NorsePlay.

While in Norway's Bergen, during my recent cross-Atlantic trip, I went to investigate the Map Of Midgard sites of The Giants Grim & Godmund's Golden Horns: Above's the current day Alrekstad Skole, the site where Álreksstaðir, King Olaf Tryggvason's residence, once stood. Odds are this long building probably sits squarely where the royal hall used to be, so it's easy to imagine it being there. The story of the Giants' Grim & Godmund's Golden Horns from Helga þáttr  þ órissonar tells of two giants both named Grim entering Olaf's hall bearing the gift of a pair of golden drinking horns from their Jötunn King Godmund. Olaf has the giants served, and being the hardcore convert that he is, blesses their drinks. The giants, being Heathen supernatural creatures, find they now cannot drink them, and are angered at this seeming turn of backhanded hospitality. They cast darkness in the hall, kill three of his men, and leave via a mountain pass, which beca...

During the current ongoing backup & editing process for The Map Of Midgard , I took a four-month departure to produce a proof-of-concept Odin-specific map, the  Óðinnsvegr : The Path Of Odin map , which is now for sale at Nexus Books in Tucson! Prints are $25 USD each, and a glass & wood framed version is $75 USD. Note that in under 24-hours, the first batch of map prints have sold, and I've had to go restock them already! You may also contact me directly for purchase, and I also have plans to have them retailed at a few other venues in Tucson, and will announce that here as it happens. Note that  map purchase includes Gmail account access to the digital map with rollover story/source data and GPS coordinates!  For example: About the  Óðinnsvegr : Using the 54-Odinic mappoints from the larger Map Of Midgard , I commissioned Medieval Mapmaker Jesse Kennedy, an artist who has extensive experience in hand drawing hundreds of map designs. I'd met him y...

This grave find from Aska, Hagebyhöga, Östergötland, Sweden, was mentioned in a recent video by Dr. Irina-Maria Manea as being thought by some to be the head of Mímir! If so, the specific design of this silver head pendant measuring about 2x2x3 centimeters provokes further thought. To NorsePlay: Knotted Mouth: The pretzel of Mímir's mouth might indicate difficulty in getting the dead jötunn to talk. Clawed Head: The bird crowning  Mímir and literally digging claws into his temples might be the device that compels him to speak. Huginn & Muninn: If the bird is literally the either/both the ravens of Thought & Memory, then it would be functionally appropriate that they are extracting their namesake mental information from  Mímir. While all the methods of this necromancy may seem cruel, you should remember that  Mímir could easily just given his own nephew a drink from his Well Of Wisdom but instead stingily demanded Odin sacrifice an eye,...

After starting the Map Of Midgard Project, I took note when Viking Metal band Týr's lead singer Heri Joensen mentioned an Álfar rock in his Faroe Islands' childhood home during an interview, and I personally made an investigative foray to go see it during my recent Scandinavian cross-Atlantic trip. According to Joensen, at fishing village Lamba's harborside on Eysturoy,  sits a rock inhabited by hulderfolk which no one dares move for fear of fierce retribution. The cabbie had never heard of the rock, and stopped a senior Lamba resident out on his afternoon walk to ask and check my story. The sock beanied man in the insulated track suit nodded & pointed down the road, confirming that we were headed in the right direction. At road's end a private property sign on chainlink fence blocked off the dock where the stone was, but the cabbie asked a forklift operator moving a huge tub of fish if we could go in to have a look, and he said yes while laughing a little, which ...

Discovering that celebrated Argentinian author, librarian, & intellectual Jorge Luis Borges wrote a survey called  Ancient Germanic Literatures was like finding a hoard of gold in my backyard, and I finally got to open & read this brief book during my recent Scandinavian cross-Atlantic vacation. As an investigative researcher, avid reader, Hispanic writer, and appreciator of Borges, I was totally enthusiastic to explore his insights into the sources from a Latin perspective I could personally identify with. Borges' masterful surrealism & erudition is pretty much second to none, so to turn that brilliant spotlight of his mind upon the deep dark wells of Norse source texts was such an exciting prospect. Yet, not to criticize the Master, my essay & short fiction-bred high expectations of Borges were actually far beyond what his intention was , and the fault in doing that is solely mine.  When writing  Ancient Germanic Literatures  back i...

  As if the idea of Naglfar, a ship made of the nail clippings of Helheim's dead, sent against the Einherjar at Ragnarök isn't an unsettling image enough, this Russian-style depiction makes one wonder what if the Kyivan Rus' had never converted, and what that artistic tradition might've looked like. The other interestingly NorsePlay'd visual choice here is that the dead seem to be the giants compared to the scale of the opposing drakkar below, which raises the question of what happens in the long run when Thor & the other Aesir take out their jötnar enemies if they're only going face them again in the host of the dead when the end battle comes around. [From Boris Zaborikhin' illustrations to The Elder Edda .] #    #    # 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 Nors...

  Loki: Whattajerkface! In this 1985 CE issue of Thor #353  distinctively   drawn by Walter Simonson , here is laid the device by which Thor: Ragnarok hangs: Marvel Surtur needing to dip his world-burning sword Twilight into the Eternal Flame in order to fulfill the Volva's prophecy of his destiny as the agent which destroys the Nine Worlds. This comic panel has the trio of Gods teaming up to prevent that. And sure, Loki's selfish honesty's amusing by contrast, but when we look at the Norse Lore, we see a God who maliciously cuts off Sif's hair , steals Freyja's prized necklace Brisingamen , cravenly makes a deal with an enemy giant to kidnap Iðunn to deny the Æsir their sustaining apples of youth , carelessly underestimates in betting the Sun, Moon, & Freyja to get Asgard's wall built, has an affair that fathers two cosmic monsters that will kill two major Gods, and is ultimately responsible for killing Baldr, which is the temporal trigger for herald...

This is likely just some pattern-making meme whose attribution has been lost long ago, but now that you've seen it, you can't unsee it, right? And now you can't unthink it either! The provocative NorsePlay here is the global chain of mid-ocean ridges, the largest mountain range on Earth that you never see since it lies deep underwater coiled around our Midgard, could very well be a physical feature correspondence for the World Serpent! This idea isn't too far from the idea of the mountains we do see on land being the bones of Ymir or the sleeping giants. [Jörmungandr from the Edda Oblongata , a 17th c. illuminated manuscript of the 13th c.  Prose Edda .] Gylfaginning tells us how Odin throws the young serpent into the great ocean where it grows over time until it's so long & large that it can bite its own tail when it finally encircles the Earth. The  40,400-mile long ridge darn well could if it stretched itself out over the Northwest Passage, and the ridge doe...

There's definite NorsePlay a'brewing in the Witches Of East End cauldron, a Lifetime channel supernatural drama that ran only two seasons in 2013-4 CE. Behold this rune-laden screenshot of the Gardiner Grimoire : The closest manuscript analog to this show's prop would be the Codex Runicus , a 202-page book from ~1300 CE: Quite unlike a grimoire though the Runicus isn't a collection of dark magical workings , but is mostly a collection of laws. Yeah, I know, not as exciting, but historically wayyyy valuable, and the later period revivalist runes are really a standout in the corpus of medieval manuscripts. But back to our regularly scheduled TV program: The origin lore of Witches of East End is that they're refugees from Asgard , leaving after Odin begins to tighten an iron fist on everyone, including Joanna (Julia Ormond), his headstrong & independent daughter, herself the mother of two headstrong & independent daughters, one most pointedly named Freya (...

  The NorsePlay 1987 CE sci-fi novel  Project: Millennium by Curtis H. Hoffmann apparently uses Norse Mythology's stories as a gloried nostalgia for a staged war in a future where the world of " Muspell's Planet " is bored with peace! I would still bet that Thor's going to clobber that Jörmungandr-gantic spaceship even without his fighting trousers. Have any of you read this, and if so, does it live up to its cover art? Leave your review in the comments below! #    #    # 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,...

While looking at Majorie Torrey's 1957 CE illustrations for Peter Pan, one notices in the above a cruel looking, rather inhuman presentation of the creature from Neverland, which is in stark contrast to Disney's 1953 CE ever-boy, or the later 1979 CE amicable, empathic, and caring Sandy Duncan from Broadway that was later televised. [looking through your window ... .] This contrast raises the question of what the disposition those beings from elsewhere, the álfar of Álfheimr &  Svartálfaheimr , are like . The primary sources don't mention them more than a handful of times, which might imply they're well removed from us in nature & location for good reasons, and that perhaps Freyr is gifted rulership & management of the  álfar   to keep them mostly away from the other Nine Worlds . [one can't help but think of the Norse Lore's "elf-shot" when seeing this out of its Peter Pan context.] Later folklore and sagas relate how encounters with t...