NorsePlay.

For Yule my bestie supportively gifted me the new publication from The Fellowship Of Northern Traditions, Bifrost: Glimpses at the Gods , and I have to say it definitely surpassed my expectations of what I thought it would be. [yes, this is exactly the same great library photo from our earlier post, not sorry.] For some context of where this 76-page magazine's from, tFoNT started as a one-man YouTube channel in 2020 CE (then The Wisdom of Odin before changing to tFoNt ), and surprisingly gained excessive traction from new practitioners to quickly become an online organization that began to host ritual meetups at campgrounds, to then acquire non-profit status with intentions to build a temple hall.    While I think nearly any in-road for people who want to discover the Norse Gods is positive, I'd always felt tFoNT, with its heavily theatrical ritual-centric approach, fostered its own culture of god-bothering gnosis chasers that have post-conversion/modern holdover ideals of pe...

There's been some speculation as to whether the Northern Lights have associations with the Valkyries riding out, or Gerðr's shimmering arms , or Odin's Wild Hunt crossing the skies. In this vein I draw attention to Sam Flegal's work, Sleipnir's Ride : NorsePlay 's featured the modern Heathen art of Sam Flegal before , and he remains one of my favourites in his technical mastery and visually expansive narrative approach to the Norse Lore. Flegal's Sleipnir notably has paired legs (as opposed to other depictions with 4 in-line at front & back , or evenly spaced along the sides , or curiously  6 in front with 2 in back ), and one might NorsePlay the leg-paired iron shoes may frictively & electromagnetically spark the Borealic path he leaves in his wake as he streaks across the night skies. As far as the Auroras go, all of the above as cosmological causes could be true. The effect has always struck people of all times as a beautiful manifestation of t...

In December of 1991 CE, the isometric computer role playing game Dusk Of The Gods hits PCs on six 5.25" or three 3.5" disks, giving players what was probably their second taste of immersive Norse Mythology via the then-height of VGA graphics (the first being Heimdall on the Amiga in June of that same year, and much like Heimdall and other early videogames, the Larry Elmore cover art's the best looking thing about it [see any Atari 2600 game box art!], but that's a technological ceiling of the time).   [the CG'd majesty of Bifrost.] After first hearing a mention of this game on the Nordic Mythology Podcast from University of Iceland's PhD candidate Luca Panaro who specifically writes about the reception of Norse Lore in videogames, I had to look it up just to see the cyber-heritage of this PC chestnut. [Valholl with golden Hlidsklalf at the head of the table!] Found these screenshots from a pretty comprehensive 3-part review by CRPGAddict. Apparently the ga...

  This screenshot from the Discovery Channel's  America's Lost Vikings takes foundation layouts from houses across three different centuries and overlays them on top of the three house foundations found in Leif Erikson's Camp/L'Anse aux Meadows. The similarities imply that the site was possibly used for centuries , as opposed to the few decades previously thought. The lack of physical artifacts of a long-settled site runs contrary to this, though given the low population of this colony compared to Greenland would render less accompanying materials to be found. And maybe they just came seasonally or for only a couple years at a time, like a set of winter cabins, perhaps using them as a staging point for further expeditions West to the mainland. While that's all suppositional based wholly on architectural parallels, hopefully that observation opens more doors toward investigations into a potentially larger Norse America . #     #    # Guillermo Maytoren...

While NorsePlay has previously featured the odd cross-pollination of Norse Lore with Tarot and Tarot-derivative decks, I recently ran across this Gjallarhorn: A Norse Oracle Deck that has a really nice panoply of art going for it : [note the Nordic Nouveau of Sif and the image borders.] Released last year, the cards feature the Gods, adversaries, runes, other Nordic symbols, are gold foil edged, and the box comes with an 80p hardback to let you know how to use the deck. So if you don't buy into the idea of an Italian Renaissance oracular system being retrofitted with a more ancient Nordic veneer (but to NorsePlay that: What if instead Bjorn Ironsides or one of his cohorts left a rune set in Luni, Italy, during their 860 CE occupation that later influences the strega who comes up with principals behind Tarot to mix with a later Mamluk deck? Sure, rather unlikely, but history blenders wyrd turns like that sometimes), then instead just enjoy it for the pretty neat gallery of art tha...

Many are the days I keep my signifiers low key, and I usually just wear my oath ring bracelet, and I get a lot of compliments on that (though I also tend to wear a NorsePlay t-shirt every workday so I can engage & promote my brand when people ask me about it, so only sorta low key?). Part of my morning's self-decorative decision-making comes from questioning whether also throwing one of my two awesome Mjölnirs on is "too much", and possibly having those who see it mistakenly write me off as a racist (despite me being Hispanic ). Yet the deal is if I'm proactively deciding not to wear the hammer for that latter reason, then that choice to a passive degree lets the racists trying to take ownership of Thor's hammer as their symbol do so, which is total misappropriation as, according to the 2013 Heathen World Census, self-proclaimed racists were less than 1% of the anonymous survey's sample. Given Heathenry/Asatru/Northern Tradition's obvious growth in t...

After a mead at the local Short Rest backroom tavern this week, I noticed these RPG prop gaming coins that seem to be adorned with the Dwarven race's arguably greatest achievement, Mjölnir : Seeing these got me wondering if there were other NorsePlay'd prop currencies being strewn about the TTRPG tables, and I also found the following: [minted by Fantasy Coins LLC.] [Talisman3D on Etsy.] [RelicCollectorShop on Etsy. Note the Valknut cornered square coin above and their other set below:] These all evoke a bit of Viking alt-history or mythic space in terms of creations from an elsewhen or elsewhere , and make one long for the assurance of physical metals over paper. #     #    # 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,...

This arrived in my mailbox! I'd only recently added it to my Amazon Wishlist as something I'd felt worth exploring. While NorsePlay has mentioned Unverified Personal Gnosis and its potential significance before , I keep thinking if there were a way to compare, accrue, and judiciously vet UPGs then a body of contemporary Verified Personal Gnosis could be accrued, and perhaps a larger picture of divine manifestations could be revealed, or at least maybe some distinct patterns of what sorts of people are tapped by the Gods. While I'm not confident The Fellowship of Northern Traditions who put this publication out is that body, I'm excited someone's at least aggregating that data in any fashion, and curious to see what stories are in this 76-page magazine. So back to my original question: Which of you readers was nice enough to send me this? Let me know in the comments, and NorsePlay thanks you! #     #    # Guillermo Maytorena IV knew there was something special i...

I probably should've posted this awesome Yule Log cake last week for those of you who mark Yule with the Winter Solstice, but this also pushes it forward for you others who re-stamp the 25th, or go by the lunisolar calendar. Anyhow, whenever you celebrate (heck, why not pick all of the above?), NorsePlay wishes you a Good Yule! [super realsies Yule Log Cake made by Heather Baird.] #     #    # 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 .

These are more visuals screengrabbed from The Viking Myths TV series I mentioned last week : I really like the graphical minimal linearity of the first one, while the second one draws together more common-ish depictive elements seen from some books, comics, & videogames where we can hear the cosmological voiceover about The Nine Worlds, which probably was precisely happening as this was onscreen, but the little differently coloured worlds are expressively distinct, and the strange Urnes-style vining in the not-snake-but-snake shapes as a frame are a neat synthesis of Nordic designs layered atop a much later romantically painted tree background. When I last mentioned how A.I.'s being tasked to tell the Norse Lore, I think these illustrations are great example of how artificial intelligence can visually NorsePlay things (like the Odin on laptop via my prompts in this post ) in variant ways we might not have thought to present them before in the last 800+ years of retellings sinc...

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 ...

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...

Iðunn's terror at being hoisted off by eagle-form jötunn Þjazi in P. Craig Russell's Norse Mythology graphic novel from Dark Horse Comics. While the focus here should be on the crucial loss of the Gods' irreplaceable harvester of youth-sustaining apples , I can't help but look backwards at the golden halls of Ásgarðr she's being hijacked from. Russell's nouveau fantasist stylings have given Elric and Dr Strange otherworldly cityscapes over the past decades and I'm glad to see him turn his hand to NorsePlay the home of the Gods as an important location in the lore. Note this specific drawing for V2 #5 recently sold on eBay for $2K+ as PCR's original graphite page that was only digitally colored by another artist, but he put his own mixed media colors on his original to make the only physical copy that differs from the cover everyone else got on their comic or in their graphics. Also note that PCR's auctioning off other pieces like this, so if you...

In my recently completed rewatch of the 1974-6 CE The Land of the Lost , I capstoned with the 2009 CE film, and had completely forgotten that a pretty near match to the Oseberg Viking Ship shows up among the sands that also have an Urban Outfitters and other odd cross-temporal Midgardian displacements. Yet given the Vikings' achievements in exploration, it instead implies that they might've purposefully come there. This pretty much duplicates the far overplayed viral meme where an astronaut finds a drakkar on the lunar surface right after he arrives: With the raft-over-the-falls-into-a-time-door mechanism that's used in the classic show's intro, the idea that a ship gaining entry into The Land Of The Lost via one of the many Viking "routine expedition"s river route for trade combined with a possibly exceptional Loki-quake could also explain its presence. Or when colonizing Greenland, only 14 of 25 ships actually make it, so it could potentially be one of those...

On the contrary, YouTube Trophy Quiz Whiz, but to brag is to Heathen! Dr Irina-Maria Manea's channel, Shield of Skuld, regularly runs quizzes in her community feed, and today I won this badge for being the Norse Lore expert I know I am. Reading pays, kids, so go hit those Sagas like Thor hammers those jötnar! [and go check out Irina's powerpoint lectures 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 .

Found in The Wicked Griffin 's post on Healing Goddess  Eir , this Valkyrie lineup hearkens back to Mucha's seasons, except in a more martial fashion. The Victorian/Belle Époque ideals of decorative beauty intersect quite well here to contribute to what NorsePlay has dubbed the Norse Nouveau . From what I can make out, Freyja 's at center with a pauldron-inclusive  Brísingamen that splays pointily downwards, and Eir is at far right with a herbily decorated placard and bearing  a healing elixir in a tankard. If you can figure out specifically who the other Valkyries are in this tableau, do let us know 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...

John Gardner's novel  Grendel  (1971 CE) is slated for a live-action screen adaptation from Jim Henson Company, and is currently in pre-production. For those of you who haven't read this NorsePlay novel, Gardner retells  Beowulf  from the monster's viewpoint. While spiteful & envious, Grendel as a character is given a more empathetically tragic narrative in his fateful defeat . The book's a successful exercise in internally departing from the story , but it's of course limited by Grendel's death, so you miss out on the latter two-thirds of the original epic poem's plot as a big drawback. The above concept art seems more of a lion-wolf hybrid, which'll be voiced by Jeff Bridges. I'd hope for a practical effects creature from Jim Henson's son Bryan, but have to imagine there might be some CGI augmentation when needed to surpass mechanical /performative limitations. Other notables are Dave Bautista as Beowulf, and Bryan Cranston as King Hrothga...

This week NorsePlay won a YouTube Trophy from the esteemed disseminator of Old Norse Philology, Dr Jackson Crawford! While I've left many quite longer, helpful , insightful, and far more erudite comments on his content over the years, I'm glad to get some love back from him. Jackson, my challenge to Crossbows & Catapults still stands , and I would like you to teach me your gunfighter's competitive quick draw techniques sometime you're in Arizona. Hails to you for bringing the Norse Lore to as broad an audience as you do -- NorsePlay loves you back for 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 NorsePlay...

This week's NorsePlay comes from the world of darts with a line of Viking-themed darts complete with shield holder made by Shot Darts! The barrels appear to be highly tactile & partly grooved for easier grip (though this is argued that such a feature in turn makes for a less-smooth release), come in anodized colors, and bomber, taper, or straight in a range of weights depending on which model you get, but all in 90% tungsten. [check out those cool Huginn & Muninn flights!] [whoa, that engraved tip!] While outside of the sewing term of a dart, there isn't an Old Norse reference to darts as we know it now, but the origins are probably the medieval English doing archery, or axes, or spears into the ends of logs with their organically ringed wooden target-like circles & distinct centers, which would way later become the more formal dartboard "clock" we know of once someone wanted to move the action indoors, but decided that battle weapons probably weren't...