In Doctor Sleep, Rose the Hat leads her traveling circle of Shining followers, The True Knot. To seek others that possess The Shining, Rose sits atop her RV on a platform they call the "watchtower" in her beaverpelt low crown top hat to cast herself astrally afar. And here is where director Mike Flanagan may have NorsePlay'd us.
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| [Swedish actress Rebecca Ferguson as Rosie the Hat.] |
There's some sagas where a seidkona or volva (that's a witch or prophetess) is hosted with honour as a wisewoman, usually wearing a conical lamb & cat skin hat as part of her needed accoutrements. She's normally asked about subsequent harvests, but then the Sagas become sagariffic when she tells the fate of someone in the room, which is when the story gets interesting. Sometimes these witches are hired to perform cursework, find a missing object, spy/remote-view, or attack an adversary from afar.
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| [the wax figure from the Saga Museum in Iceland of Þorbjörg Lítilvölva {a descriptive name meaning "little seeress"} from the Saga of Erik the Red.] |
The idea of a magician sitting up higher than the world to far-see would imply a metaphysical positioning parallel to Odin's viewing throne Hlidskjalf, or more generally, the far-seeing ritual of utsetia, or "sitting out", where one usually goes high up or on a burial mound, to meditatively evoke answers.
Specifically this seidworking platform (which is also sometimes a chair or high chair, depending which source you read, though maybe ritual scale calls for different hardware) is called a seiðhiall. We feel this idea should be NorsePlay'd further, and perhaps we could repurpose existing towers for this.
10/2020 Addenda: We've since read Doctor Sleep only to find that King in the text has Rosie farsee from the inside of her camper, so director-screenwriter Flanagan & producer co-writer Akiva Goldsman made the visually superior decision to put her on that platform. The climax of the book does occur on a viewing platform, so they may have just transposed this element from King and built on that.
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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 then 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 employment/opportunities in investigative mythology, field research, or product development to offer, do contact him.
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