NorsePlay.

  I recently spotted this in traffic: With the Volvo being an iconic Swedish car (though the manufacturer was once owned by Ford and was later sold to China's Geely automotive company), it sort-of makes humorously contextual sense that their vehicles might end up in Valhalla . If we talk about the idea of swords , axes , and ships having names and therefore some personal agency in terms of performing a function and being judged to earn a reputation of worth based on that performance, then Norse Cosmology might extend to them a battle death or Odinic pass into the Hall of the Slain, though in the Lore there isn't really a stand-alone object example of this outside of being in tow as someone's grave goods . So what we do have archaeologically are mound burials that are ship, wood cart , and/or horse inclusive, and this makes for the implied idea that you get to ride your Midgardian transportation of choice into the afterlife for use as valid. Nowadays more realistically a ...

I've a feeling that in 1978 CE the producers of Battlestar Galactica somehow got ahold of Wagner's Ring helmets and decided to build their Episode 11, The Young Lords , around these Siegfried costume props. The fearless guerilla teen Kyle (Charles Bloom) confidently tells Colonial Warrior Starbuck that his siblings are a well-oiled army that've been successfully striking Cylon targets long before he gracelessly wrecked his Viper on their homeworld. On the planet Attila (which given the context just also happens to refer to the latter chapters of the Burgundian Song of the Nibelungs ) Starbuck is rescued by the operatic clad martial family which includes young Valkyrie-esque vixen Audrey Landers as Miri, the eldest daughter: [yes, they ride unicorns!] Of course flyboy Starbuck's flirty bad boy charm wins her over pretty quickly. After using B-roll long shot of an actual Rhineland castle, there's closer interiors/exteriors of a Universal Studio's Stage 30 set I...

Pulp hero Doc Savage apparently meets his match versus some erzatz Vikings that attack a yacht off Long Island! Spoiler, they turn out to not be Vikings (boo! hiss!), so I didn't bother buying this since it's not actually a true NorsePlay in terms of content, but these pulp series covers are pretty "Viking"-riffic and show the cultural persistence of Nordic motifs. Far before these covers, the story was first presented in Doc Savage Magazine from July of 1935 CE. #    #    # 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 researc...

In Ecuador there's the Tayos' Cave (Cueva de los Tayos/Cave of the Oilbirds), which after Hungarian explorer Janos ‘Juan’ Móricz returns from in the 1960s with a fabulous/dubious tale of discovering a cavernous library of books made of inscribed Golden Tablets . The story gets alot of attention, garnering a series of expeditions, some with Móricz, some without, but the independent ones don't find the tablets, and in the guided ones Móricz instead declines to lead them to the library, claiming that the knowledge contained in the golden books can only be revealed to a ready & responsible contingent of men. In the above documentary of the 1976 BCRA expedition (which included astronaut Neil Armstrong [!]), at the 48:00 minute mark an explorer relates his missing time experience in the cave to later recall his encounter with a pale backless female with a tail-like coccyx. [ Huldra by Steve Ebdon.] This account corresponds to the Norse Lore's Huldra , a female of the...

One theory has it that the ancient Germanics based their runic writing from the Etruscans. I'm not definitively weighing in on this, but I happened upon a photo of the Pyrgi Gold Tablets where the right two are in Etruscan characters bearing some resemblance to the runes : From 500 BCE, and it wouldn't be so hard to conceive of the characters evolving or changing into Elder Futhark as time went forward. Here's a transcription for more clarity of the letter forms: Sinistrodextral and boustrophedon are present in surviving runic examples, so the left-to-right in the Etruscan above allows for runes later being pretty fast & loose with whichever direction they were written. The Ansuz ( ), Isa (ᛁ), Sowilo ( ), and Laguz ( )-like characters in mirror/reverse seem pretty dead on. These tablets are also a dedication to the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar, and that could also be seen as a sacred throughline with uses of the runes on amulets, wood staves intended for magic, and runes...