NorsePlay.

Sometimes an artist makes different choices on what is given emphasis in depictions of the Norse Cosmos. Most seem to go with the relative positioning of The Nine Worlds around the World Tree, but here the focus is more on the placing of the animals who are all inimical to the health of Yggdrasil : The Scandinavian World , the frontispiece to Annie & Eliza Keary’s The Heroes of Asgard and the Giants of Jötunheim (1857 CE) shows where the creatures/monsters who wear on the tree reside. In this, the idea of the tree's vulnerability (and perhaps its fateful approach toward its end-time encounter with fire during Ragnarök) is shown, but we then have also ask why these destructive beasts have been built into the tri-divinely intelligent design of the Norse Cosmos. Sure, the freezing world the Northmen lived in was cold and adversarial to sustaining life, so the structure of the larger unseen cosmos has to reflect that harsher worldview as, like men, the Gods themselves maintain b...

  A recent Marvel Comics blacklight calendar drew my attention to past poster offerings of blacklight images from The Mighty Thor , which included this The Resurrection of Hela by Odin , originally drawn by John Buscema, but redone in this psychedelic light-reactive style by The Third Eye who made the posters in 1971 CE. To NorsePlay this further, it would be pretty amazing if this style could be extended to actual Heathen art, like paintings, statuary, and Godpoles. If the idea of sacred space is an incursion of the otherworld with Midgard, then adding elements where things look and thus feel unreal yet undeniably present to the inside of one's blacklit temple would be both evocative & impressive. #     #    # 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...

I've recently won a music naming contest on Valhyr Music's YT channel! Renet, the musical artist behind the Viking-themed Valhyr Music posts his latest offerings with the opportunity to submit titles for some of his tracks, and for a Gefjon-inspired track I suggested The  Shearing of Sjóland , which then went to a vote of his 213K followers on IG, where it won "with quite the lead"! Given Goddess Gefjon's Gylfaginning story where in disguise she charms Swedish King Gylfi into granting her as much land as she can plow in a day & night, she then totally games it by grabbing four giant oxen from Jötunheimr and hitches them to plow off so much land that it becomes the island of Zealand (Sjælland/Sjóland), leaving behind the huge Lake Vänern from where the oxen drag it out of! Valhyr's awesome track features a low grinding soundscape as though the parting & ploughing of bedrock were occurring, which makes my title very fitting, and I'm totally honou...

  Every winter holiday season the memes roll out about Thor & his goats or Odin & Sleipnir as being the ancient origins for Father Christmas & Santa Claus and his reindeer. As easy a parallel as this is to make, many academics & others will tell you it's not true. As per the principles of NorsePlay, I would instead point out how the conversion process is being reversed in this possible bit of internet fakelore in favour of Heathenry. Given the two millennium long ownership of the winter holiday by monotheism in a long-game squatters' attempt to make Midwinter their own, the fact that these memes have become this annually re-occurring viral posting shows that the conversion has ultimately failed in terms of this re-connective & wanted polytheistic desire behind them (though always remember, there's room for everyone at this deep Winter feasting table, and no one can actually "own" a season -- it's everyone's). The simple cut & pa...

While reading James George Frazer's The Golden Bough  (1890 CE) I ran across a possible reason behind the story of Thor's journey to the land of giants in  Gylfaginning as to why you do not break the bones of his goats to suck out the marrow:   "... a belief that, if the bones are preserved , they will in course of time be reclothed with flesh, and thus the animal will come to life again . It is, therefore, clearly for the interest of the hunter to leave the bones intact since to destroy them would be to diminish the future supply of game." This above is from the Native American traditions, and only few sentences later Frazer, in his amazingly associative way, brings this taboo back around to Scandinavia (implying the similar belief traveled via migrations of people in the circumpolar regions): "In sacrificing an animal the Lapps regularly put aside the bones, eyes, ears, heart, lungs, sexual parts (if the animal was a male), and a morsel of flesh from each lim...

With my relatively recent deep dive into personal defensive equipment , I decided on a timely re-watch of  Dear Wendy  (2005 CE). There's a sequence before the climatic shootout at the end where The Dandies (pretty much a warrior ritual-centric männerbund ) break a bottle and take a cut along the arm in order to undergo a sort-of death analogue experience , that way when they do march off into the town square they've already faced and gotten passed the idea of being killed and so can then proceed fearlessly toward their fate. If we look at the Norse Lore, Odin sacrifices himself to himself, running a spear through his body to hang on the World Tree for nine days & nine nights, passing through a state of death that reveals the Runes and unlocks their magical uses. While the deathing's a means to that end, it's also a very exceptional experience, and one has to consider that Odin having that under his belt must now look at the cosmos he created & himself, and t...

Sure, the Norse Lore has its share of wooing and star-crossed tribal consummations, so one might guess in pushing that into a contemporary enemies-to-lovers themed romantasy isn't so much of a far cry to explore, maybe. Romance author Rachel Van Dyken's Fallen Gods is about to hit tomorrow on December 2nd with a Deluxe Limited Edition featuring open fore-edge painting. This is the compelling bit of the super dramatic teaser sample: He raised me to obey. To bleed. To be his blade when the time came. Now he’s sending me to Endir University, a place filled with ancient bloodlines and deadly secrets, to steal back Mjolnir , the hammer of legend. If I fail, everyone I love dies. While I'm not hot on romantasy (but hey, try and win me with your spice ), that the exploration of the Norse Lore brought forward into a contemporary setting (i.e. Netflix' Ragnarok , American Gods , The Almighty Johnsons , Friedman's awesome Vidar Trilogy ) is something that always provokes N...

So set aside the disjointed idea that post-Conversion advent is being celebrated with a Norse Mythology-themed calendar . Besides, if you squint through history you can see past that Yule -takeover, and still enjoy Emberglow's The Darkness of Blighted Heart s , a solo RPG adventure in the form of a daily surprise-stuffed boxed calendar: And even better, instead of the fleeting joy of the usual candy, you get a limited edition resin dice set, a metal dice set, a chonky D20, 2 minifigs, actual amulet s related to the Norse Gods you'll be encountering (dying to see pics of these!), plus a daily dose of adventure that has cumulative rewards & consequences as you open a container slot each night! And if need something for your juleøl or vetrmetheglin while you play, for a reasonable $35 more you can get an Emberglow hearthfire logo'd drinking horn with your already limited edition box of holiday adventure: So at $127 for the box, which seems steep in one lump sum, yet if ...

After 2,122 pages, I've leveled up my Norse Lore studies by consuming all four volumes of  The Pre-Christian Religions of the North ! Inarguably the new standard academic reference work on Norse Mythology , as of its publication in 2020 CE it establishes a current baseline on what we believe we know about the Norse Gods and references all the possible usable contexts from literature, archaeology, anthropology, ancient sources, folklore, and comparative mythology/beliefs/culture, taking a much needed interdisciplinary approach that tends to support each other, though contrary and conflicting elements and analyses are openly noted, which only adds to the amazing scope of this offering. Breaking the overview of this History and Structures set down into its respective volumes, we get: Volume I: Basic Premises and Consideration of Sources Volume II: Social, Geographical, and Historical Contexts, and Communications Between Worlds Volume III: Conceptual Frameworks: The Cosmos and Collect...

While the cover of this looks pretty mid, the provenance of this NorsePlay'd contemporary fantasy is not. Author Sally Magnusson is not only an accomplished BBC broadcasting personality for 30 years, and a multi-titled author, she grew up under her father Magnus Magnusson (1929-2007 CE), possibly the most famous Icelander outside of Iceland (well, pre- Björk ), who not only also was a longtime BBC broadcasting personality, but a prominent popular translator of many  Icelandic Sagas  and wrote a travel book about visiting the sagasteads which has been in NorsePlay's TBR pile for a long time now. From the blurb material about The Shapeshifter’s Daughter , both Hel and a terminal cancer patient converge and help each other realize who they really are. The book was just released last week on November 5th 2025 CE in Orkney, and doesn't seem available in North America yet. Have any of you Orcadian NorsePlayers already read this? If so, let us know what you think in the comments b...

  These house brands of the fishermen's houses in Vitt on Rügen, Germany, appear to be descended or perhaps even part of a runestave or bindrune tradition , but their purpose was specifically used to denote familial property. This would include objects and cattle in addition to land and houses. The following are from Hiddensee, Germany: The practice of using these house marks was also extant in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, all areas that used a runic set of letters. I've used a bindrune of my initials to mark the top of my yard's "runestone" and less lethal launcher , and it would be cool to see this revived and NorsePlay'd back into practice. It really beats that 1970s CE disc stamping plastic label gun with its weaksauce glue backing for ancient/medieval cred. [first photo by Chron-Paul.] #     #    # 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 Gi...

Within the comedic aspects of Norse Mythology with its stories of humbling trickery and characters being forced to act against type both for plot & laughs, we relate and are entertained ... but then we also forget the cosmic scale & functions of the divine and their monstrous adversaries that are mind-numbingly beyond human experience. When we find a NorsePlay that wanders into this Lovecraftian territory it reminds us of the awe & terror we can feel in encounters with the numinous , and the implications of living in a Níuverse that has a doomed-filled Ragnarök potentially awaiting it with a fingernail-ship filled with the dead , human-eating jötnar , a world encircling oceanic serpent , a sky & ground touching abyss-mouthed wolf , and a burning giant who longs to set all of existence ablaze with his black flaming sword.   In John Langan's Children of the Fang and Other Genealogies 2020 CE, there's a NorsePlay that explores the cosmological construction ...

Slow forward the NorseSpotting to 25-years-later of  Twin Peaks ' Season 3 , we see Dougie Jones-addled Dale Cooper toddling into The Silver Mustang Casino to behold the flames with the Black Lodge within them hovering over all the slot machines that are about to pay out. In European folklore, there's stories of foxfires/ignis fatuus/will-o'-the-wisps that can indicate the location of buried treasure , and specifically in the Icelandic Grettir's Saga : Now one night very late, as Grettir made ready to go home, he saw a great fire burst out on a ness to the north of Audun's farm. Grettir asked what new thing this might be. Audun said that he need be in no haste to know that. "It would be said," quoth Grettir, "if that were seen in our land, that the flame burned above hid treasure." ~  Grettir's Saga , ch18  Grettir, also being a hero who confronts undead  draugr , could perhaps be an influence for Cooper who is essentially hunting otherworldl...

While hitting a local comic book shop to look for a jötnar-filled Hellboy story arc to potentially review for NorsePlay , I happened across a large format graphic novel hardback Viking: The Long Cold Fire , a series that Image published back in 2010 CE. Of course you don't know until you look at the interiors, but the book was factory wrapped, so I didn't get a chance to qualitatively compare it to Vertigo's  Northlanders , which is what it most resembled, the implication probably being a  Saga-period  retrofitted  ScandiNoir . Have any of you read this? Is it great, or not? Leave your critically constructive & insightfully reasoned thoughts in comments below! #     #    # 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 ...

After some necessary condensing of space & fixtures at Nexus Occult Books , NorsePlay is happy to announce that the  Óðinnsvegr: The Path Of Odin map has moved back into its first retail home again ! More specifically, once you enter the front door, go to their SE corner, and on the bottom two shelves of the pictured above wood hutch on the east wall, you'll find the prestigiously framed version for $75 or individual prints below it for $25. Pick some up for the Norse Nerds in your life! Note that the map is also available at both Tucson Bookmans locations , but there's a special place in my heart for Nexus as an impressive & wonderful niche local venue, so do consider shopping them for my map if that's convenient (plus you can see all their weird objects & grimoires, and meet their winning & knowledgeable staff, too). For those of you reading about this map for the first time, this special 11" x 17" parchment patterned map tracks Odin's ap...