NorsePlay.

The 1990 CE black-and-white film The Juniper Tree takes The Brothers Grimm folkloric tale of the same name and places it within a medieval Icelandic context, adding the operating mechanism of witchcraft to push the story into the arena of magical realism. There's an observable throughline here that makes this film even more NorsePlay: The idea of a potentially very early Germanic cautionary tale set "2,000 years ago" (so 188 BCE from its recorded publication if literal), perhaps in an ancient world forest, and setting that story in an isolated Viking Age-style farmstead, and though the time period isn't stated it could be from then up to the Brennuöldin, The Age of Fire when witches (though by contrast mostly male) were persecuted & drowned, between 1625 CE and 1683 CE, so the carry forward from Germanic to Norse happens via modern art cinema. A prominent example of the same story media time shifting happens when Saxo Grammaticus' legendary Amleth becomes Sha...

In The Witch's Heart and Assassin's Creed Valhalla: Dawn Of Ragnarök , it's explained that Odin can't outright kill his blood brother's monstrous children and so has to instead imprison them. Hel gets the limitations of caretaking a whole world with its eternal duties of ruling & constantly processing the dead, her own half-dead condition potentially restricting her there. Fenrir 's everlasting & immeasurable hunger is tied down by a cord of equally impossible constructions, and this takes him out of the game. But when we look at Odin's nonchalance in throwing Jörmungandr into the ocean we have to ask how is this imprisonment? We could presume Angrboða 's serpent is a type of amphibian, initially able to breath air & live on dry land, but when Odin casts him into the water where a restriction has to be in effect from thence onward since we don't hear of Jörmungandr coming ashore, only above water when hooked by Thor , or magically bi-lo...

You'd just as likely not look twice nor too deeply at the 1982 CE Sword & Sorcery so-bad-it's-good film, The Beastmaster . Released in the huge shadow of Conan The Barbarian  only a few months later to try and capitalize on its wake, The Beastmaster only achieved a fair amount of attention after post-theatrical high-volume cable reruns, and its home video release. Yet as with anything Sword & Sorcery, The Beastmaster 's heroic tropes are inescapably Norse Mythology derived , so let's animal control more exactly where this Saturday afternoon TV matinee B-film gets a few of those specific facets from. The 3 Witches As Norns: Though they work in tandem with the wizard antagonist Maax, the witches still prophecy his downfall at the hands of Dar, the Beastmaster. And in the director's commentary, he says they're based on Macbeth's Weird Sisters, which of course are derived from the three Norns. Scrying Pool As The Fates' Well: Maax & the Witches...

Using some gifted extra time within these past few months, NorsePlay has rebuilt its very own backyard lane axe target and recently hosted a private event where a guest was kind enough to surprise me with the above awesome reel!  The big improvement between this target and the last one is modularity. So at your regular pay-to-play axe lanes, boards have to be wood screwed onto the backing, which makes for eventual wearing out of the mounting surface and cost of replacement, plus there's the chance of chipping your axe's edge on the screw heads (even though they're well above and below the target rounds area I've done it, I've seen people do it, it happens). Here I've made a board slide-in and up from the front to drop down into a secure channel system that's to tolerance and doesn't require screws on the target boards' faces. This setup presumes the boards have consistent width, so actually measure your planks to see if they're not oversized be...