NorsePlay.

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...

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...