the horror of Ymir.

Within the comedic aspects of Norse Mythology with its stories of humbling trickery and characters being forced to act against type both for plot & laughs, we relate and are entertained ... but then we also forget the cosmic scale & functions of the divine and their monstrous adversaries that are mind-numbingly beyond human experience. When we find a NorsePlay that wanders into this Lovecraftian territory it reminds us of the awe & terror we can feel in encounters with the numinous, and the implications of living in a Níuverse that has a doomed-filled Ragnarök potentially awaiting it with a fingernail-ship filled with the dead, human-eating jötnar, a world encircling oceanic serpent, a sky & ground touching abyss-mouthed wolf, and a burning giant who longs to set all of existence ablaze with his black flaming sword.
 
In John Langan's Children of the Fang and Other Genealogies 2020 CE, there's a NorsePlay that explores the cosmological construction material that was Ymir, where a billionaire investor buys what appears to be a remote arctic diamond mine, but finds it to be quite something else ... :

"Ymir?"

"It's part of the Norse creation myth. Ymir is a giant, inconceivably huge. The god, Odin, together with his brothers, Vili and Vé, kills Ymir, then uses the pieces of his corpse to build the world. His skull becomes the sky, his blood the sea -- you get the idea."

"Lovely."

"Ymir. These are the Vikings we're talking about. They weren't famed for their refined sensibilities."

"Okay -- what does this have to do with anything?"

"Picture," Choate said, "a being that size, vast enough that the inside of its skull could form the entire sky. How long did I suppose it would take for creature that enormous to die? Eons as we measure time, even as our gods do. All the time Odin and his kin were carving up Ymir, tossing his brain up into the air to make the clouds, they were surrounded by his dying thoughts. When Ragnarok -- their apocalypse -- came, and everything went down in fire and ruin, it was only the last of those thoughts, coming to end."

"That's pretty trippy," Marissa said, "but I don't --"

"Suppose,” Barry went on, "you could drill into that giant skull, through to whatever remained of its brain." A 'sublime trepanation', he called it.

"Wouldn't you need a plane for that," I said, "if we were inside the head?"

"That was taking the myth too literally," Choate said. "What it described was the fall of a being, the catastrophic fall, the Big Bang as the original murder -- in whose remains all of us were resident. We -- everything was living inside this dying titan. Our solar system was a bacterium subsisting living inside flesh. Quite a hopeless situation," he said, "no less for him and on its milk. They had scaled the evolutionary ladder, climbed so high above his familiar fellow apes they could no longer see them below, but for all that, they were little better than tapeworms gorging themselves in the loops of the giant's rotting intestines."

How many tunnels had they passed? All full of darkness that had a curiously flat quality, as if it had been painted on the rock face.

Barry said, "There are points, however, where the tractability of the quantum foam might permit you to pierce the giant's forehead, to expose the surface of that great brain. You might stand at one end of an unbelievably long tunnel and watch thoughts light Ymir's cerebrum like chains of bursting suns. If you could decode those lights, who could say what you might learn?"

The above excerpt gives you an idea of the disturbing mechanics of this story and sort of makes you wonder about the grim (albeit necessary!) fabrication of The Nine Worlds.

[Ymir's Skull, stippling pen & ink by Jason Kreiger. Purchase prints here.]

While this fiction cues into John Langan's own Lovecraftian-style cosmic mythos, I would love to see more NorsePlay'd narratives delving into the Norse Lore's darker aspects on this level. If you know of any others, do point them out in your comments below!

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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 then 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 employment/opportunities in investigative mythology,  field research, or product development to offer, do contact him.