NorsePlay.

We've all heard the Loki/Low-Key one, but then my genius-level polymath pal Matt decided to declare a state of "Ymirgency" in this Thanksgiving day group text that really caught me off guard. (And yes, my friends are actually awesome enough to indulge my love of the Norse Lore like this.) If we look at Ymir's name , it gets variously translated as sound/utterance/to cry/whine, which could very well make it a "Ymirgency" ambulance siren of sorts. And odds are he made his share of cosmic-level wailing during his dispatching  by Óðinn, Vili, & Vé. With all the kennings, deadpanning, implications, entendre, & grim humour in the Sagas , punning itself seems to not be so much of a common convention, but given the use of all these other clever names and literary structures we should start NorsePlaying them into our retellings & original compositions as it can only add to the skaldic toolbox and enrich the spirit of the Lore. Ergo: Feeling a little Tý...

After 2,260 pages, I've unlocked the achievement of reading all five volumes of The Complete Sagas of Icelanders ! I cannot pass judgment or literary review on the Sagas as a whole. † There's just too much, and the corpus itself is too important historically to come at it as though one had just read a novel or non-fiction book. What I will do instead is (in very brief) tell you the main facets & merits of reading saga literature if you're so much of a hardcore NorsePlayer as to be compelled to read them all. Like Snorri Sturluson 's Heimskringla 's dominant historical pattern of acquisition, conflict, kingship, there's a general interpersonal narrative pattern that emerges with many of the sagas: offence, retribution, vengeance, resolution. Often feud & vendetta are the operative driving forces between these Settlement Era Icelanders' stories, which quickly amplify past whose sheep trespass to graze on another's land and escalate into the socie...

During a far too short stop of my recent cross-Atlantic trip in Reykjavik, I went to investigate the Map Of Midgard site of The Stone Of The Hidden Man! Tucked behind a strip of shops at 32 Ármúli Street is an elf stone, the Huldumannssteinn (literally "Hidden Man Stone"). This stone was originally bigger and partly demolished, but this large portion was left. The then-owner was visited in a dream by its resident alfar, who asked him to leave his remaining home alone or else bad luck & misfortune would come of it, so he did. [Looking through the split.] According to Terry Gunnell's The Hidden People of Iceland (2008 CE), some bakers later bought this property to open a chicken farm whose chickens wouldn't lay once they bore holes into the remaining stone for demolition. When they figured out this cause, they spared the rock and the chickens resumed laying eggs again the next day. My cabbie, a Reykjavik Icelander for over 30 years, said he had no idea that this ...

  These  interesting Futhark rune signs over need-fire NorsePlay'd graphic arrived in a promotional email sent out by Magin Rose. I honestly don't know enough about sign language to know if the Þ sign is correct, or if this is partly taken from the (questionable/inventive) "runic mudras" of Edred Thorsson, or partly from Joanne Harris' Rune series of books, or from the unattributed chart found on the internet below, but I like the visual aesthetics of this, and wonder again if the Norse had established themselves for the longterm across the Atlantic if this might've become their Vinland Sign Language. #    #    # 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...