NorsePlay.

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...

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 ...

    In the some cosmological depictions of Yggdrasil, there's an awkward stretching weirdness in order to make the World Tree's roots reach up or around to get to Asgard , Jotunheim , and Niflheim. Franz Stassen's 1920 CE illustration of Yggdrasil from Hans von Wolzogen's Die Edda  has instead turned Yggdrasil into a monumental straddler, majestically arching over and into its three foundational worlds. This places those worlds level & below the axial trunk, here with Niflheim in the right foreground (with destructive Níðhöggr camped on that root), Jotunheim's tall mountains at left, and the last root reaching into Asgard at the back, though we maybe can see its gargantuan godly halls rising through the branches above. This makes for a more tree-centric & structurally elegant arrangement in some respects. Stassen was also noted for his illustrations in Wagner's Ring. If we stop to consider Yggdrasil being organic, subject to external forces, and change...

  What's provocative about @pleiadictarot's well dressed postcard illustration of Yggdrasil is the idea of a trunklike thickness from roots to base of the upper branches. The Norse Lore talks about how much wear the World Tree endures from the cosmic animals and other adverse elements around it, so perhaps having a far sturdier tree with a bottom-heavy root structure would help explain its solid endurance throughout time.  So there's a dragon chewing on the root, but if that root is 100,000+ times larger than the dragon, then Níðhöggr 's wee mouth worrying the tree at its scale is actually not so worrying. #    #    # 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  proje...

Ha! Post-conversion reversal and self-help tough love motives aside, this meme inadvertently speaks to why the hard polytheism of the Norse Gods better reflects & applies to not only the within, but to existence as a whole in the without. When we discuss the universe in operation, there's countless variables, things that are in constant conflict, that work at odds, not just the mentally & socially mentioned above, but physically & materially on a grand scale. The implication of this is that spiritually & divinely there are forces in direct & indirect opposition, which indicates not one monotheistic hand on the wheel, but many Gods pushing & pulling on that wheel in degrees of disagreement, whether that's Æsir or Vanir protectively steering, or their accursed anti-cosmic adversaries trying to just run the whole thing off the rails into final ruin. And the stories have the Gods themselves having divergent opinions/actions about how to solve problems, wh...

You saw something. Maybe Sunna passed by on her way overhead and snuck a flapjack off your morning breakfast plate for needed calories to burn & shine with. Perhaps Freyr helpfully left you a package of condoms to find when you needed them most. Eir got you that appointment with an impossible-to-book medical specialist. Your cat meowed & stared at a not-so-empty room's corner for two hours only to reveal your crouching  húsálfar drinking your feline's milk . You refused some change to a monocular vagrant dressed in blue before the on-ramp and then you immediately  got into a horrible car accident. You asked the sky a question and literally heard an answer within the deep growl of thunder on a rainless day. For whatever reason, totally unprovoked, accidentally seen, ritually summoned, or externally selected, you had an Unverified Personal Gnosis. No, don't straight out tell me about your UPG, because if you just start off with that to anyone, odds are its only going ...

While reading volume one of P. Craig Russell's graphic novel adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology , the immediate result from the death of primordial Ymir is shown in a panel as a giant wave of blood being released. This is so enormous that the flood kills all but two of the jötnar, which implies that Ymir's sanguine deluge also drowns the giantess wives of Buri & Bor, and collaterally their grandfather & father as well if such a flood is on so large of a cosmically uncontrollable scale. Such a consequence would then explain why after the waves settle it is the third generation of Odin, Vili, & Ve that are left to craft & rule the Níu Heimar, while Buri & Bor are unmentioned after that, and maybe settle why such a cosmic creature as Auðumbla is absent as well. This isn't necessarily the answer: There could just be missing stories, or the death of Ymir & universal creation passes forward ruler-worthy powers or status or both to the three ...

As I looked up at the New Year's sky yesterday, I saw something very much like this goat trotting its way across the firmament. In the Norse Cosmology, the clouds are long-dead Ymir's giant brains, possibly post-mortem thoughts unfolding themselves into shapes, maybe still functionally reflecting things that came into being after his necessary demise to form them. Or this is us catching a glimpse of  Tanngrisnir or Tanngnjóstr out for a solo run , and if you're lucky enough to have the sight of Heathen Worldview you have to believe it to be able to see it. [photo by David McDermott, inverted & bold italicized point in the last line from Netflix's 2022 Troll .] #    #    # 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, embr...

There's a lot of  great detail in this cosmological sketch print of  Die Neun Welten / The Nine Worlds  by E. Müller-Baden, c. 1900 CE. It almost looks like Yggdrasil's tertiary root is so far away from the main body of its subterranean structure that it's pretty slim pickings for Níðhöggr, who never actually does cause critical damage on The World Tree, so perhaps this offers a reason as to why. This diagram also solves the arboreal co-identification problem by specifically making Læradr the upper portion of Yggdrasil . There's also a more geographical separation between portions of  Niflheim depending if you're an oathbreaking victim unmercifully given to  Níðhöggr 's serpentine children (#2), or if you're a regular deceased (#9), which would probably spare Hel 's broader populace the gnashing of dragon teeth & wailing of the dishonourable. Though if any of you recall where the " Egisheim" Sea is cited from, do let me know. Below is the ...

When you depict the cosmos, you map it, you are performing the ritual of sacred geography , taking abstract invisible concepts and stickpinning them into a fixed place where they're suddenly more concrete, in a real position , around the corner, or over that mountain range, or under that hill, and even if that place's time & space doesn't match nor measure nor visibly scale as ours does, you've given or found it a physical connection point attached to our own. It felt real enough to begin with, enough to record it in mythological lore and make a story of it, but in assigning it a location , it gets that much more real and perhaps accessible. After every rain, Bifröst is a two-way street , and there's a point where the land we walk meets the trunk of Yggdrasil and connects all the points of the Norse Cosmos to us. Mostly we see more general depictions of Yggdrasil , and the above world tree map diagram re-titles some of the otherworlds, possibly to be more lin...

  [ Voluspå fresco depiction from 1933 CE by Axel Revold & Per Krohg.] The NorsePlay inspired by this mural of the World Tree at the Nasjonalbiblioteket in Oslo, Norway, is within the angular elements of the roots & branches which create sharply divided spaces. This provokes the question that what if Yggdrasil isn't only the unifying structure that holds the Nine Worlds in place, but is also the mechanism which divides those worlds and keeps them apart in differing dimensional spaces? Odin, Vili, & Ve are definitely wise enough to come up with such a dual purpose cosmic tree. And is the formidability of this structural holder/divider such that after emplaced it keeps Odin & other Aesir from spatially seeing other locations that then requires them to travel & discover that additional knowledge?  Also, like those angled curling branches, if space is folded-in upon itself, is that division of worlds then partly a mutually shared space and inste...

We recently read Graham Hancock's Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilisation (2015 CE) , and while NorsePlay doesn't necessarily endorse Hancock's theories, we feel that he's got an interesting take on things that makes for provocative discussion. And we couldn't help looking for elements of the Norse Lore in some of what he puts forth, so behold the above photo of the Great Rift, a  dark obscuring mass that appears as a huge gap in the Milky Way galaxy, and think for a moment about Ginnungagap, the primorial void at the beginning of Norse Cosmology. There are a portion of academics who believe the Norse Gods, cosmic animals, and other elements are to be found in the heavens as constellations and other celestial bodies , but we suspect this is in part a combined astrological Greek and post-conversion overlay of placing deities in the sky "up there", whereas the Norse Lore shows them distinctly housed in Asgard or, as per ...

The pictured runebook's titled The Codex Regius: A Reconstruction in Medieval Futhark Runic Script  from Ancient Artifacts and marketed as " this hardbound Codex Regius is specifically designed to be close to what you might find if you were to be directly working with the original sources. " While a book of runes is what one might imagine finding this major source of Norse Lore's Poetic Edda in, this product's manifestation is total NorsePlay. The understandable misunderstanding here's pretty funny as the vellum manuscript source copy's actually written in medieval Old Icelandic using Latin letters in Carolingian-insular script circa ~1270 CE: [page 5 of the  Codex Regius , where Völuspá ends and Hávamál begins! Scan housed at germanicmythology.com.] S ure, the Poetic Edd a's verses are the ur-stories of Norse cosmology and Lore-wise if runes are the first alphabet given to man for writing then it stands to reason that they would use runic , thou...

Norse Mythology family tree by Humon Comics. The style of this is iconically reductivist, yet still charmingly winning, though we believe Ymir should be more ancient sleeping mountain as opposed to an infant and the infanticide that would falsely imply. What's always interesting to note in these is how closely related the different factions are. Thor the jotun slayer is himself half-giant as many Aesir, and the Aesir marry often from the select of jotun maidens, yet despite familial ties the enmity overrides that, and defines the nonusversal conflict of entropic forces wanting to breakdown everything because that's just what they do, versus creators' constant struggle & vision to preserve an established existence for everyone. #    #    # 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 p...

Odin crafts the dome of night from Ymir's skull ! We like the barely visible line drawing of the Allfather 's thoughts of the skull as building material being executed into the overlaying reality of the scene. [illustration by Troy Howell from Favorite Norse Myths .] #    #    # 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 product development to offer,  do contact him .

A Lore-based cartographic achievement by archaeologist Arith Härger, this map adapts the Nine Worlds' locations in terms of continents, set up by directions and descriptions in the sources. We love the detail & dedication of this NorsePlay. [get a print here .] #    #    # 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 product development to offer,  do contact him .

Njord Kane's Spangenhelm quotes an anonymous author who speculates that Bigfoot/Sasquatch can be identified as Trolls, and that they are vibrational extra-dimensional entities in nature, which is why physical evidence has been hard to collect and why the sound of church bells pains them so. It's a pretty interesting train of thought that fills in something within Norse Cosmology. [4/10/2020 Addendum: Since originally posting this, the  Spangenhelm  website's gone down. If any of you know if there's a repost elsewhere online, we'd like to link this entry to it.] #    #    # 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 Norse...

Aric Jorn's Wolves of Ragnarok: Skoll & Hati . While we're not on about aggrandizing the devourers, it's been argued that without their motivation the sun & moon might not stay on track or keep time, and the wargs were instead harnessed to this purpose. The sunwheel-motif central paws express this clockwork force at work, especially with the selection of metallic colours for his piece, and the shoulders/hips/sun/moon seeming to mirror points on a clockface. [Layered cold-cast nickel silver, brass, copper and stone, limited edition, 2016, available here .] #    #    # 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. ...

Illustrator Peter Lloyd's depiction of the Norse Cosmos from National Geographic's Our Universe (1980 CE). Lloyd (1944–2009 CE) did alot of beautiful space & robot themed artwork, exploring a futurized art deco aesthetic, and even did some concept art for the original Tron . This image from one of our favourite childhood astronomy books is unforgettable. The one-eyed Odin at top right and giant-sized Heimdallr at the foot of the rainbow bridge are interesting style choices, as is the eagle emplaced as the canopy of Yggdrasil . [We couldn't find this online, so we're especially pleased to present this artwork.] #    #    # 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  proj...