NorsePlay.

This is the cover page for Edda - An Icelandic collection of ancient folk poems about the gods and heroes of the North (1877 CE) translated by Peter August Gödecke and illustrated by Henri Meyer and Reyem (Jacques Meyer, 1841-1899 CE). Meyer also did engravings for Jules Verne! We'd say there's a bit of  Lorenz Frølich 's style in this, but that could just be the commercial tropes of the times they were both drawing in.   [edition printed in Stockholm by PA Norstedt & Söners Förlag.] #     #    # 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...

While listening to Nancy Farmer's The Sea Of Trolls , reader Gerard Doyle does something few audiobook performers ever do: he sings! [photo illustration only, not actually the book's Vikings nor  Gerard Doyle -- it's singers from Shetland's  Up Helly Aa fire festival.] At a certain juncture in the book the Viking raiders (who show up to claim the young bardic protagonist as a thrall) start to sing an adorned version of the Hávamál 's oft-quoted stanzas 77 & 78, the in-context sample of which NorsePlay presents to you here: That lilting/rising ramped up end-delivery's an awkwardly curious stylistic choice, but functionally the after text makes one wonder if the idea of offering ritual song up to the Gods could've been presented by some just so? There's been some suppositions made in Norse Studies about performance (see the work of the amazing Professor of Folkloristics Terry Gunnell and noted deeply before him scholar Dame Bertha Philpotts), and that ...

  Unless you're paying close attention you're probably giving the Vegvísir a quick nod of immediate recognition and moving on, but in the above comparison there's subtle differences being noted in its appearance that you might not have otherwise caught while scrolling past its very commonplace presence in the cybervikingsphere. Depending how strict you feel you require your magics to be, that variance might be crucial to you actually finding your way or not. The most legitimate and interesting source difference above would be the Galdrabók (c. 1600 CE) versus the Huld Manuscript (1847 CE [ÍB 383 4to] ), but you also have to question if later changes, specifically the far later Galdraskræða version (1940 CE), are refinements or improvements to the included runestaves . In a post-GPS app-based world, maybe this wayfinder stave now doesn't matter, but it's nice to have a backup system just in case. [thanks to FolkRealms user Rollo Bloodaxe for bringing this to my...

We have to point out the spectacle of the Minnesota Vikings Legacy Ship. While one can write this off as NFL sports team marketing, if you were to take this same sculpture from in front of the US Bank Stadium and place it elsewhere, say just 2.2 miles south to compliment the American Swedish Institute, then it would play on a different level. Where it is, it's Viking kitsch as as an unapologetically commercial trope instead, featuring a jumbotron video sail that slideshows advertising and events 24/7, plus the ship has audio, can produce smoke effects, and has night lighting. Taken by itself as a sculpture by day there is something monumentalist & partly brutalist in its sharper angles and contemporary presentation, but also subtractive in only having a dragon prow above ground with only a negative space outline for the back, implying a whole ship's presence, as if the rest were still buried under the fan-inscribed pavers, only re-emerging at the tail. If it wasn't for...