NorsePlay.

I've successfully plotted 900 mappoints for my Map Of Midgard Project! This is the eighth progress update since  the initial blog post ,  the first update ,  the second update ,  the third update ,  the fourth update ,  the fifth update , the sixth update , and the seventh update . Of the original backlist of 360 mappoints left to plot, 122 potential sites remain. Of the 100 points mapped since last update 44 were outside of that backlist thanks to more references & sources popping up. I keep thinking that if I read enough Norse Lore to make data for the Map Of Midgard that I'll put things together in a way no one else has via this map, and something will emerge in one of these stickpins for me to find. Something wonderous. Something magical. Something numinous. While the Map Of Midgard itself I feel fulfills that requirement in creating a geographical wonder that has places rife with sorcery, lairs & appearances of supernormal creatures, and...

Sure, this could just be a silly seasonal food post, but then NorsePlay never squanders a Norse Lore learning opportunity: There's a scientific overlay that in the Norse Cosmology the world serpent Jörmungandr possibly represents gravity which functions to encircle & thus hold our Midgard together (much like this pie crust), while his end-of-days electrical target Thor represents electromagnetism . This physics-speculative NorsePlay is from part of Manly P Hall's lecture On Norse Myth , noted esotericist & author of The Secret Teachings Of All Ages (1928 CE). Thus the inescapable dual fate of Thor & the Serpent could perhaps be not just archenemies targeting each other throughout time, but a bond of universal forces competing & acting upon one another. So this winter holiday be Thor, and save the Norse Níuverse by eating all the pie. Plus it'll be good prepwork for your time at the endless feasting tables of Valhalla . Thanks for reading, subscribing, shari...

A  National Geographic article on the Brothers Grimm exploring the motives & origins of their fairy tale collection uses a photo of a field of barley at dawn covered in golden light catching dew to accent this lift quote from Rumpelstiltskin : If by to-morrow morning early you have not spun this straw into gold during the night, you must die. The article's photo caption poetically reads, " The alchemy of dawn turns barley into gold. " This evoked an insightful NorsePlay: Jacob Grimm in his  Teutonic Mythology linguistically associated Sif's hair with a golden moss plant, and later scholar Hilda Ellis Davidson agreed that her hair was the golden wheat. Such interpretations link the  Skáldskaparmál   story of the theft & replacement of Sif's Golden Hair as a fertility analog for the harvesting & annual re-growth of wheat, barley, and other crops, which makes Sif associated with grain. I n terms of cosmology, Thor's lightning strikes the field and...

After all the turns of fate & adversity suffered by master smith  Volundr, one has to ask what happens after he fashions wings and flies away out of the  Völundarkviða 's narrative after wreaking his creative vengeance on his petty king captor? To answer this question, brilliant Columbian novelist Gabriel García Márquez wrote a short story in 1968 CE called  A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings that NorsePlays at least one episode of where a millennium aged Volundr lands much, much later. [the 10th-century CE winged figure from Uppåkra, Sweden, a copper alloy mount thought to represent Volundr in flight.] The telling is subtle in identifying Volundr, relaying with hints who he is, and at the same time misdirecting by using Latino/Catholic-based contexts that the people surrounding him have to frame him by, which is really brilliant & clever and keeps this identity secret while having it in plain sight if you know this story from the Norse Lore. It f...