NorsePlay.

This arrived in my mailbox! I'd only recently added it to my Amazon Wishlist as something I'd felt worth exploring. While NorsePlay has mentioned Unverified Personal Gnosis and its potential significance before , I keep thinking if there were a way to compare, accrue, and judiciously vet UPGs then a body of contemporary Verified Personal Gnosis could be accrued, and perhaps a larger picture of divine manifestations could be revealed, or at least maybe some distinct patterns of what sorts of people are tapped by the Gods. While I'm not confident The Fellowship of Northern Traditions who put this publication out is that body, I'm excited someone's at least aggregating that data in any fashion, and curious to see what stories are in this 76-page magazine. So back to my original question: Which of you readers was nice enough to send me this? Let me know in the comments, and NorsePlay thanks you! #     #    # Guillermo Maytorena IV knew there was something special i...

I probably should've posted this awesome Yule Log cake last week for those of you who mark Yule with the Winter Solstice, but this also pushes it forward for you others who re-stamp the 25th, or go by the lunisolar calendar. Anyhow, whenever you celebrate (heck, why not pick all of the above?), NorsePlay wishes you a Good Yule! [super realsies Yule Log Cake made by Heather Baird.] #     #    # 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 .

These are more visuals screengrabbed from The Viking Myths TV series I mentioned last week : I really like the graphical minimal linearity of the first one, while the second one draws together more common-ish depictive elements seen from some books, comics, & videogames where we can hear the cosmological voiceover about The Nine Worlds, which probably was precisely happening as this was onscreen, but the little differently coloured worlds are expressively distinct, and the strange Urnes-style vining in the not-snake-but-snake shapes as a frame are a neat synthesis of Nordic designs layered atop a much later romantically painted tree background. When I last mentioned how A.I.'s being tasked to tell the Norse Lore, I think these illustrations are great example of how artificial intelligence can visually NorsePlay things (like the Odin on laptop via my prompts in this post ) in variant ways we might not have thought to present them before in the last 800+ years of retellings sinc...

Buried deep within the obscure streaming app Xumo, I ran across a French-produced 2024 CE 10-episode voiceover documentary-styled series called The Viking Myths . While there's a whole list of animators in the credits, as I watched the first episode there was an artifice to its style, a sort of motion-comic storyboard presentation, and an artistic lack of fine details with far more easier choices of solids and simple lines in many instances. When we talk about the uncanny valley of A.I. being unable to replicate the natural/creative aspects of humanity, this show has a possible tell of artificial generation to it. While that simplification attempts to err toward the iconic, much like Jeffery Alan Love's cut-out silhouettes with texturing/spot colour illustrations for the Candlewick Studio's 2017 CE edition of Crossley-Holland's Norse Myths , it feels like a workaround to just get something finished. Maybe that leaves fill-in-the-blanks for the viewer's imagination ...

Ran across these paper punch-out hex shaped runes in a recent book. While I'm not going to mention the book (kinda New Age-y, and see that nonsensical "blank rune" inclusion), I think this design's a good springboard for broadening & NorsePlaying what the runes could be both aesthetically & revealatorially. When the runes appear to Odin at the end of his nine-night ordeal and he screams at their appearance , this could be the cognitive shift he needs to see something that was hidden in plain sight. Previously I've posted that maybe they were there in the World Tree's branches all along, but it took passing through starvation, pain, & death for Odin's one-eye to finally behold them. When we look at shapes in nature, the hexagonal 6-sided shape stands out, and for the Norse the honeycombs required for mead, or the basalt columns that make up some of their landscape & rocks evoke stories of dwarven strongholds, giants' bridges, or elf s...