NorsePlay.

Buried deep within the obscure streaming app Xumo, I ran across a French-produced 2024 CE 10-episode voiceover documentary-styled series called The Viking Myths . While there's a whole list of animators in the credits, as I watched the first episode there was an artifice to its style, a sort of motion-comic storyboard presentation, and an artistic lack of fine details with far more easier choices of solids and simple lines in many instances. When we talk about the uncanny valley of A.I. being unable to replicate the natural/creative aspects of humanity, this show has a possible tell of artificial generation to it. While that simplification attempts to err toward the iconic, much like Jeffery Alan Love's cut-out silhouettes with texturing/spot colour illustrations for the Candlewick Studio's 2017 CE edition of Crossley-Holland's Norse Myths , it feels like a workaround to just get something finished. Maybe that leaves fill-in-the-blanks for the viewer's imagination ...

We've all heard the Loki/Low-Key one, but then my genius-level polymath pal Matt decided to declare a state of "Ymirgency" in this Thanksgiving day group text that really caught me off guard. (And yes, my friends are actually awesome enough to indulge my love of the Norse Lore like this.) If we look at Ymir's name , it gets variously translated as sound/utterance/to cry/whine, which could very well make it a "Ymirgency" ambulance siren of sorts. And odds are he made his share of cosmic-level wailing during his dispatching  by Óðinn, Vili, & Vé. With all the kennings, deadpanning, implications, entendre, & grim humour in the Sagas , punning itself seems to not be so much of a common convention, but given the use of all these other clever names and literary structures we should start NorsePlaying them into our retellings & original compositions as it can only add to the skaldic toolbox and enrich the spirit of the Lore. Ergo: Feeling a little Tý...