NorsePlay.

As a Hispanic Ásatrúar, I love & identify with the intersection between Scandinavian culture and my ethnic background, and after seeing Dalarna Horse variants during my recent Map Of Midgard site investigations in Minnesota I began to wonder if anyone had made a Dalarna-style horse piñata . Seeing my Nana craft many piñatas from the ground up as a kid , either for family events or as commissions, there were no cultural restrictions or content barriers to what she could make (i.e. when I was 7, she made a Spider-Man piñata for me), so the idea of one only sticking to the traditional donkey/burro, bull/ox, or more geometric 7-pointed star simply didn't hold. Plus with the fact that Spanish vaqueros brought horsemanship and thus begat cowboy culture in the New World, why wouldn't all equines be fair game for Mexican piñatas? While the above & below weren't made by Mexican grandmothers, I was really stoked to see that a couple people had used that folkcraft to make Da...

This marks the seventh year NorsePlay has attended the renowned Southwest Frith Moot! [note that orange NorsePlay banner adorning the ramada-hof's sacred central pillar!] Southwest Frith Moot is the longstanding annual regional Ásatrú/Heathen gathering hosted by Arizona's Wanderer Kindred's Chieftain Vince & Gythia Dani, which is held at a varying campsite, this year's June event again being up at a campground in the Coconino National Forest. [NorsePlay might bring the open table games, but it's Vince that brings the matchless Odinic knowledge!] Compared to last year's far more organic SFM , this year's had a great concrete schedule, plus a huge list of topics to choose from for initial lecturing & subsequent open discussion, the latter of which went in great & varied directions from many different voices among the more vocal & inquisitive attendees.   Yes, I was tapped to handwrite the above list of discussion topics and the below SFM schedu...

Yes, that's right Norsespotters: Max appears to be brandishing a Völva's Staff! Whether Maurice Sendak in 1963 CE perhaps saw the short iron wands from Norse archaeology/studies can't really be confirmed, and perhaps may have also been in part influenced by vintage troll tale illustrations for his creatures in  Where the Wild Things Are  is pure conjecture, but looking at the scepter compared to the find & reproduction below, it definitely could've been NorsePlay'd into the classic children's picture  book. [ NorsePlay acknowledges Nathaniel Morton's random T-shirt choice last week as inspiring this entry.] #     #    # 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 Mid...

In the Norse Lore there appears paired legendary drinking horns like the Whitings and Godmund's Golden Horns from Helga þáttr Þórissonar , or within archaeology like the Golden Horns of Gallehus, or the Early Anglo-Saxon ones at The British Museum, or these pictured Sutton Hoo horns. This raises the question of why two separate horns are needed. While the more obvious answer is that horns naturally come in pairs off the heads of bovines so why not keep them paired, yet more pragmatically unless you're double fisting it then you only need one at any given moment of drinking for your single mouth. My previous reading of Georges Dumézil gives us the rather well-fitting theory that Freyr's servants Byggvir & Beyla are poetically named for Barley & Bee , both associated with Freyr's agricultural harvest of plenty. Within The Pre-Christian Religions of the North V.3 (ch54, p1410, Lindow & Schjødt), we're presented with a picture of a pair of preserved drinki...

Now the Gods can be with you wherever you roll, plus save your ride's interior with their protective presence on a custom sunshade: This photo doesn't really do this sweet D'Aulaires double truck illustration from their famous book justice, but I had to show it in the NorsePlay-mobile 's front window to demonstrate how a practical item can represent. While I'm going to have to use the reverse reflective surface for the next few months of Arizona summer, when fall hits this is the side that'll get displayed. #     #    # 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...

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...

Like a global empire, Sunna never sets on NorsePlay . This week NorsePlay has surpassed 100K+ views! [and I know for a fact that readers have visited my blog from Iceland & Greenland, and I'm not sure why the global count tracker didn't see those, so, like the Vikings to Vinland, NorsePlay has definitely also crossed the Atlantic.]  I would first specifically like to thank my South American Latino-gard for an amazing reading spike of nearly 10K of those views in the past month. This obviously has alot to say about how interest in the Heathen Worldview surpasses all boundaries & constructs, and how the Norse Lore has universal appeal. Hails y  bienvenidos mi gente! Note that this 100K+ is only the view count after  the blog's move from mid-2023 , before which it had gotten 27.8K at its previous URL , so really it's more likely just over 130K. (Hey Blogger, where's my shiny wall plaque?) [in a graph, views from the URL move onwards!] And more broadly, I th...

After the city & cable company decided to totally spraypaint mark underground lines in my easement area and front yard (which is where I have my holy Vé with the sacred tree I leave offerings in front of), I decided to then spraypaint & adorn their semi-eyesore broadband podium box that's stood unused in my Vé since I bought the house well over a decade ago into a runestone of my own: Semi-modeled after the Karlevi Runestone (Rundata Öl 1) on the island of Öland, Sweden, my "runestone" like most has been "raised" as a property marker, a praise/boast of achievement, and in memory of one who's died /fallen. Bouncing my text through Valhyr's Old Norse translator, I then used their Short Twig Futhark converter on the ON for the following (with a bit of transliteration to keep proper names intact): These Runes are drawn by Guillermo Skald of NorsePlay Mapmaker of Midgard Owner of this Vé and Red Hof And Raised in Memory Of Buddy Guillermosson For a pa...

While on my way to this year's Southwest Frith Moot , I decided to take a detour to go to my Map Of Midgard 's stickpin for The Mogollon Troll and have a proactive investigative mythologist looksee both for the monster that makes this central Arizona highland rim its home, and a hidden cave potentially filled with legendary giant-kin treasures! [ Map Of Midgard rollover for The Mogollon Troll stickpin from the Jötnar data layer!] Known as "The Mogollon Monster", given his physical description in the screencap above, if we lens him through the Norse Lore this totally makes him a troll, so I've used that recontextualization & worldview to place him on my map as The Mogollon Troll. As I drove up, it started to rain. At first intermittently, then for wetter spates. While I'd read online the unpaved road was an unchallenging washboard, the reality was somewhat rougher than that, took slower going, and had logging truck traffic that if mistimed around some cor...

In 1975 CE, master writer  Jorge Luis Borges of Argentina, writes The Disk , a very short story that explores the NorsePlay of an additional Odinic magical item of curious qualities. I'm linking the following reading so you can enjoy this strange tale and so I can discuss it afterwards: Great, right?!? (Wait, you don't do audiobooks? Then go read it here , and come back.) So if we look at Borges' story though the greater context of the Norse Lore, there's the oddity of the Disk Of Odin itself, and its impossible one-sided-ness. We have to ask why Odin needed such a thing made in the first place. If the old man's reason is correct, then its singular quality provides an irrefutable proof of kingship , though not a guarantee of one, since the exiled old man Isern only has the object and not his kingdom. There's an Odinic quality in the old man's blindness (which also meta-reflexes into Borges' own single-functioning eye into a later complete blindness). T...

Last month I had the pleasure of attending an artmaking party where a surplus of supplies were made available to guests, along with a pretty good refrigerator & bar full of creative lubricants. (Being very NorsePlay, I brought a Danish Raspberry Kringle to share, which got eaten first!) Our host scored some off-brand Shrinky Dinks, which he announced most enthusiastically ... but I had no actual idea what that was, somehow bereft of such a thing growing up, though I wasn't the only one there who didn't know what that was exactly. Once I got through evaluating the room for flirtworthiness, I grabbed the sheet of hard plastic material, a set of fancy colored pencils, and went to town, taking an unexpected three hours to finally create this: Above is the final result with the sunlight from behind through the opaque drawing surface! Note the scale compared to my fingertips. Using a portion of the holster design that I made a matching T-shirt from, plus the Bjornkult text banne...