NorsePlay.

As a Hispanic Ásatrúar, I love & identify with the intersection between Scandinavian culture and my ethnic background, and after seeing Dalarna Horse variants during my recent Map Of Midgard site investigations in Minnesota I began to wonder if anyone had made a Dalarna-style horse piñata . Seeing my Nana craft many piñatas from the ground up as a kid , either for family events or as commissions, there were no cultural restrictions or content barriers to what she could make (i.e. when I was 7, she made a Spider-Man piñata for me), so the idea of one only sticking to the traditional donkey/burro, bull/ox, or more geometric 7-pointed star simply didn't hold. Plus with the fact that Spanish vaqueros brought horsemanship and thus begat cowboy culture in the New World, why wouldn't all equines be fair game for Mexican piñatas? While the above & below weren't made by Mexican grandmothers, I was really stoked to see that a couple people had used that folkcraft to make Da...

Yes, that's right Norsespotters: Max appears to be brandishing a Völva's Staff! Whether Maurice Sendak in 1963 CE perhaps saw the short iron wands from Norse archaeology/studies can't really be confirmed, and perhaps may have also been in part influenced by vintage troll tale illustrations for his creatures in  Where the Wild Things Are  is pure conjecture, but looking at the scepter compared to the find & reproduction below, it definitely could've been NorsePlay'd into the classic children's picture  book. [ NorsePlay acknowledges Nathaniel Morton's random T-shirt choice last week as inspiring this entry.] #     #    # 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 Mid...