NorsePlay.

The 1990 CE black-and-white film The Juniper Tree takes The Brothers Grimm folkloric tale of the same name and places it within a medieval Icelandic context, adding the operating mechanism of witchcraft to push the story into the arena of magical realism. There's an observable throughline here that makes this film even more NorsePlay: The idea of a potentially very early Germanic cautionary tale set "2,000 years ago" (so 188 BCE from its recorded publication if literal), perhaps in an ancient world forest, and setting that story in an isolated Viking Age-style farmstead, and though the time period isn't stated it could be from then up to the Brennuöldin, The Age of Fire when witches (though by contrast mostly male) were persecuted & drowned, between 1625 CE and 1683 CE, so the carry forward from Germanic to Norse happens via modern art cinema. A prominent example of the same story media time shifting happens when Saxo Grammaticus' legendary Amleth becomes Sha...

In The Witch's Heart and Assassin's Creed Valhalla: Dawn Of Ragnarök , it's explained that Odin can't outright kill his blood brother's monstrous children and so has to instead imprison them. Hel gets the limitations of caretaking a whole world with its eternal duties of ruling & constantly processing the dead, her own half-dead condition potentially restricting her there. Fenrir 's everlasting & immeasurable hunger is tied down by a cord of equally impossible constructions, and this takes him out of the game. But when we look at Odin's nonchalance in throwing Jörmungandr into the ocean we have to ask how is this imprisonment? We could presume Angrboða 's serpent is a type of amphibian, initially able to breath air & live on dry land, but when Odin casts him into the water where a restriction has to be in effect from thence onward since we don't hear of Jörmungandr coming ashore, only above water when hooked by Thor , or magically bi-lo...

You'd just as likely not look twice nor too deeply at the 1982 CE Sword & Sorcery so-bad-it's-good film, The Beastmaster . Released in the huge shadow of Conan The Barbarian  only a few months later to try and capitalize on its wake, The Beastmaster only achieved a fair amount of attention after post-theatrical high-volume cable reruns, and its home video release. Yet as with anything Sword & Sorcery, The Beastmaster 's heroic tropes are inescapably Norse Mythology derived , so let's animal control more exactly where this Saturday afternoon TV matinee B-film gets a few of those specific facets from. The 3 Witches As Norns: Though they work in tandem with the wizard antagonist Maax, the witches still prophecy his downfall at the hands of Dar, the Beastmaster. And in the director's commentary, he says they're based on Macbeth's Weird Sisters, which of course are derived from the three Norns. Scrying Pool As The Fates' Well: Maax & the Witches...

Using some gifted extra time within these past few months, NorsePlay has rebuilt its very own backyard lane axe target and recently hosted a private event where a guest was kind enough to surprise me with the above awesome reel!  The big improvement between this target and the last one is modularity. So at your regular pay-to-play axe lanes, boards have to be wood screwed onto the backing, which makes for eventual wearing out of the mounting surface and cost of replacement, plus there's the chance of chipping your axe's edge on the screw heads (even though they're well above and below the target rounds area I've done it, I've seen people do it, it happens). Here I've made a board slide-in and up from the front to drop down into a secure channel system that's to tolerance and doesn't require screws on the target boards' faces. This setup presumes the boards have consistent width, so actually measure your planks to see if they're not oversized be...

Let's start with The Boneless Mercies (2018 CE), and far more importantly, let's lead with why using a band of traveling female assisted honour-suicide deathbringers who want to become glorious heroes is a very important NorsePlay , after which we'll get into a standard critical teardown of the novel. With the identification of the Birka Viking Warrior's high-prestige grave (Bj 581) as a woman in 2017 CE, and the subsequent re-examination of other graves previously thought to be men also getting re-gendered as result, we then become curious as to why there's a lack of Eddic Goddess myths and Saga Literature that feature bold female protagonists to reflect that ( †) . Sure, we get wintery huntress Skaði and awesome tomboy adventuress  Herv ǫ r Angantýrsdottir , but that's about it beyond mentions of Valkyries harvesting the dead and Hel keeping hers. That leaves a vacuum that was probably filled with stories we no longer have (and I would hope will one da...

If you don't happen to ever be near Nexus Occult Books , and/or are "trade rich", you can now go get NorsePlay's new The Map Of The Norse Gods at Bookmans River! [River also still carries the Óðinnsvegr map at left!] Head over to the jewelry bay along the south wall just past the cashiers, then look west and up on the slat wall above the cases to behold the Norse Lore-based cartographical glory! This second map will be the largest in the Map Of Midgard series at an impressive 20"x30", printed on heavy 65# acid-free parchment paper with archival ink, this map is of heirloom quality that should last for five generations at least. Prints are $60 USD each, and a prestigious glass & wood framed version is $120 USD (which should be available from River next month [but if you want it now, do go to Nexus!]). Note that map purchase includes complimentary Gmail account access to a matching digital map with source data and even more GPS coordinates! One example fr...

After years of reading, then 10+ years of data aggregation for the Map Of Midgard Project , and then applying that into 8 months of art direction, NorsePlay is so pleased to announce the  Norðreginskort: The Map Of The Norse Gods is finally available, premiering for sale at Nexus Books in Tucson! Look up for it on the Nexus' west wall above the shelves! This second map in this series will be the largest at 20"x30", printed on heavy 65# acid-free parchment paper with archival ink, and is of heirloom quality that should last at least a century. Prints are $60 USD each, and a prestigious glass & wood framed version is $120 USD. Note that map purchase includes complimentary Gmail account access to the matching digital map with rollover story/source data and even more GPS coordinates! For one example from the 143 digital stickpins: With the above information, if you wanted to go see the island where Thor's animate statue faces off in a tug-of-war with Olaf Trygvasson,...

NorsePlay has dug into Rick Riordan's Magnus Chase series before and found it somewhat wanting , though we were grateful at the time to see Young Adult contemporary fantasy offerings that forayed into Norse Mythology at all, but still it was with some hesitance we returned to read its companion post-trilogy storybook collection  9 From the Nine Worlds (2018 CE). The literal running gag is that Thor's taking a jog through all the Níu Heimar to log in enough mileage to win a cameo spot on his favourite TV show (yes, that's as ridiculous as it sounds), and to incidentally cross his path are the nine short stories each featuring a Magnus Chase supporting castmember, each one now upgraded to a main character, having to deal with a problem in each world. This unexpectedly gave them as individuals a moment to shine and show how they would do things as opposed to (the now-absent) Magnus taking care of business. One of the tropes of contemporary fantasy is juxtaposing the magic...

So there's a pretty popular kids' book series called Who Would Win? where different wild animals get pitted against each other which compares the aggressive factors and stats of each animal before delivering a conclusion. But what if a publisher then decided to use this face-off bout format with the Gods? It seems Capstone has enlisted authors Claudia Oviedo and Lydia Lukidis to do just that, and 5 of the 8 books are Norse versus Hellenic deities, which gives us: [Odin would mop the floor with Ares!] [wait, not Freyja in a "Battle Of The Beauties"?] Yet if we look temporally further back there's common Indo-European roots for these Gods before the chariots rolled northwest or south depending on their different migrations, and these Gods separated out, changed, and distilled into different figures as those people found new lands, so some of these are the later regional versions of the same God/dess, well, fighting themselves. While I haven't read any of the ~3...

In Skáldskaparmál §5  Snorri Sturluson quotes the example of poet Ulf Uggason using " the god of lamentations " kenning for Baldr. While we have the universe-stabilizing presence of Baldr's handsome light while he's alive, Hel 's request that all things weep for his return explains this characterization shrouded in the sadness of loss. [the stones, grasses, and flowers weep tears of dew and condensation for Baldr. (prompts by me, produced by Gemini.)] Yet, what if there's more to this? Could this kenning potentially refer to a ritual to Baldr where worshippers must lament to recreate the mythic event in the Baldrs draumar narrative? And would it be too much to say that such a ritual would grant the space and grace of participants to mourn the loss of their own sons, daughters, kin , and pets as a purposeful function? The loss of the brightness Baldr grants clearly mirrors all loss of love and companionship taken by death, tilting one's personal world...

While reading the Faulkes' translation of the Prose Edda , there's some hard numerical facts being thrown at King Gylfi by High, Just As High, and Third. In using these exact figures, it lends a level of concrete certainty and reportage to their account of things, which as readers and potential participants/victims of this fate, is unsettling. So to give ourselves an idea of the exact scale of The Twilight Of The Gods , and hopefully some sort of edge when the time comes, let's do some pre-doomsday math crunching so we know what to expect. When the three start speaking about Ragnarök , the scale of Vígríðr, the plain where this final battle unfolds, is brought up and given as 200 by 200 leagues, so this makes it 600 by 600 land miles, which means this becomes 360,000 square miles! To compare historically, we've only got WW2's Battle of Moscow which had a front of 373 miles, or if we go naval there's WW2's Battle of Leyte Gulf that spread over 100,000 square...

Inspired by the dark, dark Icelandic magical practice of making a pact with someone who will allow you to dig their body up, flawlessly skin their lower half and immediately wear that second epidermis over your own, then activate that skin by stealing a coin from a poor widow to place in its scrotum with a magic stave which will then always generate more coins invisibly stolen from those around you, the ritual of which the Necro Pants pedal grabs its name from. Known as the Nábrók from the 17th century Icelandic grimoire  Galdrabók , this effects pedal 's namesake and artful outline is taken from the hanging legs at the Galdrasýning á Ströndum (Museum of Sorcery & Witchcraft) in Hólmavík, where the exhibit has a reproduction of the necropants in a case. While one might perhaps imagine a semi- draugr -like dry skin-rubbing/chafing shuffle sound from wearing them, this effect pedal's been characterized as a filthy ripped speaker garage fuzz sound, which also seems invasivel...

Looking at the Norse Mythology themed art of Milivoj Ćeran , it takes one back to the core classic fantasy artists: the Brothers Hildebrandt, Frazetta , Vallejo, Lee , Elmore , and Howe. Ćeran's technique is flawless, the depictions are stylistically on point, and beyond this there's a reflexive integration of high fantasy's modern visual tradition which acknowledges those tropes' roots in the Norse Lore, which mirrors what one discovers when looking at the fantasy literature it comes from. You gamers might recognize Ćeran's brush as he's also done work for Wizards of the Coast, Fasa, Monte Cooke, Privateer Press, Fantasy Flight, and others. Hopefully the "Art Book 1" in the above title means there's more of his Norse-themed work on the way. [check out his other gallery selections and shop the above book and prints here !] #     #    # Guillermo Maytorena IV knew there was something special in  the Norse Lore when he picked up a copy of the d'A...