Richard III, but follows Snorri's lead in creating the Norse adversarial...

Elvis might be bardically setting the pace with a swivel of the hips, but he's not the King of the ship -- the chainmail bikini wearing Valkyrie's definitely running this historical line-up of a crew. From the blurb inside I gather there's a Vikings versus Mongols story in the weird post-death Riverworld, which is why the Valkyrie, but I've always wondered if Farmer's mashup fantasy world tends to the too farcical? Anyone read this, and if so, does the one story stand alone, or do you have to have read all five novels beforehand to get it? Anyhow, I thought the Viking ship cover with its chooser of the slain leading her slain at oars was a NorsePlay worth presenting here. [1992 CE book cover by Don Punchatz.] #     #    # 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 M...

While wandering gobstopped through Meow Wolf Santa Fe 's forest area last week, I heard a weird voice speaking above me that turned out to be a huge automated raven sporting a gold chain hung with a fat ruby. Of course this had to be Muninn manifesting his way into the densely accrued materials of this former bowling alley turned into its own elaborate sci-fi saga installation.   But I didn't quite catch what the raven said, so I waited in the area for at least 20 minutes looking at other things while expecting the bird to launch into an audio loop, or be activated somehow into speaking again, but it never happened, which made me wonder if he only spoke once-a-day at Noon, which makes his input a rare clue in the Pastore family's story. After being wowed and absorbing as much as I could of the deep narrative on-site from its videos & exhaustive documents, I longed for even more context and bought the giftshop book  Don’t Read This! The Private Diary of Piper Pastore ...

For Yule my bestie supportively gifted me the new publication from The Fellowship Of Northern Traditions, Bifrost: Glimpses at the Gods , and I have to say it definitely surpassed my expectations of what I thought it would be. [yes, this is exactly the same great library photo from our earlier post, not sorry.] For some context of where this 76-page magazine's from, tFoNT started as a one-man YouTube channel in 2020 CE (then The Wisdom of Odin before changing to tFoNt ), and surprisingly gained excessive traction from new practitioners to quickly become an online organization that began to host ritual meetups at campgrounds, to then acquire non-profit status with intentions to build a temple hall.    While I think nearly any in-road for people who want to discover the Norse Gods is positive, I'd always felt tFoNT, with its heavily theatrical ritual-centric approach, fostered its own culture of god-bothering gnosis chasers that have post-conversion/modern holdover ideals of pe...

There's been some speculation as to whether the Northern Lights have associations with the Valkyries riding out, or Gerðr's shimmering arms , or Odin's Wild Hunt crossing the skies. In this vein I draw attention to Sam Flegal's work, Sleipnir's Ride : NorsePlay 's featured the modern Heathen art of Sam Flegal before , and he remains one of my favourites in his technical mastery and visually expansive narrative approach to the Norse Lore. Flegal's Sleipnir notably has paired legs (as opposed to other depictions with 4 in-line at front & back , or evenly spaced along the sides , or curiously  6 in front with 2 in back ), and one might NorsePlay the leg-paired iron shoes may frictively & electromagnetically spark the Borealic path he leaves in his wake as he streaks across the night skies. As far as the Auroras go, all of the above as cosmological causes could be true. The effect has always struck people of all times as a beautiful manifestation of t...

In December of 1991 CE, the isometric computer role playing game Dusk Of The Gods hits PCs on six 5.25" or three 3.5" disks, giving players what was probably their second taste of immersive Norse Mythology via the then-height of VGA graphics (the first being Heimdall on the Amiga in June of that same year, and much like Heimdall and other early videogames, the Larry Elmore cover art's the best looking thing about it [see any Atari 2600 game box art!], but that's a technological ceiling of the time).   [the CG'd majesty of Bifrost.] After first hearing a mention of this game on the Nordic Mythology Podcast from University of Iceland's PhD candidate Luca Panaro who specifically writes about the reception of Norse Lore in videogames, I had to look it up just to see the cyber-heritage of this PC chestnut. [Valholl with golden Hlidsklalf at the head of the table!] Found these screenshots from a pretty comprehensive 3-part review by CRPGAddict. Apparently the ga...

  This screenshot from the Discovery Channel's  America's Lost Vikings takes foundation layouts from houses across three different centuries and overlays them on top of the three house foundations found in Leif Erikson's Camp/L'Anse aux Meadows. The similarities imply that the site was possibly used for centuries , as opposed to the few decades previously thought. The lack of physical artifacts of a long-settled site runs contrary to this, though given the low population of this colony compared to Greenland would render less accompanying materials to be found. And maybe they just came seasonally or for only a couple years at a time, like a set of winter cabins, perhaps using them as a staging point for further expeditions West to the mainland. While that's all suppositional based wholly on architectural parallels, hopefully that observation opens more doors toward investigations into a potentially larger Norse America . #     #    # Guillermo Maytoren...

While NorsePlay has previously featured the odd cross-pollination of Norse Lore with Tarot and Tarot-derivative decks, I recently ran across this Gjallarhorn: A Norse Oracle Deck that has a really nice panoply of art going for it : [note the Nordic Nouveau of Sif and the image borders.] Released last year, the cards feature the Gods, adversaries, runes, other Nordic symbols, are gold foil edged, and the box comes with an 80p hardback to let you know how to use the deck. So if you don't buy into the idea of an Italian Renaissance oracular system being retrofitted with a more ancient Nordic veneer (but to NorsePlay that: What if instead Bjorn Ironsides or one of his cohorts left a rune set in Luni, Italy, during their 860 CE occupation that later influences the strega who comes up with principals behind Tarot to mix with a later Mamluk deck? Sure, rather unlikely, but history blenders wyrd turns like that sometimes), then instead just enjoy it for the pretty neat gallery of art tha...

Many are the days I keep my signifiers low key, and I usually just wear my oath ring bracelet, and I get a lot of compliments on that (though I also tend to wear a NorsePlay t-shirt every workday so I can engage & promote my brand when people ask me about it, so only sorta low key?). Part of my morning's self-decorative decision-making comes from questioning whether also throwing one of my two awesome Mjölnirs on is "too much", and possibly having those who see it mistakenly write me off as a racist (despite me being Hispanic ). Yet the deal is if I'm proactively deciding not to wear the hammer for that latter reason, then that choice to a passive degree lets the racists trying to take ownership of Thor's hammer as their symbol do so, which is total misappropriation as, according to the 2013 Heathen World Census, self-proclaimed racists were less than 1% of the anonymous survey's sample. Given Heathenry/Asatru/Northern Tradition's obvious growth in t...

After a mead at the local Short Rest backroom tavern this week, I noticed these RPG prop gaming coins that seem to be adorned with the Dwarven race's arguably greatest achievement, Mjölnir : Seeing these got me wondering if there were other NorsePlay'd prop currencies being strewn about the TTRPG tables, and I also found the following: [minted by Fantasy Coins LLC.] [Talisman3D on Etsy.] [RelicCollectorShop on Etsy. Note the Valknut cornered square coin above and their other set below:] These all evoke a bit of Viking alt-history or mythic space in terms of creations from an elsewhen or elsewhere , and make one long for the assurance of physical metals over paper. #     #    # 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,...

This arrived in my mailbox! I'd only recently added it to my Amazon Wishlist as something I'd felt worth exploring. While NorsePlay has mentioned Unverified Personal Gnosis and its potential significance before , I keep thinking if there were a way to compare, accrue, and judiciously vet UPGs then a body of contemporary Verified Personal Gnosis could be accrued, and perhaps a larger picture of divine manifestations could be revealed, or at least maybe some distinct patterns of what sorts of people are tapped by the Gods. While I'm not confident The Fellowship of Northern Traditions who put this publication out is that body, I'm excited someone's at least aggregating that data in any fashion, and curious to see what stories are in this 76-page magazine. So back to my original question: Which of you readers was nice enough to send me this? Let me know in the comments, and NorsePlay thanks you! #     #    # Guillermo Maytorena IV knew there was something special i...

I probably should've posted this awesome Yule Log cake last week for those of you who mark Yule with the Winter Solstice, but this also pushes it forward for you others who re-stamp the 25th, or go by the lunisolar calendar. Anyhow, whenever you celebrate (heck, why not pick all of the above?), NorsePlay wishes you a Good Yule! [super realsies Yule Log Cake made by Heather Baird.] #     #    # 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  investigative mythology,  field research, or product development to offer,  do contact him .

These are more visuals screengrabbed from The Viking Myths TV series I mentioned last week : I really like the graphical minimal linearity of the first one, while the second one draws together more common-ish depictive elements seen from some books, comics, & videogames where we can hear the cosmological voiceover about The Nine Worlds, which probably was precisely happening as this was onscreen, but the little differently coloured worlds are expressively distinct, and the strange Urnes-style vining in the not-snake-but-snake shapes as a frame are a neat synthesis of Nordic designs layered atop a much later romantically painted tree background. When I last mentioned how A.I.'s being tasked to tell the Norse Lore, I think these illustrations are great example of how artificial intelligence can visually NorsePlay things (like the Odin on laptop via my prompts in this post ) in variant ways we might not have thought to present them before in the last 800+ years of retellings sinc...

Buried deep within the obscure streaming app Xumo, I ran across a French-produced 2024 CE 10-episode voiceover documentary-styled series called The Viking Myths . While there's a whole list of animators in the credits, as I watched the first episode there was an artifice to its style, a sort of motion-comic storyboard presentation, and an artistic lack of fine details with far more easier choices of solids and simple lines in many instances. When we talk about the uncanny valley of A.I. being unable to replicate the natural/creative aspects of humanity, this show has a possible tell of artificial generation to it. While that simplification attempts to err toward the iconic, much like Jeffery Alan Love's cut-out silhouettes with texturing/spot colour illustrations for the Candlewick Studio's 2017 CE edition of Crossley-Holland's Norse Myths , it feels like a workaround to just get something finished. Maybe that leaves fill-in-the-blanks for the viewer's imagination ...

Ran across these paper punch-out hex shaped runes in a recent book. While I'm not going to mention the book (kinda New Age-y, and see that nonsensical "blank rune" inclusion), I think this design's a good springboard for broadening & NorsePlaying what the runes could be both aesthetically & revealatorially. When the runes appear to Odin at the end of his nine-night ordeal and he screams at their appearance , this could be the cognitive shift he needs to see something that was hidden in plain sight. Previously I've posted that maybe they were there in the World Tree's branches all along, but it took passing through starvation, pain, & death for Odin's one-eye to finally behold them. When we look at shapes in nature, the hexagonal 6-sided shape stands out, and for the Norse the honeycombs required for mead, or the basalt columns that make up some of their landscape & rocks evoke stories of dwarven strongholds, giants' bridges, or elf s...

Iðunn's terror at being hoisted off by eagle-form jötunn Þjazi in P. Craig Russell's Norse Mythology graphic novel from Dark Horse Comics. While the focus here should be on the crucial loss of the Gods' irreplaceable harvester of youth-sustaining apples , I can't help but look backwards at the golden halls of Ásgarðr she's being hijacked from. Russell's nouveau fantasist stylings have given Elric and Dr Strange otherworldly cityscapes over the past decades and I'm glad to see him turn his hand to NorsePlay the home of the Gods as an important location in the lore. Note this specific drawing for V2 #5 recently sold on eBay for $2K+ as PCR's original graphite page that was only digitally colored by another artist, but he put his own mixed media colors on his original to make the only physical copy that differs from the cover everyone else got on their comic or in their graphics. Also note that PCR's auctioning off other pieces like this, so if you...