NorsePlay.

After some necessary condensing of space & fixtures at Nexus Occult Books , NorsePlay is happy to announce that the  Óðinnsvegr: The Path Of Odin map has moved back into its first retail home again ! More specifically, once you enter the front door, go to their SE corner, and on the bottom two shelves of the pictured above wood hutch on the east wall, you'll find the prestigiously framed version for $75 or individual prints below it for $25. Pick some up for the Norse Nerds in your life! Note that the map is also available at both Tucson Bookmans locations , but there's a special place in my heart for Nexus as an impressive & wonderful niche local venue, so do consider shopping them for my map if that's convenient (plus you can see all their weird objects & grimoires, and meet their winning & knowledgeable staff, too). For those of you reading about this map for the first time, this special 11" x 17" parchment patterned map tracks Odin's ap...

Then while reading this series of books for a year, buried in a footnote on p1182 of The Pre-Christian Religions of the North V.3 , a passing reference happens to one-eyed Gaius Julius Civilis (25 CE – c. 1st Century) as potentially being the ancient figure that Odin's one-eyed-ness is based upon! Pulling back to look at how maybe this happens, as we see the chariots roll out of the Indo-European steppes and the migration moves over time & distance from Germany to Scandinavia to the UK to Iceland, the original stories gather details from histories, other mythic traditions, and creative retellings ( NorsePlay , anyone?), so this idea that the Gods are a displaced multi-particulate apotheosis or an agglomeration of aspects from ancient figures/locales/traditions is a possibility. Enter Civilis, Prince of the Batavi, rebel leader in Germania Inferior against the Romans in 69 CE, a notable one-eyed royal warrior who makes a stand and very Odinically celebrates defiant heroism by sa...

Ran across these paper punch-out hex shaped runes in a recent book. While I'm not going to mention the book (kinda New Age-y, and see that nonsensical "blank rune" inclusion), I think this design's a good springboard for broadening & NorsePlaying what the runes could be both aesthetically & revealatorially. When the runes appear to Odin at the end of his nine-night ordeal and he screams at their appearance , this could be the cognitive shift he needs to see something that was hidden in plain sight. Previously I've posted that maybe they were there in the World Tree's branches all along, but it took passing through starvation, pain, & death for Odin's one-eye to finally behold them. When we look at shapes in nature, the hexagonal 6-sided shape stands out, and for the Norse the honeycombs required for mead, or the basalt columns that make up some of their landscape & rocks evoke stories of dwarven strongholds, giants' bridges, or elf s...

  There's something definitely Odinic & Icelandic Saga outlaw-ish in Snake Plissken. I mean, sure, the eyepatch & top tier warrior bad arsery. There's also the ticking clock of Ragnarök against which Odin's taking action against and his wandering into the impossibly hostile territory of Jotunheim to bring out knowledge as a Bolverk-ian operative, much as Snake is compelled to go into dystopian America's prison/rebel zones to go rescue/retrieve critical assets that are important to keeping the nation operational. There's also the implication that Snake essentially sacrificed his eye during his tours of duty. While NorsePlay can find no direct throughline from the Norse Lore to director/co-writer Carpenter's anti-hero (and it was Kurt Russell who suggested the eyepatch), it appears as though some hint of metaphysical manifestation's possibly occurred here if you think about it. #     #    # Guillermo Maytorena IV knew there was something special in...

I read. I read a lot. And I wondered if in the afterworlds all my questions about the Norse Lore, the Níuverse, and everything else would be answered. † And I realized that doesn't happen. The Gods don't know everything. Odin still looks for all the things he doesn't know. And if Odin himself doesn't know then that means the Níuheimar's probably an evolving exponential mystery beyond its Æsir creators. Yggdrasil grows, it gnarls, it spreads, it bears & dies in parts, constantly. While I think I will have access to so much more amazing storehoused knowledge in the afterworlds , there will still be more in that next level to learn, travel to, have adventure, and explore. There will be people from throughout time at the tables of the ancestors to ask questions of, the books of Bragi's Hall with their stories & songs, Valkyries who've witnessed thousands of glorious & horrific battles, dwarves who may begrudgingly barter their skillsets, álfar th...

This is as pictured, and if you're looking for a  cross-pollination of Southwestern neckwear and Norse Lore design , this is the piece for you. I've gotten nothing but compliments when I rock this, and am glad to wear the classy flair of its Heathen-inspired post-Reconstruction regionalism. Note that the back has open loops and not channeled clips for the strings, so if you wanted to flip the Valknut, it'll require you to push the metal loops open (which I haven't attempted as I'm unsure about the tensile strength of the metal nor the epoxy which mounts the hardware to the reverse of the design) and push them back into place, so be aware of that. It's a terrific piece that could only be made better by making it in sterling, adding some Rúnatal in cattlebrand-inspired futhark font to it, and allowing it to easily be flipped, but it's outstanding and the only thing of its kind out there. With Odin's reputation as the God Of The Gallows, when seen along wi...