NorsePlay.

NorsePlay was proud to help crowdfund When The Wolf Comes , the tabletop role-playing game based on the Vikingverse novels , and was glad to see it surpass its needed monetary goals to get to publication in 2024 CE. Only now have I recently had time to sit down and give my shiny hardback copy the reading it deserves. [Because in the Vikingverse's Hulfviðr Torga , I'm the center square! Photo from a 2024 CE Shieldwall backer mosaic.] Forwarding context: I'm writing this review only after reading the core rulebook without having ran it, so I'm not addressing the mechanics (which use  Shadow of the Demon Lord ) or playability, just the contents. If you want the flavour of how it does play, author/creator Ian Stuart Sharpe did a 23-episode gaming podcast called Vikings & Valkyries that was superfun to listen to, and had great cybervikingsphere guests like Saga Thing podcast hosts John Sexton & Andy Pfrenger, and exceptionally talented Heathen Artist  Sam Flegal ...

This amazing depiction of Heimdall's Nine Mothers (2021 CE) by Brazil-based illustrator Runar Hall has so much going for it. The merging of early petroglyphic Sunna symbol with later runestone curlicue-jointed figures, the brave integration of a Hollywood Bathing Beauties film choreography as a still in the daughters' arrangement, and the just enough modern linear shaping & speckle work is so brilliant, plus the breaking of the 2D wall with the boat coming out toward the viewer to ferry all that mythic past into the artistic present as a single package is a serious delivery and achievement. We have to presume Odin's being handed infant Heimdallr, and it's likely this specific visual identity cue that we can't see the boatman's left eye , and the Prose Edda 's  Skáldskaparmál  §8 does attribute Odin as his father, otherwise some posit that he's a Vanic deity from his qualities mentioned in Þrymskviða  §14, but these could also accounted for by Odin ...

Last year I flew to Minnesota and went on many adventures with some old friends who were willing to road trip to all extreme points of their wonderful state for the NorsePlay Investigates series of entries . This is the first entry about that trip, so stay tuned for more! While NorsePlay has posted before about the 1965 CE World's Fair fiberglass statue that is Big Ole in Alexandria, MN , there's nothing like seeing the kitch Scandi-majesty of this roadside attraction firsthand. [Big Ole & I raising our spears! Hails brother!] Ole is supposed to measure at 28-feet tall, but in real life, he seems to tower wayyyy larger. At its most basic, there's a sort of mini-golf quality sculpture about Big Ole -- a fiberglass hollowness, the bright enamel paint, theme park/casino lobby play deco, that pronounced stagey winged-helmet Wagnerian hyper-Viking image -- but Ole transcends all that. [my pal 'Stine at right for scale.] There's too much meaning & history pinned...

While browsing The Book Stop's vintage juvenilia section in homebase Tucson, I found a hardback copy of Edith Heal's Siegfried from 1930 CE, which would be a then-kids' novel adaptation of The Saga of the V ö lsungs . Printed on the flyleaves there was this handsome Map of the Siegfried Country : While some of this doesn't line up NorsePlay's placements in The Map Of Midgard Project (i.e. The Hall of the Volsungs should be in Ezinge, Netherlands, not up in Finland, or Fafnir and the "Flaming Hedge" not in Scandinavia, but down in Germany), I really love the art style of this. Also interspersed in the text there were some great illustrations: So why is Siegfried naked, you ask? American illustrator Milo Winter (1888-1956 CE) must have been thinking of the logistics for when Siegfried stabs Fafnir from below and gains nigh-invulnerability from being almost completely drenched in dragon's blood that this could only happen sans clothing. Character-wise...

A friend who frequents the charmingly small but vibrant historical city of Bisbee, AZ, USA, spotted this very random runestone perched in front of a house: My friend was also good enough to leave my card & a note of inquiry at the house whose sidewalk this happens to be on and I was contacted by Ben, the property owner, who was kind enough to tell me what he happened to know about it, the information which I've integrated into the following investigation. [Note that I'm only working from two photos my friend took, and the by-text interview that Ben, it's current owner, gave me. At some point I know I'll be back in Bisbee and have a firsthand look at it myself, but felt it was more important to report this curiosity secondhand in a timely manner rather than wait on an indeterminate future road trip.] Objective Observations: Ben reports that it's a granite stone weighing "300 pounds" at ~26" tall with a ~13" diameter. The above photo shows thre...

While I would hope the cacao would hammer out a chocolate darker than 70%, this isn't to say if Thor doesn't conche this right it's not going to taste darker, yet 77% tends to be the standard for dark bars. And while this Mexican can tell you "white chocolate" isn't actual chocolate mass, it's cocoa butter, the company has also made a Freya bar in this style for those of you who like that faux confectionary byproduct: The missed opportunity here is a Sæhrímnir bacon bar. At $10 USD a 3 oz bar, it really depends how good these are. If Thor's Chocolate wants to send NorsePlay a sampler to review, I wouldn't say no, but I'm not going to pull any punches in my taster's notes since I'm seriously spoiled in terms of the bars I have tried. Have any of you NorsePlayers had these? Let us know how they taste in the comments below! #     #    # Guillermo Maytorena IV knew there was something special in  the Norse Lore when he picked up a copy of t...

This bronze Valkyrie-laden medal was a random eBay find. Aside from a similar Etsy listing saying it's from the 1920s CE, and the eBay one stating it's 1.5"D and 23g, there's nothing else about it. It makes me wonder if this was a souvenir from a Bayreuth performance of Wagner's Ring , otherwise I might hope there'd be medals for all the Valkyrjur . And if so, does Brunhilde only merit a bronze since she was demoted for her compliant defiance? Are the other usual 12 choosers of the slain (but this number goes up to 39 if more unusual citations are included [and honestly, if that's it, then those 39 have to be working nigh-eternal overtime to pick out ~16K battle dead each to assemble Valhalla's total of 614,400 Einherjar, so there has to logistically be over 39 to delegate that]) cast in more precious/meritorious/other base metals? For a possible other context, in The Nibelungenlied , Brunhild is the Queen of Iceland, and it is the hidden gamesmanship ...

Maybe you need an altar-starter centerpiece, or a big cosmic representation that'll embody your Heathen Worldview. Well, here you go: Straight outta Kyiv, Ukraine, are wood crafters Mihaylo & Olha Melnichuk of Blagowood. The above's a 15.7" H x 6.9" W stunning relief of Yggdrasil with all the worlds and accompanying tree-dwelling beasts . But if that's a bit too large in terms of available shelf space or scale, here's an equally amazing version with somehow even more stylistically finer detail at only 9.1" H x 3.9" W: And look, I know some of you out there are going to say "hey, there shouldn't be a doubled gebo in the rune line! You don't double letters!", and hey, you're probably right, though applying absolute syntax rules in a varied script that was commonly riddled by users' mistakes at that time is probably also way pedantic. But look, Blagowood has personalization options and can carve it for you without the dou...

If we look at the transition from Elder Futhark to Younger Futhark, we lose a whole eight letters, and there's lots of dissertation-length ideas as to why that amputation occurred, and how that makes later translations of this truncation in Old Norse compared to Proto-Norse such a pain ... but that's not the linguistically deep can of worms I want to open here. What I want to draw your attention to is this one instance below of how language organically evolves to use foreshortening, abbreviations, and contractions for convenience's sake, plus how generational change in language happens to create subcultural exclusion, delineate age-group differences, and just to sound "cool". Now, I'm not recommend ing the tween graphic novel series Barb: The Last Berserker by any means. In fact I only read the first 20 pages or so before I put it down, but during my shallow preview of its low-end juvenile-target art and flip self-aware camp fantasy trope dialogue I ran acros...

This reclaimed wood pallet playhouse cleverly NorsePlay'd "Pallhalla" is totally inspiring. It gives one the idea that perhaps a full-size longhall could be assembled from the very same free roadside wood if this was just increased in scale ... . #     #    # 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 .

While reading Marvel Team-Up #116 (1972 CE) I ran across this sweet vintage panel of Valkyrie using the awesome Asgardian explicative: The killing blue, her matching eyes, and those battle braids with penciller Herb Trimpe's detailed tip of the hat to Kirby 's metal shading on the gorget & cloak clasps , all makes NorsePlay seriously want to make a t-shirt with it. The comic itself has a study-weary frustrated Spider-Man taking a webslinging break, when he spots Valkyrie and is about to put the verbal moves on her, when she, under the influence of her possessed sword, cleaves the flagpole he's posed upon to woo her out from under him! Like Völund and King Gunther of the Norse Lore, Peter Parker has bitten off far more than he can chew in intending to possess a battle goddess , and compared to those two, he doesn't even get her near his webshooter, illustrating that attracting the attention of a Valkyrie involves courting or achieving that attention-getting hero...

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...