NorsePlay.

While reading Marvel Team-Up #116 (1972 CE) I ran across this sweet vintage panel of Valkyrie using the awesome Asgardian explicative: The killing blue, her matching eyes, and those battle braids with penciller Herb Trimpe's detailed tip of the hat to Kirby 's metal shading on the gorget & cloak clasps , all makes NorsePlay seriously want to make a t-shirt with it. The comic itself has a study-weary frustrated Spider-Man taking a webslinging break, when he spots Valkyrie and is about to put the verbal moves on her, when she, under the influence of her possessed sword, cleaves the flagpole he's posed upon to woo her out from under him! Like Völund and King Gunther of the Norse Lore, Peter Parker has bitten off far more than he can chew in intending to possess a battle goddess , and compared to those two, he doesn't even get her near his webshooter, illustrating that attracting the attention of a Valkyrie involves courting or achieving that attention-getting hero...

Sometimes an artist makes different choices on what is given emphasis in depictions of the Norse Cosmos. Most seem to go with the relative positioning of The Nine Worlds around the World Tree, but here the focus is more on the placing of the animals who are all inimical to the health of Yggdrasil : The Scandinavian World , the frontispiece to Annie & Eliza Keary’s The Heroes of Asgard and the Giants of Jötunheim (1857 CE) shows where the creatures/monsters who wear on the tree reside. In this, the idea of the tree's vulnerability (and perhaps its fateful approach toward its end-time encounter with fire during Ragnarök) is shown, but we then have also ask why these destructive beasts have been built into the tri-divinely intelligent design of the Norse Cosmos. Sure, the freezing world the Northmen lived in was cold and adversarial to sustaining life, so the structure of the larger unseen cosmos has to reflect that harsher worldview as, like men, the Gods themselves maintain b...

  A recent Marvel Comics blacklight calendar drew my attention to past poster offerings of blacklight images from The Mighty Thor , which included this The Resurrection of Hela by Odin , originally drawn by John Buscema, but redone in this psychedelic light-reactive style by The Third Eye who made the posters in 1971 CE. To NorsePlay this further, it would be pretty amazing if this style could be extended to actual Heathen art, like paintings, statuary, and Godpoles. If the idea of sacred space is an incursion of the otherworld with Midgard, then adding elements where things look and thus feel unreal yet undeniably present to the inside of one's blacklit temple would be both evocative & impressive. #     #    # 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 M...

I've recently won a music naming contest on Valhyr Music's YT channel! Renet, the musical artist behind the Viking-themed Valhyr Music posts his latest offerings with the opportunity to submit titles for some of his tracks, and for a Gefjon-inspired track I suggested The  Shearing of Sjóland , which then went to a vote of his 213K followers on IG, where it won "with quite the lead"! Given Goddess Gefjon's Gylfaginning story where in disguise she charms Swedish King Gylfi into granting her as much land as she can plow in a day & night, she then totally games it by grabbing four giant oxen from Jötunheimr and hitches them to plow off so much land that it becomes the island of Zealand (Sjælland/Sjóland), leaving behind the huge Lake Vänern from where the oxen drag it out of! Valhyr's awesome track features a low grinding soundscape as though the parting & ploughing of bedrock were occurring, which makes my title very fitting, and I'm totally honou...