The Norse Mythology Blog

NEIGHBORHOOD OF THE GODS, Part Three

2012-01-25T15:32:00.000-06:00

Njarðargata (Njörð's Street)

Njarðargata (Njörð's Street) was named in 1919 for the father of Frey and Freya. Njörð is one of the Vanir, the tribe of Norse gods who are associated with fertility - as opposed to the more warlike Æsir. Njörð's home is Nóatún ("ship-enclosure"), but his street doesn't quite go down to Reykjavík's docks. It does, however, run by the airport, which is where Iceland's modern Vikings depart from.

Mímisvegur (Mimir's Way)

In 1924, Mímisvegur (Mimir's Way) was named for the god etymologically linked to "memory." He is associated with the Well of Wisdom and advises Odin, even after being beheaded (thanks to magic herbs and incantations). Mímisvegur was meant to be a path for medical professors to travel between the hospital and the proposed site of the University of Iceland, but the school was built at a different location.

Hnitbjörg - Einar Jónsson Museum

Hnitbjörg, the Einar Jónsson Museum, lies at the corner of Freya's Street and Njörð's Street. Built between 1916 and 1923, it is named for the mountain where the giant Suttung hides the Mead of Poetry until Odin seduces his daughter and steals the intoxicating and inspirational drink. The museum's garden features the sculpture of Jónsson (1874-1954), much of which is based on Norse myth.

Egilsgata (Egill's Street)

Icelandic saga is closely tied to Norse myth, and streets named for its figures lie near the Neighborhood of the Gods. Egilsgata (Egill's Street) honors the protagonist of Egil's Saga, Egill Skallagrímsson. A brilliant warrior-poet and master of runes, he had a conflicted relationship with Odin, who inspired his poetry. Since 1913, the Egill Skallagrímsson Brewery has provided a different kind of inspiration.

Njálsgata (Njál's Street)

Njálsgata (Njál's Street) is named for the hero of The Saga of Burnt Njál, the longest of the Icelandic sagas. The tale features prophetic dreams, the appearance of fylgjur (protective spirits), dead heroes singing in burial mounds and visions of Valkyries choosing the slain as they weave "the web of the spear" on a loom strung with men's entrails weighted with severed heads.

Eiríksgata (Erik's Street)

Eiríksgata (Erik's Street) is two streets over from Egill's Street. Erik the Red has his own saga; it tells of the Norse settlement of Greenland and exploration of Vínland in North America. It also features a detailed account of a ritual in which Þorbjörg Lítilvölva ("little seeress") predicts the future while sitting on a high-seat and wearing a blue cloak, a black lamb-skin hood and white cat-skin gloves.

Leifsgata (Leif's Street)

Between Erik's Street and Egill's Street is Leifsgata (Leif's Street), named for Leif Erikson (son of Erik the Red). Both The Saga of Erik the Red and The Saga of the Greenlanders tell of his journey to North America. Although he is Christian, his expedition includes a follower of the Old Way named Thorhall, who crows at one point that "Redbeard [Thor] has got the better of your Christ! I have done this by my poetry which I made about Thor, in whom men trust."

Intersection of Karl's Street and Snorri's Course

I'll conclude our walking tour of the Neighborhood of the Gods (and the Streets of the Sagas) at my favorite intersection - Karlagata (Karl's Street) and Snorrabraut (Snorri's Course). I was pleasantly surprised to find that a street with my name on it (spelled with a k, naturally) intersects one named for Snorri Sturluson, the author of the Edda. As a Norse mythologist, I'm definitely following Snorri's Course!

NEIGHBORHOOD OF THE GODS, Part Two

2012-01-05T12:47:00.002-06:00

Þórsgata (Thor's Street)

In 1920, Þórsgata (Thor's Street) was named for the Norse god of thunder. Thor appears in several versions in the poems, myths, sagas and folklore of Denmark, Germany, Iceland and other northern lands. In some ways, he can be seen as the idealized self-image of the rugged, honest and hardworking common man of ancient times, always ready to stand against evil and tyranny.

Mjölnisholt (Mjölnir's Hill)

A little over a kilometer from the Neighborhood of the Gods, you can find the street called Mjölnisholt (Mjölnir's Hill), named for the dwarf-forged mystic hammer of Thor. According to Snorri, the hammer would never fail, however hard Thor hit; it would never miss its target; it would return to Thor's hand after being thrown; and it could be shrunk down and carried in the thunder god's shirt. Very handy!

Týsgata (Týr's Street)

The northernmost street in the Neighborhood of the Gods is Týsgata (Týr's Street), named for the one-handed Norse god in 1919. The name Týr literally means "god," and has cognates in several other languages (Deus, Deva, Zeus, etc.). Týr may once have been a major Germanic god, but his role had been greatly reduced by the time that the myths were codified at the end of the Viking Age.

Freyjugata (Freya's Street)

Freyjugata (Freya's Street) was named in 1920 for the most complex and fascinating goddess of the Norse pantheon. Freya is associated with death, fertility, gold, love, magic and much more. Of all the goddesses, she plays the most active role in the surviving poetry and prose that documents Norse mythology and religion. Her character is arguably as complex as that of Odin, patriarch of the Norse gods.

Urðarstígur (Urð's Lane)

Dedicated in 1919, Urðarstígur (Urð's Lane) is another street named for a powerful female figure from Norse myth. Urð is one of the three norns who determine the fate of both human beings and gods. Along with Verðandi and Skuld, she sits at Urðarbrunn ("Well of Urð") beneath the roots of Yggdrasil (the World Tree of Norse cosmology), weaving the web of each individual's doom.

Sjafnargata (Sjöfn's Street)

Ten years after Urð was given her street, Sjafnargata (Sjöfn's Street) was named for a minor goddess from Norse mythology. According to Snorri Sturluson, Sjöfn "endeavors to turn the minds of people to love, both those of women and men, and from her name a lover is called sjafni." That's really all we know of her; she is simply one of several sketchily-characterized ásynjur (Norse goddesses).

Bragagata (Bragi's Street)

Bragagata (Bragi's Street) was named in 1919. Snorri writes that the god Bragi "is renowned for wisdom, and most of all for fluency of speech and skill with words. He knows most of skaldship [the art of poetry], and after him skaldship is called bragr, and from his name that one is called bragr-man or -woman, who possesses eloquence surpassing others." While Bragi is the poet of the gods, Odin is the god who brings inspiration to human poets.

NEIGHBORHOOD OF THE GODS, Part One

2011-12-28T14:56:00.003-06:00

Reykjavík's Neighborhood of the Gods is an area in Iceland's capital city featuring streets named after figures from Norse mythology. In 1906, Óðinsgata (Odin's Street) was the first street in this part of the city to be named for one of the Norse gods. Many others followed, creating what became known as the Heathen Neighborhood; Sjafnargata (Sjöfn's Street) completed the set in 1929. In the mid-1920s, the district was known for poorly-built houses and the poverty of its inhabitants, leading some to refer to it as the Blasphemy – meaning that the deteriorated condition of the neighborhood was an affront to the gods whose names it bore. With the usual tides of population change that sweep through urban areas, the neighborhood is now considered a fashionable place to live.

This map shows the Neighborhood of the Gods, from Týsgata (Týr's Street) at the top to Mímisvegur (Mimir's Way) at the bottom.

Óðinsgata (Odin's Street)

The first street in the Neighborhood of the Gods is named for Odin, the Allfather of the Norse pantheon. Like so many figures in Norse mythology, Odin is a complex and enigmatic figure. He is the god who stirs anger in human hearts and delights in war, but he is also the god who inspires creativity in men's minds and (according to Ynglinga Saga) speaks everything in rhyme.

Baldursgata (Balder's Street)

In 1912, six years after Óðinsgata was dedicated, Baldursgata (Balder's Street) became the second street in the district named for one of the Norse gods. Balder, the bright and beautiful, is better known for his death and afterlife than for any actions he accomplished while alive. Troubled by dreams, magically protected, killed by mistletoe and trapped in Hel's domain, Balder will return after Ragnarök.

Nönnugata (Nanna's Street)

According to Snorri Sturluson, Nanna was the wife of Balder. She died of a broken heart at his funeral and was placed on the burning pyre alongside her husband. Nönnugata (Nanna's Street) was named for her in 1919. Does the graffiti on the street sign simply show teenage nonsense, or does it seek to portray Nanna lamenting the death of her beloved Balder?

Intersection of Balder's Street and Nanna's Street

Fittingly enough, the streets named for Balder and Nanna intersect one another. The love shared between the god and goddess was stronger than death, and the two of them journeyed together to the dark realms of Hel, the sinister ruler of the afterlife. Today, Balder and Nanna remain connected in the streets of Reykjavík's Neighborhood of the Gods. Who says Norse mythology isn't romantic?

Haðarstígur (Höðr's Lane)

Haðarstígur (Höðr's Lane) was named in 1925 for the blind god who, according to Snorri, killed Balder by shooting him with a mistletoe missile. Höðr's hand was guided by the scheming Loki, who was jealous of the attention the gods were paying to the seemingly invulnerable Balder. The street was likely designed for garbage pickup, sadly underscoring Höðr's status as an outsider, left out of the god's joyous games.

Válastígur (Váli's Lane)

Válastígur (Váli's Lane) is named for the young god sired by Odin specifically to avenge the death of Balder, his beloved son. According to the Poetic Edda, Váli kills Höðr "when one night old." Válastígur lies directly behind Baldursgata, suggesting Váli's role as Balder's avenger - or perhaps referring to the Eddic assertion that Váli and Balder will both survive Ragnarök to rule over a new era of peace.

Lokastígur (Loki's Lane)

Completing the cast of Balder's drama is Loki, "originator of deceits and the disgrace of all gods and men." In 1920, Reykjavík's mayor supposedly named Lokastígur (Loki's Lane) to get even with a greedy landowner who sought to increase profits by dividing his property. The lane hides behind Þórsgata (Thor's Street), as Loki hides behind (or from) the god of thunder in the myths. Note the graffiti monster lurking around the corner as shadows descend on Loki's Lane.

A HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT ASKS ABOUT NORSE MYTHOLOGY AND NORSE RELIGION

2011-11-02T21:41:00.001-05:00

Belleville West High School

Woodrow Gardiner is a student in Mr. John Lodle's Advanced Placement English Composition class at Belleville West High School in Illinois. Mr. Lodle has asked his students "to think beyond the traditional research sources" and include an interview as part of a research assignment.

Woodrow asked me to be his interview subject and sent me a list of wonderfully insightful questions about Norse mythology and Norse religion. He asked about religious history, the meanings of the myths and the role that the mythology plays in today's world. Since he posed such interesting questions, I felt a responsibility to put some time into writing serious answers.

There must be other young people who are thinking about these same issues, so I'm posting the interview here for their benefit.

WG – How would you describe the characteristics of Norse gods as a whole? Are they generally reliant on brute strength or cunning?

Thor, his daughter & the dwarf he outwitted, now turned to stone
(1908 illustration by W. G. Collingwood)

KS – One of the things that makes Norse myth so fascinating is that the gods are as diverse and individual as the people you meet in your own life. Odin is wise, Loki is tricky, Thor is macho, Frigg is loving, Balder is kind, Frey is peaceful, Skadi is tough, and so on. What makes the gods even more interestingly human-like is that each one has a complex character that really can’t be summed up in a single phrase. Odin may have vast amounts of knowledge, but he can’t figure out a way for the world to survive the final battle at the end of time. Thor may be a simple tough guy, but he also manages to outwit a clever dwarf whose name is literally “All-Wise.”

The more you read Norse myth, the more you will find that the gods reflect people you know. Maybe you have a friend who – although you’re buddies and have fun together – sometimes drags you into trouble, even if it you had nothing to do with it. That’s Loki. Maybe you have a teacher who has dedicated himself to learning everything he can and sharing it with you. That’s Odin. It’s amazing to realize that people over a thousand years ago were thinking about the same issues we think about today.

WG – Why did the Norsemen have mortal gods? They were able to be killed (like Balder), and most of them die at the final battle of Ragnarök (“Doom of the Powers”).

KS – This is a very difficult question. Why do Christians have a god who is all-powerful and all-knowing? Why do Hindus have a complicated pantheon of gods? We can’t know for certain why the religions of the world developed in the ways that they did. We can only look at what records we have and theorize about the evolution of religious ideas in different cultures. Over many centuries of religious scholarship, learned people have come up with a variety of explanations. Maybe the gods were human leaders who were elevated to godhood after their deaths. Maybe the gods are natural forces that evolved into characters (Thor = thunder and so on). Maybe the religion of a people is a reflection of their psychology or so-called “collective unconscious.”

If you decide to really get into the study of religious history, you will find that the past can be just as magical and mysterious as the future. In the grand scheme of human existence, a thousand years is no time at all, but there's no way you and I will live that long. Since we won't experience it, the far future is merely science fiction to us. The distant past can be like that, too. When you begin to study history in a serious way, you realize how little we actually know about life a thousand years ago. The farther back you go, the more fragmentary the records are, and the more guesswork we have to do to fill in the gaps.

The German flag flying over the parliament building in Berlin

You could say that the Norse outlook is a little gloomy – everything dies, even the gods. However, that isn’t quite true, is it? Balder, the god of light and peace, comes back to life after the final battle and rules over a new world of joy and happiness. Maybe this is actually a hopeful idea that the “undiscovered country” of the future holds better things. The three-colored flag of Germany reflects this concept: black stands for the dark past, red for the bloody present, and yellow for the golden future.

You can read the myths as life-affirming, as well. In one of the poems, Odin says:

Merry and mirthful each man should be,
until the time of his death.

He also says:

Better blind than to be burnt:
no one has use for a corpse.

I would interpret both of these to mean, basically, carpe diem. Seize the day, live life to the fullest. This life is all that we have, but it is beautiful. Enjoy it.

WG – In what form has the mythology survived to today? Are the stories still told in Scandinavia?

KS – The stories are still told around the world. We’ll talk in a minute about how the myths have survived as living religion, but the stories themselves are continually told and re-told. Walk into any comic book store and you’ll see Thor on the shelf. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, two Jewish-American artists, created the Marvel Comics character based on the Norse god way back in 1963, and he’s been a fixture in popular culture ever since – including in the recent blockbuster Thor movie.

Frontispiece to The Children of Odin by Padraic Colum

Every few years, someone publishes a new re-telling of the myths, turning the complicated collection of prose and poetry into a coherent storyline that a modern reader can understand and enjoy. The first book on Norse myth that I read was The Children of Odin, a wonderful version of the myths written in 1920 by the Irish poet Padraic Colum, with beautiful illustrations by the Hungarian artist Willy Pogany. There’s also a recent graphic novel by the American artist Erik Evensen called Gods of Asgard that brings all the myths together into a coherent storyline.

Novelists continue to use Norse mythology as a source of material for original works. J. R. R. Tolkien based much of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings on Norse myth, of course. My favorite recent releases are by the English author Joanne Harris. She has two brilliant books out called Runemarks and Runelight. They tell the story of a young girl named Maddy who lives after Ragnarök and gets mixed up with all the Norse gods who have somehow survived (it’s complicated). The books are in the same Young Adult genre as the Harry Potter novels, but are full of Ms. Harris’s original take on the Norse myths.

You can see that the myths speak to people all over the world. There is something in them that appeals to writers in Britain, artists in Hungary, and high school students in Illinois. It’s up to you to meditate on what makes them so endlessly fascinating.

WG – Does Norse mythology have any influence on today’s society, like Greek mythology apparently does (i.e., Nike shoes, Midas Touch car shop, etc.)?

KS – Just look at your cell phone. The Bluetooth symbol is a bind-rune, which means that it is formed from two runes that are merged together. Runes are the ancient Norse letters that, according to mythology, Odin discovered and gave to gods and humans. Runes actually exist and were used for over a thousand years. They were letters (used to spell things) and symbols (each symbol stood for a specific word or concept). Harald Bluetooth (circa 935-985) united Denmark under his rule; the Bluetooth technology unites different devices under its “rule.”

If you take the rune for “H” –

and combine it with the rune for “B” –

you get the Bluetooth logo –

Also, next time you use the restroom in a public place, look at the paper towel dispenser. Chances are, it will have this symbol on it –

which is the logo of Svenska Cellulosa Aktiebolaget, a Swedish paper-goods company. It’s based on a symbol that is associated with Odin in ancient carvings like this one –

Detail of the Hammars Stone in Sweden (8th century)

So, think of Odin the next time you make a phone call or dry your hands!

WG – What are some underlying themes throughout Norse mythology? Maybe humanity being flawed, or that we are insignificant compared to the workings of gods and giants, or that maybe we are the next big thing?

KS – You can find all the themes you suggest in the Norse myths – and many others. Myths and poetry are open to interpretation. This is, in large part, why they do continue to appeal to people around the world, after all these years. You may find one message in a particular story, and I may find the complete opposite. The Norse myths do not give commandments or moral instructions; it is up to you to decide what they mean. In one poem, Odin says of the runes –

Do you know how to cut? Do you know how to read?
Do you know how to stain? Do you know how to test?
Do you know how to invoke? Do you know how to sacrifice?
Do you know how to dispatch? Do you know how to slaughter?

Runic inscription on Kylver Stone in Gotland, Sweden (c400 CE)

To understand this, you should know that runes were cut into wood or stone, and that they were stained with some sort of material (paint or blood, most likely) so that they were easier to read (or to magically “activate” them). That being said, I would interpret this verse as Odin inviting you to make your own reading of the stories and poems. He doesn’t tell you an interpretation; he asks to you to learn how to interpret. This is much less comfortable than having a god who instructs you very clearly on what is right and wrong, how you should behave, and what life really means. It is more difficult to struggle with these complicated ideas and make your own decisions, but it can lead to deeper understanding and be more meaningful for your own experience of life.

WG – Where and for how long was Norse mythology held as a main religion?

KS – I would make a distinction between mythology and religion. Mythology is a set of stories and poems that is connected to a religion; religion is a set of spiritual beliefs and practices in real life. That being said, you can argue that some form of Norse religion has existed for approximately 4,000 years. This is definitely open to debate, so let me explain what I mean.

I would define “Norse religion” as a set of beliefs that was common to the ancient northern world – what is now Germany, Scandinavia and Britain. These beliefs were greatly varied, complicated and contradictory over a very large geographic and temporal space. What we call “Norse mythology” comes mostly from two books that were written down in Iceland in the 13^th century. This is where we get the stories and poems from – the tales of Thor, Odin, giants, dwarves, etc. I would argue that this is a very late form of the religion, as it was actually written down two hundred years after Iceland’s official national conversion to Christianity.

There are rock carvings in Sweden from around 1800 BCE that show “reverse echoes” of Norse myth. We can’t say that they portray Thor or Odin, but we can argue that they show an early form of a religion that eventually evolved into the one that we’re familiar with. For instance, does this carving show an early version of Thor in his goat-drawn chariot?

Bohuslän rock carving (c1800 BCE)

This Swedish carving from around 1300 BCE shows axe heads and wheels. Are the axes “thunder-weapons,” and therefore prototypes of Thor’s mystic hammer? Are the wheels the same “sun-wheels” that continually reappear century after century in Scandinavian religious art?

Scania rock carving (c1300 BCE)

This small Danish chariot from around 500 BCE seems to portray the horse-drawn chariot of the sun that is described in 13^th-century mythology, and its wheels look just like those in the Swedish carving above –

This poor fellow was stabbed and hung, then thrown into a Danish bog around 300 BCE. Later mythology describes that those sacrificed to Odin were, strangely enough, both stabbed and hung. Was this man sacrificed to the leader of the Norse gods?

Tollund Man (c300 BCE)

In 58 CE, Julius Caesar described the religion of the Germans. In 98, the Roman writer Tacitus described it in much greater detail, portraying gods whom we understand as Odin, Thor and Tyr. So you can see that recognizable forms of the Norse gods had already developed by the Roman Age, centuries before the Viking versions that we are most familiar with today.

The brown areas of this map give you an idea of where
the Germanic languages are spoken in northern Europe

The story of the conversion of northern Europe to Christianity is long and complicated. Conversion occurred at different times in different European cultures; in Iceland, for instance, we date the conversion to the year 1000. Some Scandinavians argue that the Norse religion continued in secret after the conversion.

What is clear is that the stories of gods and heroes never completely disappeared, but were preserved in literature, oral tradition, folk tales, popular song, art and superstition. They pop up in England, Ireland, Scotland, Scandinavia and Germany – any place that was part of what we can call pan-Germanic culture. This doesn’t mean “German” (as in “from Germany”), but refers to the family of Germanic languages, of which English is a part.

Yes, the old faith is a living religion in Iceland!

In 1972, a group of poets and intellectuals formed a church in Iceland called the Ásatrúarfélagið (“Æsir Faith Fellowship” – the Æsir are the Norse gods) that brought the old faith into modern life. In 1973, it was officially recognized by the Icelandic government. Today, the members of the church form 0.6% of the Icelandic population. This might not seem like much, but it’s exactly the same percentage of Americans that are Muslims – so you are just as likely to meet a follower of Thor in Iceland as you are to meet a follower of Allah in the United States. Probably even more likely, because Iceland is so small! The members of the Icelandic group have been very involved in their country’s spiritual, social, cultural, ecological and political life – just like any other active church.

Given all of this, you can argue that the Norse religion has had a (very complicated) existence of over 4,000 years. Interestingly, Judaism is usually dated to the traditional birth of Abraham in circa 1800 BCE. This is also the approximate date of the Swedish carvings I discussed earlier, so these faiths are just about the same age.

WG – Who exactly followed Norse religion?

KS – It was followed, in one form or another, by people all over the northern world. We can find echoes of the old belief in place names from Britain, Scandinavia and Germany. There are historical and archaeological records from various locations over this vast area that show the geographical scope of the beliefs.

I want to emphasize that this wasn’t a continuous, coherent and clear religion. There were great variations over time, and each cultural group had their own particular version. However, we can see common elements that appear again and again in different times and places. Part of the fun of studying this subject is trying to make sense of such a large and complicated body of literary, historical and archaeological evidence.

WG – What is, in your opinion, the most interesting aspect of Norse mythology?

KS – There are so many! It’s both terrifying and hilarious. It’s both spiritual and vulgar. It has all of life in it, really. I find it somehow comforting to know that my ancestors (I’m German, English and Scottish) were struggling with the same questions that I am – about relationships, life, death, learning, finding your place in the world and so on. I love that there is always something more to learn about and that there are always surprises.

You could spend your whole life studying just the BCE period, the Roman Age, the Viking Age or the Middle Ages. Some scholars only study the runes, and they have plenty to keep them busy. Some professors work with only the literary records from Iceland; others work solely with archaeological artifacts. You can focus on oral tradition, you can focus on artistic interpretations or you can focus on the written poetry.

From the English hoard (c675) - were these objects "sacrificed" to the gods?

There are always new discoveries to keep things exciting. In the last few weeks alone, there were news items about a Viking burial in Scotland and an ancient Anglo-Saxon “weapon sacrifice” in England. Every new thing that we learn sheds more light on the great mysteries of the past.

WG – Why do you think it is that Norse mythology is so unknown? Some kids in my class don't know that it exists.

Recreation of Norse settlement (c1000) at L'Anse aux Meadows

KS – This is another complex question. It has to do with the educational system in America, with individual religious upbringing and with intellectual curiosity.

For example, we have ancient literary records that the Norse landed in North America nearly five hundred years before Columbus (who never actually set foot on North America itself). In the 1960s, physical proof of ancient Norse presence was unearthed in Canada. Do you study this in your American history class? If not, maybe you should ask your teacher why the decision was made to ignore these historical facts. I’d be very interested in the answer, myself!

It’s possible that some Americans with Norse heritage are embarrassed about this aspect of their own family history. If you are a devout Christian, do you want to admit that your ancestors were still making human sacrifices to the old gods 1,000 years after the birth of Christ? That’s a hard thing to deal with, both psychologically and spiritually.

If you’re not an intellectually curious person, it’s very easy to live a modern life – full of Facebooking, Twittering and YouTubing – and never come across this subject. Actually, it’s very easy not to come across a lot of subjects! I would guess that the average student in your class also doesn’t know that William S. Burroughs, Charles Mingus or Caspar David Friedrich existed, either. These are the times we live in.

WG – What does Norse mythology encompass? Obviously the gods, but does it also include stories like Beowulf?

An 18th-century manuscript of The Prose Edda,
with pictures of the gods Odin & Heimdall
and places, objects & animals from Norse myth

KS – What we know of Norse mythology comes mainly from the two Icelandic books I mentioned earlier (The Prose Edda and The Poetic Edda), plus another Icelandic book (The Heimskringla), plus a Danish book (The History of the Danes), plus a limited number of other poems and stories. These are, basically, the main primary sources on the subject. However, you’re completely right to ask about Beowulf, which was written in a Christian era but contains many references to the older beliefs.

As I mentioned earlier, there are records about the religion going back many centuries. However, I did make a distinction between mythology and religion, so you have to decide for yourself where to take your own research. Do you stick to reading the main stories? Do you start reading about the history of the various periods? Do you compare the German Nibelungenlied (about Siegfried the Dragon Slayer) to the Icelandic Saga of the Volsungs (about Sigurd the Dragon Slayer)? Do you search the Icelandic sagas for more information about myth and ritual? Do you check out books about the runes? It’s all related, which makes it a lot of fun.

WG – Is there anything else you would like to add, that you think everybody should know about Norse mythology but doesn't?

Odin the Wanderer by Georg von Rosen (1886)

KS – I think that everybody should know about everything! I mean, the main reason that I like Odin is his endless quest for knowledge. He’s always disguising himself as an old wanderer and travelling through the world, trying to find out more about life and death. I’m an endlessly curious person, and I’m always hunting for new information. Each question I answer leads to more questions.

Maybe the Norse myths speak to you. If so, you should learn everything you can about them. Maybe you think they’re just a bunch of nonsense. That’s fine, too. I would encourage you to find something that does speak to you on a fundamental level. Maybe it's mathematics, maybe it's music, maybe it's mixed martial arts. Whatever it is, make it a part of your life and learn as much as you can about it. The quest for knowledge will make you a deeper person and a valuable contributor to the intellectual and cultural life of our society.

Thank you for inviting me to participate in this interview. I hope that my answers help you a little bit on your own quest!

BLOND THOR: STAN LEE WASN'T WRONG

2011-09-30T16:03:00.002-05:00

The first appearance of Lee and Kirby's Thor
Journey into Mystery #83 (1962)

Students and scholars of Norse mythology often roll their eyes at the Marvel Comics version of Thor, with his clean-shaven chin, blond hair, winged helmet and self-questioning insecurity. The burly and macho thunder god of myth, they insist, had a large red beard and was a fully-formed adult god, not a childish figure who defers to a Yahweh-like Odin (cf. Anthony Hopkins’ patriarchal performance as the Allfather in Kenneth Branagh's recent Thor movie). According to this position, the comics character created by writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby is simply too pretty, too blond, too young.

A 2005 issue of The Jack Kirby Collector quotes Lee on the origins of the Marvel superhero: “Before starting the series, we stuffed ourselves to the gills with Norse mythology, as well as almost every other type of mythology – we love it all! But you’ve got to remember that these are legendary tales – myths – and no two versions are ever exactly the same. We changed a lot of things – for example, in most of the myths Thor has red hair, Odin has one eye, etc. But we preferred doing our own version.”

“In most of the myths”? Isn’t Thor always a bearded redhead in the source mythology?

In his Dictionary of Norse Myth and Legend (1997), Andy Orchard writes, “Physical descriptions of [Thor] are few . . . According to the eddic poem Þrymskviða (“Thrym's Poem”), however, he has a bristling red beard, piercingly frightening eyes when roused and a frightening appetite.” A simple check of the poem’s text shows that it actually does not mention the color of Thor’s beard. The verse in question reads:

Thor was angry when he awoke
and missed his hammer;
his beard bristled, his hair stood on end,
the son of Earth began to grope about.

Maybe the comic book writer read the poems more carefully than the scholar of Old Norse!

Thor, pictured in an Icelandic manuscript (1760)
His beard looks blond to me!

Snorri Sturluson’s Edda makes no mention of Thor’s beard at all, and the Prologue simply states, “Hár hans er fegra en gull” (“His hair is fairer than gold”). This would seem to be a clear case of Thor being described as blond, but it’s not quite that simple.

The Old Norse fegra usually means “fair” in the sense of beautiful – not necessarily “light in color” – yet it is also used in the compound hárfagra (“light-haired”). Conversely, the Edda elsewhere cites poetic verses calling gold “red wealth,” which would imply that Thor is a redhead. However, other poetic quotations in the work compare gold to both yellow amber and red fire. So, evidence from Snorri doesn’t give a definitive answer on the color issue. In an email exchange, Helga Hlaðgerður Lúthersdóttir (University College London) underscored this ambivalence: “the issue is also complicated further by the fact that most blond Nordic men have red beards.”

Rudolf Meissner’s Die Kenningar der Skalden (1921) provides an exhaustive list of kennings (poetic phrases that replace specific nouns) in Scandinavian poetry dating back to approximately 850 CE. In the section of the book dealing with references to Thor, there is no mention of beards – blond or red. Over the last hundred years, scholarly dating of Þrymskviða (with Thor’s bristling beard) has ranged from the late 900s to the early 1200s. Snorri’s Edda was written or compiled around 1220. In these early mythic sources, there is no clear answer.

The first references to a red-bearded Thor appear in the sagas, written after the Eddas (either slightly after or much later – see below). These few mentions of Thor’s red beard appear in strikingly Christian contexts, not pagan ones. They portray Thor a god whose time has passed – a relic of a bygone era.

In Eirik the Red’s Saga, Thorhall remains loyal to Thor during the Viking exploration of Vínland (North America) despite the Christians around him. In one well-known passage, he brags that Thor is more powerful than Jesus: “Didn’t Old Redbeard prove to be more help than your Christ? This was my payment for the poem I composed about Thor, my guardian, who’s seldom disappointed me.” Gísli Sigurðsson (Árni Magnússon Institute) has dated the writing of the saga to between 1220 and 1280. When Kendra Wilson (UCLA) was kind enough to check attestations of rauðskeggr (“red-bearded”) in the Dictionary of Old Norse Prose, this speech of Thorhall’s was the only result she found.

In "Out-Thoring Thor in Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta" (2006), Merrill Kaplan (Ohio State University) describes how Thor appears in the saga as a “demonic entity” who is “young-seeming, powerfully built, and red-bearded” and is referred to only as rauða skegg (“red beard”). The saga itself was likely compiled between 1225 and 1250.

Thorgils isn't the only one who dreams of Thor!

In Flóamanna Saga, Thor appears several times in the dreams of Thorgils, a man who “was among the first to be converted” to Christianity in Iceland. Thor repeatedly threatens the hero in an attempt to turn him back to the old religion, but he is unsuccessful. When he visits Thorgils in his dream-visions, the god materializes as a “large and red-bearded man.” According to Medieval Scandinavia: An Encyclopedia (edited by Kirsten Wolf, Paul Acker and Donald K. Fry, published 1993), this saga is dated between 1290 and 1350 and was most likely written by a Christian clergyman in southern Iceland.

So the first traceable appearances of Thor's red beard appear in sagas dated c1220-c1350, not in the earlier mythological sources from c850-c1220. The chronology can be argued, but it is clear that the saga version of Thor's appearance is the one that has stuck with us. Long after the age of saga-writing, the red-bearded Thor remained as the popular image of the god in folklore of various lands. The French scholar Georges Dumézil writes, "Whereas the Edda presents [Thor] as a man in the prime of life, the Lapp tradition, in accord with several popular Norwegian expressions, makes him an old man with a red beard.” Jacob Grimm wrote in 1835 that “this red beard of the thunderer is still remembered in curses, and that among the Frisian folk, without any visible connexion [sic] with Norse ideas: ‘diis ruadhiiret donner regiir!’ (let red-haired thunder see to that) is to this day an exclamation of the North Frisians.”

Marvel’s youthful, inexperienced Thor – especially as portrayed in the early Lee/Kirby stories – also has roots in the Eddas. Both Hárbarðsljóð (“Harbard’s Song”) and Hymiskviða (“Hymir’s Poem”) refer to Thor as sveinn (“boy” or “lad”). Snorri glosses the second poem by writing that Thor “went out across Midgard, having assumed the appearance of a young boy,” but the original text makes no such claim that Thor's youth is put on as a disguise.

Snorri’s description of Thor’s fight with the giant Hrungnir also posits a younger, less-experienced god of thunder: “Thor was eager not to let anything stop him from going to single combat when he had been challenged to a duel, for no one had ever done that to him before.” Dumézil discusses this passage in connection with initiation rites for young warriors, which underscores the idea that Lee and Kirby’s immature Thor is not necessarily out-of-step with mythological sources.

The son of Thor kicks butt!
Art by Jack Kirby

Jack Kirby’s classic Thor design incorporates earlier elements of his work that stretch back over twenty years before the character’s first appearance in 1962. In 1941, the superhero known as Mercury – a Kirby character for Timely Comics (which eventually evolved into Marvel Comics) – moved from Red Raven Comics to Captain America and underwent a name-change to Hurricane, “son of Thor, god of Thunder, and the last descendant of the ancient Greek immortals.”

Despite this strange confusion of mythologies, the character is noteworthy in that he is blond and wears winged headgear – two attributes of the later Marvel superhero version of Thor. Of course, the wings relate to clasic portrayals of the Roman Mercury, not the Norse god of thunder. Similar character design of another character named Mercury appears in the December, 1948 issue of Venus – edited by, of all people, Stan Lee.

Mercury appears in Venus #3 (1948)

In 1942, Kirby (with Captain America co-creator Joe Simon) published a story called “The Villain from Valhalla” in issue #75 of DC’s Adventure Comics. It features the first Kirby-designed version of the Norse god thunder god, portrayed as a villain with a red beard and horned helmet who fights the heroic Sandman. Although this “Thor” is really just a mobster using futuristic technology to imitate the god, Kirby's first vision of the character is much closer in appearance to the bearded Thor of the sagas than it is to the later Marvel character.

Jack Kirby's first version of Thor
Adventure Comics #75 (1942)

In 1957, Kirby drew a story called “The Magic Hammer” in DC Comics’ Tales of the Unexpected #16. This bearded Thor is almost identical to Kirby’s 1942 version, but his hammer now has the same design that Kirby would use five years later for the Marvel superhero. Also notable is the design of Thor's tunic, which features the same stylized circular bosses that are prominent on the costume of the subsequent Marvel character. Unlike the 1942 story, this tale portrays Thor as an actual Norse god, complete with a foil in the villainous Loki – who would, of course, become the main villain in the Marvel series.

Kirby's second Thor, same as the first
Tales of the Unexpected #16 (1957)

How did Kirby’s later conception (beardless, blond) change so radically from these two similar designs, separated from each other by fifteen years? A possible “missing link” can be found in a 1959 story illustrated by Steve Ditko, who was known to Stan Lee since the early 1950s and who began working in 1955 for Atlas Comics, another Marvel precursor that featured writing by Lee. Ditko drew “The Hammer of Thor” in issue #11 of Charlton Comics’ Out of This World. It features a young Viking – initially blond and beardless – who discovers Thor’s mystic hammer in a cave and uses its magic power to drive invading Huns out of Scandinavia. In a strange echo of Snorri’s euhemerism, the final panel implies that this human hero was remembered as a god by later generations.

Steve Ditko's Thor finds the magic hammer
Out of This World #11 (1959)

Finally, in 1962, issue #83 of Marvel’s Journey into Mystery featured the first appearance of Lee and Kirby’s thunder god in “Thor the Mighty and the Stone Men from Saturn.” The influence of Ditko’s version is clear. Dr. Don Blake finds a wooden cane in a Scandinavian cave; when he strikes it against a boulder, it becomes the Thor’s magic hammer. Kirby’s visual storytelling of a human character's discovery of Thor's hammer in a cave is quite similar to Ditko’s:

Kirby's version of the hammer-finding scene,
suspiciously similar to Ditko's

As in the Ditko tale, the hero uses the newly-found weapon to repel an invasion of Scandinavia. In this case, which takes place in contemporary times, the invaders are space aliens rather than Huns. Did Lee know Ditko’s tale and instruct Kirby to replicate its plot and imagery? The murky nature of Lee and Kirby’s collaboration – and who created what elements – has led to recent court battles, so there is no clear answer to be found. However, we do know that Lee insisted later Marvel artists study and imitate Kirby's work, so it's not outside the realm of possibility that, in this instance, he asked Kirby to emulate the earlier Ditko story.

Kirby’s final version of Thor is blond, clean-shaven and wears a winged helmet, combining elements from both his earlier Mercury/Hurricane character (the headgear and blond hair) and his second Thor (the hammer design).


Kirby's classic Thor, with clean-shaven chin, blond hair & winged helmet

The wings are also clearly related to the imaginary Viking helmets popularized in the Romantic Era through productions of Richard Wagner’s Edda-derived operas.

Fritz Feinhals as Wotan (Odin) in a
1903 production of Wagner's Ring

As for the youthfulness of Lee and Kirby’s Thor, it may – like the plot of the origin story – come from Ditko’s version, but is more likely part of Lee’s idea of featuring young and inexperienced characters such as Spider-Man, the X-Men and even Millie the Model in the new “Marvel Age of Comics.”

As Lee said of the myths, “no two versions are ever exactly the same.” The complicated back-history of Kirby’s design reflects, in a way, the complex and contradictory nature of the ancient myths and sagas. What is clear, however, is that we can’t simply dismiss the 1960s Marvel Thor as having no connection to the source material. Writers and artists pick and choose what elements of myth they will use in their interpretations, and academics do the same as they polish their scholarly interpretations.

INTERVIEW WITH M. D. LACHLAN (WOLFSANGEL), Part Five

2011-09-14T16:20:00.004-05:00

How to use an actual German Wolfsangel: (1) Sling the longer
piece over a tree branch. (2) Wrap meat around the z-shaped
hook hanging from the chain. (3) Wait for wolf to take the bait.

KS - The title of your book and the symbol it references are somewhat problematic, as you have discussed in previous interviews. Wolfsangel is not "wolf’s angel" (in the English sense), but a German word for "wolf-trap" that refers to a so-called runic symbol. The symbol has a disputed history, but no version of its origin traces it back to the Viking age. There was a rather nasty hooked trap used to capture wolves in Germany, and its shape is echoed in German heraldry dating back to 1340 – well past the end of the Viking age and not in Scandinavian territory. You reference the hunting tool in the novel in a wonderfully poetic way when the werewolf feels "as if the rune was hooked through his throat, pulling him up towards a terrible destiny." In any case, this early version lacks the central cross-bar of the Wolfsangel symbol, which doesn’t appear in heraldic design until sometime around the 18th century.

List's Gibor

The symbol – as we know it today – was popularized by the Nazis, who used it as an insignia for several military divisions and programs. As far as I can tell, they got the symbol from the German occultist Guido von List. It seems to be based on "Gibor," the 19th "rune" in The Secret of the Runes (1908), which detailed the "occult vision" he had in 1902, when the "secret of the runes" appeared to him in a vision while his eyes were bandaged after a cataract operation. Tellingly, the 18th "rune" is the swastika. I’ve asked some colleagues (scholars, publishers, religious leaders) to weigh in on any runic origins for the symbol, and their reaction is telling.

Wolfsangel on cover of Rice's
Music, Martinis and Misanthropy

An Icelander said, "I cannot find a single reference to this symbol in my library." One (polite) German said "I do not know any older German source," and another (rather more forward) German said that "the Wolfsangel itself is, so far I know, more or less a kind of Fleischerhacken ["meat-hook"] used for wolf hunting. Not a rune. Wolfsangel seems to me really Nazi. He should use another name." A Norwegian said, "I have only seen that rune used by people like Boyd Rice/Death In June" – musicians associated with neo-nazi politics. The symbol is now banned in Germany and is categorized in the Anti-Defamation League’s Visual Database of Extremist Symbols under "Graphic Symbols," notably not under "Pagan Symbols Co-opted by Extremists."

After the interview, a leading runologist wrote to me
about the runic origins of the Wolfsangel symbol:
"The whole concept seems very much like 19th-20th-
century rune magic. Pure hogwash, in other words."

You have said that, "in the Norse myths, the runes and the history of the Vikings we have a huge cultural treasure. We shouldn’t hand it over to morons without a fight." No argument here. In the novel, however, you acknowledge the non-Viking origins of the symbol, writing that it is "not one of the twenty-four runes given by Odin." When the witches first see the Wolfsangel, they have varied interpretations. Some see it as a thunderbolt, some as a werewolf. "Others," though, "saw a different meaning in the rune, one that it would bear down the centuries until one day someone gave it a name. Wolfsangel. This was not a word the sisters would have recognized, though its sense was clear to them – wolf trap." Did you choose this symbol because the book was originally intended – as you’ve said in interviews – to take place in WWII? Did you first plan to use it as a Nazi symbol, then reset it as a rune when moving the action back to the Viking age?

ML - It’s a serious point you make, so I’m going to give it some serious attention – starting by telling you how the symbol ended up in the book and going on to discuss if its Nazi associations outside of the US and UK make it illegal or unusable.

The symbol appealed to me because it has three meanings – wolf trap, storm and werewolf, depending on the orientation. I have no idea where I got that information from – it’s something I think I picked up as a kid. I was very interested in runes, in hieroglyphs and all sorts of magical symbols and used to scan the encyclopedia for references to them. So the symbol was in my unconscious, I think, and that’s why it suddenly hopped out on to the page when I was writing.

However, the Wolfsangel looks
much more like List's Gibor than
it does like heraldic symbols such
as this one from circa 1340

It fitted well with the central theme of the book. Its use as a magical symbol which embodies all three meanings was a driving force of the plot. I have to be honest and say I did no research at all on it while I was writing the book and was unaware of its association with Nazism or neo-fascism until the book was nearly finished. Then I think I looked it up on Wikipedia and was given some pause for thought. However, the entry I read referenced it as a heraldic symbol, and my further research seemed to bear that out.

I was aware it may or may not have been a rune of the Viking Age but I incorporated it as a matter of artistic license. There is some suggestion that it is a version of the rune Eihwaz, which is a Viking rune, but I understood it emerged as a 13th-century Mason’s mark. Had I thought that rune originated with the Nazis – which I don’t think it did – then I would not have used it. I think it’s just part of the Nazis' haul of symbols swiped from Norse mythology, Rome, Victorian and Edwardian pagan revivalists and other cultures. Some of those symbols are beyond redemption, clearly – the swastika is rightly outlawed in Germany. But some of the symbols had a life before Nazism, continue to have a life independently of Nazism, and their association with the ideology – certainly in my country – is weak or non-existent. And in fact, some symbols that actually did originate with the Nazis outgrew them and have an entirely different cultural resonance today. The Olympic torch, for instance, was invented for the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and the first lighting of the Olympic cauldron by a torch bearer was presided over by Hitler.

Löns' The Warwolf

As far as my research goes the Wolfsangel is a heraldic symbol – one that is used in coats of arms in Germany and which continues to be used to this day. So it predates the Nazi smash and grab on mystical cultures and, crucially, it has a life independent of association with Nazism today. There are also uses of it which are contemporaneous with List but, as far as I know, have no connection to him. The 1910 novel The Warwolf by [Hermann] Löns incorporates it in a non-nazi context.

List was certainly an unsavory figure and a Nordicist, but he wasn’t a Nazi and in fact was decried by the Nazi’s chief occult cheerleader Karl Maria Wiligut. However, some of what he thought chimed with the Nazi philosophies. But, then again, ideas of racial superiority and anti-semitism were common in that era. We were only just out of the Victorian age, where racist prejudice had the status of scientific fact. And not everyone who held those views was a Nazi. Churchill, for instance, was a supporter of eugenics and wrote, "the unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the Feeble-Minded and Insane classes, coupled as it is with a steady restriction among all the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks, constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate." So, though it’s tempting to put List into the box "proto-Nazi," that may be a historically-inaccurate way of viewing him. He certainly talked a great deal of bunk and some of it nasty bunk – just as Churchill did – but it’s a long way from there to the Final Solution. He clearly had some horrible views, but they belonged more to the Victorian and Edwardian ages than they did to that of the horrors of Hitler’s Germany.

There really is evidence of a connection, including
the 1932 statement by a prominent member of the
Guido von List Society that Hitler is "one of our disciples"

List was plundering heraldic symbols and adopting them to his runic alphabet, so it seems possible he got the Wolfsangel from heraldry. There’s no evidence Hitler took the swastika from List. It was a symbol in use by several German nationalist and folk movements, but it seems likely that Hitler adopted it from the Hindu symbol, based on claims by the orientalist and racialist Émile-Louis Burnouf that it was a fire altar seen from above. So I dispute your implication that the Nazis took both the swastika and the Wolfsangel from List – which is what I assume you meant by your use of the word "tellingly." They grabbed runes from a variety of sources, some of which weren’t actually runes but Hindu symbols.

Also, if you’re going to say that the Wolfsangel is intrinsically a Nazi symbol because the Nazis used it, then you’d have to say that Nordic neo-paganism is irredeemably stained by its association with Nazism, which continues to this day. Some neo-nazis do identify themselves as Odinists. I don’t think the link is unbreakable, though. I think it’s possible to be a Nordic religion revivalist and a decent human being. However, it’s undeniable that Nordic neo-paganism has its roots in nationalism and racialism. It’s also undeniable that, for many neo-pagans, it has left them behind.

German Criminal Code actually does punish anyone
who "domestically distributes or publicly uses,
in a meeting or in writings disseminated by him,
symbols of one of the parties or organizations"
such as "a former National Socialist organization"

There were two deciders for me. The first was that, contrary to your information earlier, the Wolfsangel is not banned in Germany. I researched this before deciding on using it. According to the German law, the symbol is illegal if used in a neo-nazi context – as it should be. In any other context, it’s fine. The German publishers were happy to reproduce the symbol in the book. The Wolfsangel is still used in coats of arms in Germany and in True Blood, which I assume is shown in Germany – it’s shown everywhere else! I was surprised that True Blood’s use of the Wolfsangel emerged a month after my book was published – one of those weird coincidences – and I haven’t seen the episodes with it in. What it does show, however, is that the symbol can be shown without controversy in a fantasy context.

The second decider was that, in my primary market – US and the UK – the symbol has entirely lost any resonance it did have. Very few people would associate it with Nazism in the UK – and I believe very few in the US, too – outside of academic and specialist circles. I had no idea the book would sell in Germany, but we’ll come to that later. I tested it on a wide audience, and no one had even heard of it.

An obsession with wolves & the occult isn't unique to Germany.
Example 1: The symbol of Yale University's Wolf's Head Society

The symbol was used in the WWII version of the book. It’s used as in the Norse version of the book as a rune that lives inside someone. Other symbols the Nazis used are there, too. The Wolf’s Head was used by the main character as his family crest. He referred to it as "one of the many venerable symbols the Nazis have so presumptuously appropriated." The original WWII version was a fairly sustained and direct attack on the Nazis, their barbarity and their ridiculous occult research program. In the very first version, the main villain is a Nazi, and he falls very foul of the Norse gods – whom he is trying to summon. There are also two parallel threads – the descent into lycanthropy of one of the main characters, who manages to hold on to his humanity, and the far more disturbing descent of the other main character, a flippant but well-meaning young man who finds himself in the orbit of the SS and is utterly compromised and degenerated by the experience.

I was very pleased with the story, and it’s as well written as anything I’ve ever done. However, I cut it, after a lot of thought. The reason was that I just wasn’t convinced that an event as terrible as the Holocaust could be handled in what is, essentially, a fantasy story. I still don’t know that I made the right decision, because it was powerful stuff that made valuable points about the uses of faith – independent of its truth – in directing correct moral action. I was concerned, though, that my intention would be misunderstood because historical fantasy is, primarily, a form of entertainment. If you incorporate the barbarities of the Nazis in that context, would people think I was presenting them for entertainment? That was not my purpose at all. So I cut all the stuff in Germany out, even though I thought I had come up with something affecting and worthwhile.

Coventry Cathedral after the German bombing of November, 1940

The WWII version that was submitted to publishers only had Nazis in it flying at 40,000 feet over Coventry to bomb it. It’s a detective story set in the Blitz on my home town of Coventry in the UK. I may release the WWII story as an eBook one day, if my publishers agree – because it could be 20 years before I get there, if I keep proceeding through history. Which version I release will depend on a lot of consultation. I may even consult you, Karl! The one with the Nazis in it is definitely up there with the best stuff I’ve ever written. However, it may be treading on too many sensitivities. I have asked one Jewish friend of mine what he thinks of it, and he loves it, but I fear he may be untypical. X-Men, of course, touches on the whole concentration camp horror, and I have seen no complaints about that, so my feeling is that what I’m writing would be fine. It’s not like it’s making light of the Holocaust. But I’m not sure. So – if you’d care to read it – I’d love to get your opinion. Also, if you know any Jewish scholars who’d be willing to read it, then I’d love to get their opinion too.

German edition of Wolfsangel

KS - How do you feel about your choice now that the book is out in the world? In Germany, the novel has been published as Wolfskrieger ("wolf warrior"), and the cover features an image of a large, Marvel-style Thor’s hammer – two choices that clearly distance the book from what most Germans would see as fascist imagery. How would you explain your use of the symbol to a German or Israeli audience?

ML - Well, obviously, I don’t want to upset or offend anyone, but I don’t think I have! The symbol is used in Germany, as I said, entirely independently of fascist associations. I don’t know if most Germans see it as fascist imagery. If any do, then they haven’t mentioned it to me. The symbol is in the book in the German version. No one from the German publishers even raised it as an issue with me. So I don’t know how strong the association is in Germany. I should imagine that it’s stronger than it is in the UK, though. Sometimes books are retitled for no apparent reason. My book Lucky Dog was retitled When the Hound Came in German – not a title that gives the right impression in English at all! No one consulted me about that either. So I have no idea if the book was retitled out of concerns about the symbol’s association or for other reasons. I have no idea if the German publisher even recognized the association.

Let’s assume it was retitled out of concerns about the associations of the Wolfsangel – as seems likely. It was still left in the book, complete with an illustration of the symbol. I think this is because, when Germans read how I introduce the symbol in the context of the story, they can clearly see it is not used to support a fascist outlook, nor to make any political comment at all. I have had no comment from Germans on its use whatsoever, and it’s only come up in one interview worldwide so far, other than this one – and then because the interviewer’s flatmate was a military historian who recognized the sign. Thankfully, I have had no fascist idiots mistaking me for one of them either.

The important thing here is that the symbol is obscure in my country and in the US, and I am clearly not using it in a Nazi context, nor is there a crypto-fascist agenda in the book. Symbols are defined by context, and the context here is very obviously not one that supports Nazism or fascism. In fact, it very clearly points out the value of ordinary, fallible, humanity.

I would explain it to a German or Israeli audience by saying all of the above. There was certainly no intention to offend and, as far as I can see, no one has taken offense.

The death of Wulf Sternhammer, 2000 AD's time-traveling Viking

KS - In contemporary genre fiction, one major difference between writers in the US and the UK is the British willingness to kill off major characters over the course of a story. Think DC Comics versus 2000 AD – Superman and Batman keep dying and resurrecting, while the Mighty Tharg (2000 AD’s green alien editor) seems quite gleeful about bloodily axing long-running characters without a moment’s hesitation. Grant Morrison, especially, seems quite bloody-minded whenever he’s allowed to play in the sandboxes of American comic companies. You have said, "If I’d written Lord of the Rings, Sam would have been left dead on the mountain." Why do you think there’s this difference between American and British writing styles?


Surely somebody cares about poor Gollum! Painting by Frank Frazetta (1973)

ML - I’m not sure I accept that. George R. R. Martin chops people down with relish. And Tolkien was British. No one you really care about dies in Lord of the Rings. In a country as big and as culturally diverse as the US, I’m not sure you can talk about "American writers" in any sense other than they happen to all live or work in the US.

If there is a difference, it’s because we British have a chip on our shoulders about happy endings. Somehow they don’t seem very clever, and we have a chip on our shoulders about that too. We’re the people making vomiting noises in the medal-giving ceremony in Star Wars. And was I the only one who felt sorry for the RDA Corporation in Avatar?

A writer needs to kill some of his characters occasionally to get taken seriously by the reader, to increase the dramatic charge. Otherwise, it’s all too comfortable. I never liked James Bond as a kid, because I never thought he was ever in any serious trouble. Spider-Man, however, earned huge respect from me when the writers killed Gwen Stacey. Wow! That never happened to Lois Lane. However, Bond is English and Spider-Man is as NYC as a stand-bought hot dog. You need to get the reader’s respect, and killing dearly loved characters is just one way to do it..

English culture hero Basil Fawlty moonlighting as a Scottish wizard

But let’s suppose you are right, or at least there is something in what you say. Why the difference? Do US writers grow up in a story-making culture so influenced by Hollywood and TV that the happy ending becomes almost a reflex for them, a tick? Can’t see that would account for much of a difference as we see the same films. Our public TV, however, is much darker. If you look at a lot of our cop shows – or even comedy shows – they are quite bleak, sometimes. Apparently, when the sublime Fawlty Towers – England’s best-ever sitcom, for my money – went to the States, US viewers were turned off by the unremitting nastiness of the main character. However, a lot of British men saw the rude, reactionary, abusive, snobbish, half-mad, sneering Basil Fawlty as a role model, or at least as saying and doing the things they would like to. The Office: An American Workplace features a foolish but essentially lovable main character. The main character, David Brent, in the English version has very few redeeming features at all. And yet a mainstream audience loves the show – it’s on public TV, not tucked away on a cable channel.

If there is a difference, perhaps it’s because US writers have an optimism that we lack in our country. We fell quite quickly from our role as the world’s superpower, and perhaps that has an ongoing effect on the national psyche. I don’t think modern British writers are harking back to the days of empire, but they are writing in a culture that still carries the invisible tremors of the aftershock of its collapse. It will be interesting to see, if the US loses its pre-eminent role in the world, how US writing changes.

Summer Glau as Firefly’s River Tam

From the cover of Danielle Dax's
Blast the Human Flower (1990)

KS - In the movie of the book, I would cast Summer Glau as Gullveig, a character with the same otherworldliness as Firefly’s River Tam. One scene in particular reminded me of a specific shot from the TV series. After Gullveig finds a dead girl in the witches’ labyrinthine caverns, "the witch leaned forward and tapped her tongue on the girl’s cheek." Of course, Danielle Dax could also pull off Gullveig as “a girl, a wasted and haggard child, dressed in a long and bloody white shift.” When you were writing the novel, did you picture specific actors in an imaginary film?

Martin Johnson & the spoils of victory

ML - Only Loki as John Hurt, in his Caligula role, though Hurt is too old to play the role nowadays. I kept envisaging Bodvar Bjarki either as a Swedish soccer fan I once encountered at an international match between England and Sweden – around 7'2" and built like a bear – or as Martin Johnson, the old England Rugby captain – a very intimidating individual of 6'7" and 265lbs. He’d have to change his hair color, though.

The rest, I don’t really have a solid picture of what they look like – Authun aside. I have a verbal imagination, not a visual one. I get glimpses of the characters, but they don’t sit still long enough for me to get a very clear look at them. One thing is certain, though, I wouldn’t like the corn-fed look of some of the Twilight actors. Nothing wrong with Twilight, but its actors look like what they are – affluent teenagers. My actors would have to appear a bit more starved, hungry and sharp looking.

Mads Mikkelsen in Valhalla Rising (2009)

Come to think of it, Mads Mikkelsen would make a good Authun. Valhalla Rising came out just before Wolfsangel was due to be published, and I was terrified it was going to feature the same view of magic, so mine would look derivative. It was a great film, though, and Mikkelsen certainly had the right look.

KS - There’s a wonderfully atmospheric video trailer out for Fenrir – the second book in the series – that hints at the power that a film version of the series could have. How far forward in history does this book move the story?

ML - It begins at the Viking siege of Paris in 885, so only about 60 or so years. This actually occurred and was one of the steps on the way to the foundation of Normandy. The trailer is good, isn’t it? The soundtrack is by Jonathan Harvey – Mortuos Plango. Sends shivers down the spine.

KS - What’s your planned schedule of writing and publishing the rest of the series? Has the whole process tilted more towards the exciting or to the daunting?

ML - The third is done, and the fourth will be written early in 2012. The third is set in Constantinople in about 969 and features the beginnings of the Varangian Guard – the Byzantine emperor’s Viking bodyguard.

KS - Thank you for being so gracious and patient during the interview process!

ML - Well, thanks for such an in-depth and challenging interview. It’s amazing to be questioned by someone with such a detailed knowledge of the book’s background. I’m aware that I’ve answered some questions as, "Dunno, just came out that way," but – as I noted several times – this is the prerogative of the creative writer rather than the academic. Thanks a lot, Karl. Much appreciated.

INTERVIEW WITH M. D. LACHLAN (WOLFSANGEL), Part Four

2011-09-06T14:40:00.002-05:00

M. D. Lachlan (a.k.a. Mark Barrowcliffe)

KS - Although your book weaves together the stories of many deeply-constructed individuals, Vali is arguably the "main character." There are two Vális in Norse myth. One is the son of Odin who will avenge his father’s slaying by the wolf Fenrir at Ragnarok and go on to survive the Twilight of the Gods. The other is the son of Loki, turned into a wolf by the gods. He kills his brother Nari (or Narfi), and the poor fellow’s guts are subsequently used to bind his father Odin in his cave of torment. Wolfsangel, with Loki as the father of both Vali and Feilig, clearly uses the second of these myths. That explains Vali’s name, but why did you call his brother Feileg? The closest I can come to interpretation is jeg feile – Norwegian for “I fail.” Is his name a coded foreshadowing of his inability to stop the tragedies at the end of the book, or is there some other reference?

ML - Félagi or Félagr are names meaning "fellow" and it’s an adoption of those – as I generally prefer to avoid accents whenever I can. I thought there was a source for it in one of the sagas but, like you, I can find no trace of it now, which is annoying. Again, I go back to the academic/creative writer thing. I don’t have to do a glossary so I don’t keep track of my references.

Unfortunately for the monks, Lindisfarne Castle wasn't there in Viking times

KS - Early in Wolfsangel, the Viking characters come into violent contact with people they refer to only as "West Men." The term comes from the Old Norse vestmenn, which referred to the Irish. Despite what is in the publisher’s blurb, the actual text never specifically calls them Saxons – Anglo or otherwise. When your character Vali participates in his first Viking raid, is it meant to be an Irish village, an Anglo-Saxon village, or is it modeled on the historical raid on the Lindisfarne monastery off northeast England’s Northumbrian coast? You have said that the book "begins roughly at the dawn of the Viking era, which is 793. That’s when the first Viking raid began on British shores, anyway." This is, of course, the date of the Lindisfarne raid - which leads me to believe that Vali is actually participating in this historical event.

ML - It is modeled on Lindisfarne. I couldn’t find out if the Vikings actually used the name "Saxons," so I settled on West Men as a generic term. I found it very difficult to establish exactly what the monastery would have looked like at this period – the people at the Lindisfarne museum didn’t really know, so I had to base my description on other, contemporary descriptions of monasteries. It’s not meant to be Lindisfarne exactly because it’s a flatter island, and it’s made clear (I think) that raids are already underway.

Berserker chess piece found in Scotland (from circa 1150)

KS - Wolfsangel features terrifying berserks "from the northern cult of Odin the Frenzied" who drink a mind-altering mushroom soup to enter a state of battle madness. The most prominent of them is Bodvar Bjarki – named for Bödvar Bjarki ("little bear of battle") who appears in the Icelandic Hrólfs saga kraka and Saxo’s History of the Danes and may share a common origin with the character of Beowulf ("bee-wolf" = bear). While the Icelandic, Danish and English characters are heroes, this berserk is definitely a villain, and is more like the wicked berserks fought against by Egill Skallagrímsson and Haldan, the champion of Thor. Was there a specific literary or historical figure that you modeled this character after?

ML - I don’t find him villainous. I find him a bit stupid but he has a strong moral code and is prepared to die by the laws he lives by. He’s not a coward and, though he likes a scrap, there’s nothing other than his opposition to Vali that qualifies him as villainous. He’s an antagonist, but is that the same as a villain? He kills some slaves they can’t fit on a boat, he picks unnecessary fights, but he’s bound by his oaths and he seeks fame and glory. I rather liked him! He gives respect to Vali when he proves himself in battle, he’s brave and applies the same standards to himself as he does to others. I took the name because I liked it and it had a good association with Beowulf which gave me a solid impression of what he looked like while I was writing the book. He is modeled on contemporary accounts of berserkers and freebooters who would use holmgang law – the right to decide disputes by combat – in order to steal whole farms from people.

Maybe Freya - Viking pendant
from Tissø, Denmark

KS - In Wolfsangel, female characters (Adisla and Jodis) pray to Freya, berserks pray to Odin, one of Authun’s retainers prays to Frey (and Tyr and Thor), the warrior Bragi (named for the god of poetry) invokes Tyr (and "Thor’s bulging nut sack"). During the Danes’ attack on Vali’s village, their religious predilections are described: "There was a roar like a landslide, and the enemy were charging, screaming oaths to Thor, the thunder god, and Tyr, god of war. The name of Odin was not on their lips. These were not berserks, and the hanged god was too peculiar, mysterious, and mad for the average farmer or bodyguard." This nicely reflects the influence of gender and social status on an individual’s choice of gods.

Aside from Odin and Loki, however, the Norse gods don’t appear in your book. They are mentioned by the human characters, but it isn’t clear that – in the universe of your novel – they actually exist. Do they, or are Loki and Odin the only "real" gods in your fictional world? You give one of the meanings of the Wolfsangel symbol as "thunderbolt." Does this mean that Thor will be appearing in a later novel?

Maybe Thor's goats - another find from Tissø, Denmark

ML - Thor is a very difficult god to represent in my world because he’s so straightforward. I’m dealing in sinister and weird forces that exist at the edges of human sanity. I can’t think where the giant-crushing, hammer-throwing, serpent-smashing Thor would fit in to this. He makes a brief appearance at the end of Lord of Slaughter, but I may even cut that in the final edit. He’s not alien enough for the world of Wolfsangel – which may, of course, be one of the reasons he was popular enough to be represented as the chief among gods at the temple at Uppsala described by Adam of Bremen. I don’t like the word "liminal" which gets very much overused in all creative endeavors, but Loki and Odin are liminal figures – or at least subject to that interpretation. Thor is much more solid and earthy, at least in my imagination.

KS - The absence of other gods in Wolfsangel gives "the endless battle between the wolf, Odin, and Loki" a flavor that, again, seems to fit more into a Judeo-Christian worldview than a polytheistic one. Odin and Loki’s battle – and the position of the werewolf between the two mystic forces – feels like the struggle between the Christian God and Satan, with Jesus as the character given physical, earthly form. Why did you decide on this somewhat Manichean view of Good (Loki, friend to mankind) and Evil (Odin, bringer of death) instead of a more ambivalent, polytheistic setting?

Maybe Odin with Raven Helmet
(also from Tissø)

ML - SPOILER ALERT IN THIS REPLY The endless battle is a publisher’s blurb, not my description. I would argue my view is not Manichean. Odin is a complex figure, almost at war with himself. Remember, the Witch Queen is one of his victims and SPOILER ALERT he is the cause of her death as EVEN BIGGER SPOILER ALERT she is one of his embodiments. Loki characterizes himself as Odin’s servant. It’s not a straightforward position of enmity and – at the end – it’s plain Loki has been tricked into doing as Odin wants. He’s an instrument of Odin in a way that the Devil is not an instrument of God (though, if you start thinking about it, as chief warden of Hell the devil’s actually responsible for inflicting God’s punishment).

I do accept that I’ve cut the number of gods who appear in Wolfsangel and, in that sense, you could see a Judeo-Christian style opposition in the story. This was for dramatic reasons. The focus is the human characters. I just didn’t want to start cramming lots of other gods in as they would be distracting.– although Freya is in the original WWII version.

Freya by James Doyle Penrose (circa 1890)

KS - Your “witch queen of the mountains, that mind-blown child” is called Gullveig ("gold-draught") and is named for an Eddic figure usually associated with Freya, especially in her relationship to both gold and magic. In Wolfsangel, the witches have piles of golden treasure molding in their dark caves, and Gullveig is known "to some of the local people as Huldra" – a variant name-form for Huld or Holda, who is sometimes portrayed as a practitioner of seid-magic and a mistress of Odin. Near the end of the novel, Gullveig presents herself to Adisla using magic and appears as what seems to be a vision of the goddess Freya : "The lady was dressed in a fine robe embroidered with gold; a beautiful necklace burned at her throat and a crown of sapphires shone like ice in the sun upon her head. Even the dark seemed to peel away around this lovely woman."

When you describe the piles of treasure in Gullveig’s horde, you write: "Jewels were called the tears of Freya, after the goddess who was said to weep them. He had thought it just a story for winter. But now he saw that tears and precious things have their fates tightly bound." This is a very interesting idea; it explains the kenning for gold ("Freya’s weeping") by connecting wealth to misery. I don’t think it spoils your book’s plot to say that Gullveig is not actually Freya. Did you give her this name to deepen the mystery surrounding the character, or are you putting forward the idea that Freya is merely a reflection of Odin – a sort of valkyrie messenger or “wish maiden”? How does this fit in with your use (or not) of the Norse pantheon?

Gullveig's Execution by Anker Eli Petersen (2003)

ML - In the WWII version, the witch has an absolute correspondence with Gullveig – three times burned – the gold-hungry witch.

In that version she was an incarnation of Freya and when the Nazis summon her, they get a lot more than they bargained for because of her insatiable appetite for gold. There was a really fun scene where the chief Nazi psycho contradicts her and finds himself unable to speak any more. The Nazis don’t realize she’s appeared in their midst – they only know that one of their officer’s wives is showing uncanny powers of prophecy. When they try to control her, a rising panic goes through their ranks as they find out that Norse goddesses are not so easily controlled and, in fact, are a whole lot more used to controlling.

When I rewrote the book, I kept the name but not the correspondence. I didn’t actually see who Gullveig really was until about half way through the book. It came as a surprise to me. The description of the necklace is inspired by the Brisingamen necklace that belonged to Freya. In the original Wolfsangel, it’s described as "burning with all the colors of a city on fire."

Egill Skallagrímsson raises níðstöng
("scorn-pole") by Gustav Vigeland

KS - The spirit of the 10th-century Icelander Egill Skallagrímsson seems to permeate the book. Chapter Five is called “The Loss of Sons,” which is the English name for Sonatorrek, arguably Egill’s best-known poem. When Gullveig sends Feileg to be raised by úlfhednar (“wolf-skins”), the boy is trained by Kveld Ulf ("night wolf"), which is the nickname of Úlfr Bjálfason, Egill’s grandfather. Egil’s Saga reports that "every day towards evening he would grow so bad-tempered that few people dared even address him. He always went to sleep early in the evening and woke up early in the morning. People claimed he was a shape-shifter and they called him Kveldulf." The original Kveldulf is no werewolf, but really just a grumpy old man. Your Kveld Ulf may not be a geezer, yet he is also not a true werewolf, "but a man who had become by instinct and thought half animal."

Feileg and Kveld Ulf, like the berserkers in the novel, drink mushroom potions and hallucinate. They put on wolf skins and prey on hapless travelers, like Sigmund and Sinfjötli in the Völsunga Saga. You have said that many of the tropes of the werewolf – full moon, silver bullets, etc. – are really Hollywood creations of the 20th century, and that "my wolf is closer to the wolf of the Norse myth." However, Vali’s first "transformation" occurs under "a huge full moon." Aren’t the werewolves of Norse legend really metaphorical or psychological? When it comes down to it, aren’t your men in wolf skins more like saga werewolves and the mystical monster of your book more a creature of the modern horror genre?

Full moon and northern lights in Norway

ML - The mystical monster’s transformation occurs over a period of about three months (maybe longer, I honestly can’t remember) – not at any one time. I admit that I do put some moon imagery in, but it’s not cited as a cause of his transformation. It’s more in the spirit of playing with the reader’s expectations. By saying that my werewolf is closer to that of Norse myth, I meant the conception of lycanthropy as something you take on as a choice – through sorcery – or as a curse. Sinfjotli in the Volsung saga has a little of both aspects.

But yes, the men in wolfskins are more akin to saga werewolves than the mystical monster. My Kveld Ulf may not be a true werewolf, but he does a good impression. He’s mistaken for a wolf by Feileg when he first sees him. I would say the monster is nearer to other mythic traditions – Greek and Roman, where the werewolf does not get to change back – than it is to modern horror. However, there’s undoubtedly the influence of modern horror there, it’s just not swallowed hook, line and sinker.

In fact, if there’s an inspiration for the mystical werewolf in Wolfsangel, it’s Kafka’s Metamorphosis. What level of horror can love survive? How much must someone change before they’re no longer really them? Kafka asks those questions and provides his answers. I came to the same conclusions.

8th-century Irish crucifix

KS - There are some very clever moments in the book dealing with religion. Vali misunderstands an embroidered image of Christ on the cross: "It was a strange but beautiful representation of Odin suspended from a tree, a spear piercing his side. It was a depiction, he felt, of the god’s quest for wisdom at the well of Mimir, where he had given up his eye for knowledge." At another point, Loki says, "Have you not heard the stories? Of how the gods can split off a hair and grow it as a man, how their incarnations forget their godly origin and live as ordinary people. More of a challenge to be a god and not know it, I think, than to walk secure in your divinity as Jesus did." You have written, "I have no axe to grind for Odinism or Christianity. I find both very interesting myths." After delving so deeply into the subject as you wrote this novel, what do you think is relevant about these ancient religious systems for contemporary life?

ML - Clearly there’s an awful lot relevant for contemporary life with Christianity – at least in the USA, where it has a firm cultural hold. One of the things that’s always amazed me about American friends is how atheism seems to be a statement of some sort for them. In the UK it’s the default position – I knew no one who went to church until I met my wife and you never hear politicians thanking God the same way you do in the US. You’ll notice Blair – a religious man – just said "we don’t discuss that" when asked about God during his time in office. He feared his faith would lose him votes. It’s a surprise in the UK to meet people who are religious, and – particularly in metropolitan, educated circles – it comes as a shock if you discover one of your friends is. It’s also something that’s more likely to hamper you at work than get you on. I can’t think of many corporate types who would happily admit to being churchgoers. You’d be seen as a little weird. I don’t share that view myself, or I wouldn’t have married a Christian, but I mention it as it’s a key cultural difference between the US and the UK.

Thor with iPod by Marko Djurdjevic

The relevance of Christianity to modern life has been discussed ad infinitum by much more learned people than me. One that modern Christians might like to ponder, though, is the Sermon on the Plain – "But woe to you who are rich, because you have received your comfort." From my reading of the Bible, it seems entirely incompatible with modern consumer culture or capitalism as a whole. Can a Christian buy an iPod while Africa starves? Luckily, I don’t have to answer these questions myself!

The Norse myths have great relevance for anyone who cares to read them. In particular, Hávamál – the Ballad of the High One – contains very good advice on everything from how to get on with people at a dinner to the transitory value of worldly goods. Some of the advice is inappropriate to our modern society, but some of it is timeless.

Both myths, of course, contain the destruction of the world as a certainty. That is irrelevant for modern life – our future is in our hands.

Drekkingarhylur (Drowning Pool) in Þingvellir

KS - Your portrayal of religious ritual mixes historical information with neo-pagan beliefs. On the historical side, Adisla is threatened with hanging at midsummer as "Odin’s bride." Disa inhales herb-smoke and chants meditatively, cutting an Ansuz rune on piece of wood and coloring it with her blood. Vali undergoes ritualized drowning to gain mystic knowledge from Odin, and is told that "we’ll put a noose on you. It’s a symbol so the god can find you." Chapter 21 is called "The Drowning Pool," the English name for Drekkingarhylur in Iceland’s Þingvellir – actually a place of Christian punishment for "guilty women" until 1838. Ancient bodies left as bog sacrifices (presumably to Odin) in Denmark – as well as descriptions in various historical documents – show a combination of hanging, stabbing and drowning. In Hávamál, Odin himself ties this all together:

Do you know how to carve, do you know how to interpret,
Do you know how to stain, do you know how to test out,
Do you know how to ask, do you know how to sacrifice,
Do you know how to dispatch, do you know how to slaughter?

On the neopagan side, Disa has her hair braided "at the back in three tight knots," which you describe as "the hanging knots of the dead lord’s necklace – symbol of Odin." Elsewhere, you call this symbolic shape "the three tight interlocking triangles – the dead lord’s necklace, sign of the god Odin, the berserk, the hanged, the drowned, the wise and the mad, the god to whom she had dedicated her life." This seems to reference Alby Stone’s idea of connecting the ancient (but mysterious) symbol to both the hangman’s noose and to ancient hairstyles. Did you research neo-pagan beliefs while writing the novel? Did you attend rituals or correspond with any contemporary practitioners?

So-called "Valknut" on 9th-century carving from Lärbro, Sweden

ML - I think I’m aware of neo-pagan beliefs from my adolescent interest in them. The hanging knot had a great significance in the WWII story and is known to modern pagans as the Valknut. I did use a lot of Alby Stone’s ideas in conceptualizing it. Its use in my story is related to this, but you’ll see that the image of the triple knot is at the heart of Wolfsangel and to the ongoing series – from the way that Adisla, Feileg and Vali are bound to how other characters relate in the follow-up Fenrir.

I’m aware the bog sacrifices show a combination of hanging, stabbing and drowning, and Wolfsangel contains an explanation of why that might have been. The sorcerer goes to the bog (in Wolfsangel it’s called a "mire"; "bog" is British slang for "toilet") to contact the other world. He may be possessed by dark forces and so his friends wait to kill him, if he is. This is, clearly, a step too far in interpretation for any historian to make. However, I’m not a historian so I can use the ancient religious practice as a jumping off point for my imagination.

KS - Describing your version of seid (simply put, “sorcery” or “magic”), you have said that "it is basically the magic system that operates in the real world. When I say that, that doesn’t mean I believe in real-world magic, but this is what people attempt when they attempt magic in the real world. Christian ascetics – i.e., people who go to the desert for thirty days, thirty nights or longer, live in the desert, starving – Indian yogis, American Indian holy men, particularly shamen from all cultures suffer in order to invoke magical visions or magical consciousness inside themselves." Your portrayal of a "magic of suffering" in Wolfsangel feels right; it emotionally resonates as an elaboration of the rituals hinted at in Norse myth and saga. Were these scenes in the novel based on any personal experience with, say, meditation or hallucinogens? Were they based on research that you’ve done, or did you imaginatively follow the implications of seid as it is described in the Old Norse texts?

norsemyth.org does not endorse drug use.
Poster by R. Crumb (1971)

ML - A bit of both. My experience of magic is heavily influenced by my teenage use of hallucinogens – psilocybin magic mushrooms which, I hasten to add, were legal in my country at the time I was taking them. The interesting thing about them, I found, was not the visual hallucinations they caused but the emotional effect. You start to feel emotions for which there are no words at all. I always used to get a sort of creeping, knowing paranoia descending into a conspiratorial but vulnerable sort of giggling. The descriptions of the werewolf transformation, where the werewolf finds himself giggling, his nose dribbling with snot, the world seeming hostile, beautiful and strange are basically descriptions of coming up on mushrooms – particularly in the scene at the Saami camp.

The reason I stopped taking mushrooms was that I genuinely feared being tipped over the edge into madness. That significant downside of the experience is in Wolfsangel, too.

The descriptions are equally influenced by the experience of being extremely tired, working late or – as a kid – doing all night wargames. Time becomes elastic, minutes stretching to hours but suddenly snapping back when you realize it’s becoming light.

There are descriptions of Norse vala – female magic practitioners – sitting on high chairs to conduct their ceremonies. It occurred to me that this might be because it’s very difficult to sleep on a high chair, and that went into my description of the ceremony Disa conducts. There’s no historical reason to think this was the case, but I thought it an interesting idea.

INTERVIEW WITH M. D. LACHLAN (WOLFSANGEL), Part Three

2011-08-30T14:38:00.002-05:00

Loki by Carl Emil Doepler (1882)

KS - In another Wolfsangel scene, Vali prays, "Lord Loki, prince of lies, friend to man, let me endure. Let me endure." Despite the beliefs of some neo-pagans today, there is actually no historical evidence of there ever having been a cult of Loki. Recently, a producer for the History Channel got very short with me when I pointed this out, as he’d already planned an episode around the idea of Loki’s supposed worshipers.

Near the midpoint of the book, you write that "Vali was not religious but for a heartbeat he realized the truth of the gods of his people. Every one was a god of death – of war: Freya, goddess of fertility and war; Thor, god of thunder and war; Freyr, god of pleasure and prosperity but battle bold. Only Loki was not a fighter. Only Loki stood at the sides and laughed, a laughter more deadly to the self-important gods than any sword or spear. No wonder they had chained him." In Norse myth, Frey gives away his mystic sword for interracial love. Balder, Bragi, Idunn, Njord, Idunn, Sif and others have no connection to war – and Loki famously taunts them for it.

Vali later says that "Loki is an enemy of the gods, not of people. When did you ever hear of him acting against men? He kills giants, he kills gods, but men he helps or leaves alone." Thor is, of course, the giant-killer of myth. Loki’s involvement in the murder of Balder is portrayed in the Edda as unequivocally evil. Placing your book after death of Balder and binding of Loki means that – in mythic time – it’s after Loki has become a wholly wicked creature. His next step is to destroy the world and kill all of humanity (save for one lucky couple).

McNamara's The Star-Crossed Stone

In The Star-Crossed Stone, Kenneth J. McNamara writes of the pentagram: "turn it upside down and the black dogs of hell are unleashed, symbolizing, at least from the nineteenth century onward, evil and the devil." After thousands of years of use of the pentagram as a positive symbol, we have the Late Romantic era to thank for its unshakeable association with Satanism and, eventually, heavy metal of the 1980s. Recently, there seems to be a similar – if reverse – process at work on Loki. Despite being a clearly evil figure by the end of the mythic timeline, there is a trend to make him a sympathetic character. Is this part of a Western focus on anti-heroes and villains as being intrinsically more interesting than simple heroes? What does it say about the values of our contemporary culture?

ML - People have been doing this for years. I mentioned Don Quixote, but I could easily chime in with Richard III, the figure of the malcontent in Elizabethan drama, Tom Jones, Becky Sharpe, Moll Flanders, Sam Spade – Robin Hood, for goodness sake! However, we are at a point in history where it is difficult to find a traditional Roy-Rogers-style hero. The growth of the anti-hero says nothing negative about us at all. It just says that we enjoy moral complexity and won’t settle for simple categories of good and evil. I’m not sure "anti-hero" is even a meaningful phrase any more. "Complex hero" is less snappy but more descriptive.

Tony Soprano with Viking beard

Actually, I think it’s only partly true that we want greater complexity from our literature. We’ve seen a huge growth in the anti-hero but not a corresponding growth in the anti-villain, at least not in genre fiction. Modern films and books still bristle with straightforwardly horrible villains who almost appear in a puff of smoke with a thunderclap. Not every depiction of a villain is so straightforward, and moral complexity has been introduced into the figure – Hannibal Lecter springs to mind, although I’d argue he’s actually an extreme form of anti-hero, as is Dexter and Tony Soprano. But the traditional villain is in much better shape than the traditional hero. Hollywood still usually characterizes its antagonists as in some way intrinsically bad (and often British!), not simply misguided or acting from legitimate but competing interests to the hero.

In both Wolfsangel and Fenrir, I have complex villains. However, when I wrote Lord of Slaughter – third in this series and out next year – I decided to come up with one who is a little more down-the-line evil. It was quite good fun writing a no-holds-barred nasty piece of work.

I was thinking of the main Norse gods when I wrote that speech for Vali. I wouldn’t read too much into Loki’s taunts – he also taunts Thor for hiding in battle, something that has no corroboration in other stories. Also Eldir, a serving man at the home of the gods, says of the Norse gods who are drinking in a hall: "Of their weapons they talk, and their might in war." He, unlike Loki, is not associated with lies so we may trust his word better. All the gods you mention are in the hall that Eldir is referring to. Loki is outside it when the action begins.

Vali by Carl Emil Doepler (1882)

You are correct – there is no evidence for any worship of Loki. However, I don’t think it unusual that people at odds with their society – and Vali is in some ways that, a figure who is thinking beyond the constraints of his upbringing – should identify with marginal figures from the myths. Again, I’m not making an academic point or trying to suggest that Vali is even in a cult of Loki; it’s an interpretation that just feels right. Also, remember in the story that Vali is Loki’s son. It’s the consciousness of that that’s dawning on him.

The notion of Loki as a hero is interesting. Again, I didn’t think of him as that. As far as I recalled, I was being true to the myth to make him antipathetic to the gods but friendly to men.

My Loki hates heroism and finds heroes boring, self-centred egotists. Loki is not straightforwardly heroic, but he is outwardly sympathetic to ordinary humans. I’ve hunted for the story where I formed this impression and can’t find it. Perhaps you will know it – he basically helps two islanders outwit a giant, I recall.

Odin at Mimir's Well of Knowledge by Emil Doepler (1905)

KS - Despite the book’s final scene – in which Loki gives his own spin on Christian mythology – your version of Loki seems grounded in a Judeo-Christian worldview. Early on in the novel, he describes Odin's quest for knowledge: "He would eat the world! . . . He would know it all, devour every mystery until the whole of creation came at his call. He’s mad, you know. He drank so deeply of the knowledge well but the waters splashed on that burning hunger and boiled all his brains. Yet still he wants to know, ever more, ever more." Although this echoes the refrain from the Eddic poem Völuspá ("Would you know more, or what?"), the idea that the quest for knowledge is a dangerous thing comes straight from the Book of Genesis. Near the end of the novel, knowledge of the runes brings "insight and unhappiness." I understand your portrayal of Odin as battle-mad, but why did you choose to portray Odin’s quest for knowledge – such a fundamental part of his character – in this negative light?

ML - A quote from Hávamál ("Sayings of the High One") from the Poetic Edda:

A measure of wisdom each man shall have
But never too much let him know
For the wise man’s heart is seldom happy
If wisdom too great he has won.

It’s right there in the source text, along with "Let no man the fate before him see / For so is he freest from sorrow." The runes bring unhappiness because they reveal the truth of the human place in the schemes of the gods.

Odin, Wisdom-Seeking Wanderer by Arthur Rackham (1911)

This doesn’t invalidate your point of view about the quest for knowledge being a fundamental part of Odin’s character and, in some ways, a very positive one. It just shows there are different strands within the Eddas and, as a creative writer, I feel free to pick up the ones I like and discard the ones I don’t.

I would accept that Loki views knowledge as a dangerous thing, but this predates Christianity. Pandora’s Box springs to mind and the myth of Prometheus. Also the idea that mystic knowledge is privileged and should be treated with great care, accessible to only a few, is central to many religions – from that of shamans through the medieval Catholic church right up to modern Masonic cults. It is Christian, but not exclusively so.

The association of knowledge with unhappiness comes out of my conception of magic – that it involves a descent into madness. At other points in Wolfsangel, knowledge is seen as very desirable. Vali wishes he had a Christian scribe to help him out and longs to learn to read. Also, remember that it’s Loki who’s describing Odin’s quest. He doesn’t like him. Loki is seen as a figure who celebrates the ordinary sensual pleasures – it’s enough for him to enjoy the light of a spring morning. He doesn’t need to know where it comes from or why it seems to glitter. So his quest for knowledge is only negative if you believe Loki and see the state of magic-induced madness as a bad thing.

"It was then that I carried you" - Footprints now available on a coffee mug

KS - Odin’s self-sacrifice on the World Tree to gain mystic knowledge – which he then shares with humanity – is often compared to the sacrifice of Christ on the cross for the benefit of his human followers. In your book, Odin is portrayed as completely selfish, and Loki becomes the Christ figure as you foreground his binding and suffering. When Loki appears next to Vali in battle against the Danish invaders, Vali asks, “Are you with us?” Loki touches his arm and says, “I have been with you since the beginning.” Not quite “it was then that I carried you,” but we’re definitely leaving Trickster Land and getting into Christlike “friend and protector” territory. Why did you decide to portray Loki in this fashion?

ML - He’s Vali’s father and has appeared to reassure him. I hope there isn’t a parallel with the "it was then that I carried you" story. I find the Bible evocative, inspiring and frightening. The footprints story has always struck me as a piece of unbearable latter-day schmaltz! I remember hearing it for the first time as a kid and having difficulty keeping my dinner down.

The Troll Wall is a difficult climb (even without carrying babies)

John Hurt's Caligula enjoys cross-dressing as much as Loki does!

Loki is clearly an interesting figure in Norse myth and one who doesn’t behave particularly consistently. He is capable of being helpful to the gods, of being mildly mischievous and of being murderous. Again, I approached this as a creative writer, not an academic. I didn’t particularly plan for Loki to appear – he came with Saitada. She was not a planned character but only came into the book when I realised Authun needed someone to feed the babies on his trip to the Troll Wall. So I put them with their mother. Then she kind of took over. I knew the twins were Loki’s children, so I needed to account for how a slave girl came to lie down with a god. That’s when Loki appeared. He’s not Christlike when he seduces Saitada. My mental model for him was John Hurt playing Caligula in the BBC series I, Claudius. He’s not Christlike – he is governed by extremes of emotion and is a little deranged himself.

We have one view of Odin in Wolfsangel, and it’s a view that lasts the first three books. However, there is a large development planned in Book IV that shows another view of Odin. Is there a possibility Loki might have been lying? Or – more consistent with my Loki – speaking truths that he knows people will misinterpret?

Loki helps Hoder kill Balder by Carl Emil Doepler (1882)

KS - In the last few years, neo-pagans have looked to Loki as a positive role model, especially for gay and transgendered individuals. I understand the impulse, but the Loki of Norse myth very clearly progresses from Trickster to Destroyer of Worlds. You have said that "Ragnarök is not the end of the world, as the Edda make clear. It’s the end of the old gods, and a time of great trial for the world, but the world survives and new, kinder gods take over." This seems to posit Loki as an agent of positive change, yet the Eddas clearly portray him as an evil figure who brings about the death of Balder – "the wisest of the [gods], and the fairest-spoken and most gracious" – and whose actions indiscriminately kill gods and humans and drown the world. How do you read, for example, Snorri’s statement that Loki is "the Æsir’s calumniator and originator of deceits and the disgrace of all gods and men"?

ML - It’s an interpretation. I’m not presenting a paper on Norse myth, I’m offering a view. What happens when you write is that the characters take on a life of their own. The Edda has its view of Loki, I have mine. Now I know that sounds enormously arrogant, but Snorri is doing what I am doing – changing the form in which the myths are rendered. These are part of a spoken tradition. Snorri is writing them down and, in doing so, inevitably changing them. OK, he’s nearer to the source material, but that doesn’t mean we have to take his word as inviolable – not as creative writers anyway. It would be different if you were coming at the text as an academic.

Also, the world renews after the gods are gone – Loki’s actions make the place better – unless you read the last couple of verses of Völuspá. So it’s a telling of a story from a different point of view.

Snorri Sturluson - creative writer or academic?

I still perform as a stand up comedian, and the spoken discipline is entirely different to the written. Things that work well in written form die on stage, and stage jokes often don’t quite cut the mustard on the page. So I think it likely that these myths were told in many different ways down the years and, in the case of skilled storytellers, adapted on the hoof. If the storyteller senses the audience are enjoying Loki, he will elaborate a bit more. If they’re bored by him, he’ll dismiss him and move on. Snorri gets a snapshot of the myth and – as it’s all we have – then that’s what we must go on when making our judgments. But you can’t regard it as canonical in the same way you would a novel.

Odin brings war into the world. With his death it disappears. Now, you can view that as a bad thing if you like, but I interpret it as a good one. And, yes, it does entail me ignoring certain statements of Snorri’s, but that’s fundamental to the nature of storytelling, and it’s been that way ever since people began telling stories. As I’ve compared myself to a Nobel Prize winner, I may as well compare myself to Shakespeare. If you look at what he does with Macbeth, for instance, he entirely ignores the actual history and turns Macbeth from a reasonable real ruler into a monstrous fictitious one. I don’t think it works as a criticism to say, "But, Shakey, baby, you haven’t got it right." No, but it’s rather irrelevant to the drama Shakespeare created.

Beowulf vs Dragon in DC Comics (1975)

KS - The names of your characters all resonate with allusion. In a seeming editorial oversight that perhaps refers to an earlier version of the character’s name, Authun is called Authwi at one point – from the Icelandic auðui (“wealth”). This seems to underscore the emptiness of this haunted king’s physical treasure and power. Near the end of the novel, Authun’s battle with the werewolf occurs in a chapter entitled “The Battle in the Hoard Cave” – an echo of Beowulf’s struggle with the Night Flyer. Authun’s wife is Yrsa, named for the Icelandic saga character who is both sister and mother of the hero Hrólf Kraki – a man with a name that itself references the wolf. Adisla’s mother (“a noted healer”) is Disa, from dís (“lady,” “woman”) – but also associated with dísir (“goddesses”). Bragi is named for the poet of the gods, and he – like a courtly skald – tries to instill young Vali with a love of tradition, history and Viking manliness. This creates a deeper current beneath the surface of the text for those familiar with Norse myth and legend. Did you create characters and then search for meaningful names, or did the names suggest the characters?

ML - The answer is "neither." Again, I have to say that I approach this stuff as a creative writer, not an academic. So I pick names I like. The correspondences – particularly those of Disa and Bragi – did strike me at the time I thought of them but only as an afterthought. Academics tend to want the creative process to be mechanical – an identifiable train of cogs that can be traced back to the power source of myth. They assume that because something refers to something else, it was intentional. Sometimes that’s true, but in this case, it isn’t.

Authwi is a typo in the Pyr version – my typo, but a typo nevertheless. I could say, then, that you’re simply wrong to deduce the correspondences that you do. However, the correspondence seems too strong - Authwi is pretty much a direct rendering of auðui – for there to be nothing at all in what you say. So I would say that the allusions you’ve identified are both accidental and revealing. I don’t think there’s a contradiction in that.

Paradoxically, "Creative Writing" is now an academic subject!

As I’ve said, the creative process is a mysterious and weird thing, and I’m convinced it comes from a different part of the brain to the one requiring rational thought. There really is very little similarity in the way academics construct their arguments and how writers produce their stories. There is not always a trail of footprints back to the text. Some things appear from thin air – or at least appear to. I’m prepared to accept that these correspondences are correct and that – as I am someone who has been immersed in the myth for many years – they hopped out of my brain. But they had nothing to do with planning, forethought or deliberate allusion. Maybe, as you say, it is Odin working through me – though I can’t think he’d approve of me too much!

I’m not mining the myth like an academic would mine a text for references to support their central idea. It’s much more haphazard and organic. What is remarkable is that, when you proceed in this way, you can come up with some remarkable allusions that you never actually intended and in such a number that would make you believe it couldn’t be just coincidence. Spooky stuff, eh?

Loki in Chains (1880)

The exception here is Vali. Vali comes from the following passage: "Now Loki was taken truceless, and was brought with them into a certain cave. Thereupon they took three flat stones, and set them on edge and drilled a hole in each stone. Then were taken Loki's sons, Váli and Nari or Narfi; the Æsir changed Váli into the form of a wolf, and he tore asunder Narfi his brother. And the Æsir took his entrails and bound Loki with them over the three stones: one stands under his shoulders, the second under his loins, the third under his boughs; and those bonds were turned to iron."

Again, I’m not looking for direct correspondences in the myth, but this was where the idea of two brothers bound to a destructive destiny came from, and it was appealing one turned into a wolf. Originally, Feileg was called Narfi. Unfortunately, to the British ear that name is comic. It either conjures up NAAFI – which used to be the notoriously foul army catering service – or the word "naff," so it had to go.

It was only as the story was written that I saw that the werewolf transformation would be related to the Fenris wolf and therefore a threat to Odin rather than to Loki.

There is no process of logic to this. I think sometimes logic can be the enemy of creative thought. I could have said, "but the myth says he must kill his brother and bind Loki." But I’m rendering the spirit rather than the letter of the myth and I have no problem with that.

Badb by Elizabeth Caffey (2011)

KS - The mother of Vali and Feilig is named Badb, after the Celtic goddess associated with the raven, the wolf and “fury” – all very Odinic. She changes her name to Saitada, the name of a goddess known only from one engraved altar stone in Northumberland, England. Despite a lack of sources, British historian R. G. Collingwood theorized in 1908 that she may have been the "lady of grief." Associating your tragic character with grief is very understandable, but why did you link the consort of Loki with Badb, who seems more simpatico with the Raven God than with the Trickster?

ML - I agree. She was originally thought of as an incarnation of Odin. However, as the story wrote itself, it became more obvious she was an incarnation of Loki himself. That emerged at the moment I wrote Loki’s line to Saitada:

"My name is Misery. Do you want to know a secret?"
"I do."
"Yours is too."

She emerged at that moment. I may be misquoting a bit there, but the gist is correct.

I changed her function but not her name. However, it may turn out that Loki wasn’t right about her in later books and that the Trickster has himself been tricked. Or it may not.

Note: Star Trek's Tellarites do not appear in Wolfsangel

KS - There is a complicated character in the novel named Veles Libor. He’s an Obotrite, which sounds like a creature from the first seasons of Star Trek, but is actually a member of a Slavic tribe that lived in what is now northern Germany. Veles was a Slavic god with Odinic qualities, and your character is both wise and treacherous. Did you intend for his name to literally mean “Odin Liberated”?

ML - Veles the Slav god has Odinic qualities, but Loki-like ones too in that he’s the enemy of the central god of the Slav pantheon. He’s also a shapeshifter and a mischievous figure. Again, I just thought of the name and liked it, although its connotations did strike me.

I didn’t intend a correspondence between him and Odin, but it did occur me that there might be one. I’m not an academic, so I don’t have to tie up these loose ends. I thought it was an interesting possibility he might be an incarnation of Odin or Loki, but I didn’t feel the need to nail that down for myself or the reader. One of the interesting things you can do in a novel is let things float.

Veles the God by Viktor Križanovskij

Veles has a more direct and less mystical role too. He is a member of the coming merchant class – the people who will eventually become the rulers and powerbrokers of the world, an echo of the future. There is a small victory for trade over heroism – at least for a time – in the book. Veles is also a member of an oppressed minority and exposes Vali’s naivety in thinking that he would have forgotten the injustices he has suffered enough to be Vali’s friend. Veles hates the people he serves, but he is clever enough to disguise that. He’s a pragmatist rather than an evil figure, and I think there’s nothing wrong with the way he treats Vali. After all, Vali’s people have burned his home town, enslaved him and dragged him halfway across the world. Would he not naturally want revenge on them, given the chance?

INTERVIEW WITH M. D. LACHLAN (WOLFSANGEL), Part Two

2011-08-24T12:56:00.001-05:00

M. D. Lachlan (a.k.a. Mark Barrowcliffe)

KS - The novel is full of wonderful realistic touches. Authun a white-haired old man at age thirty-five, underscoring that life in the Viking age was nasty, brutish and short. Historical realism features prominently, as well. One example alludes to actual gender relations of the pre-Christian era: "Disa had divorced her husband and, since he was heavy with his fists, the assembly had voted that she be allowed to keep his farm." I’m very curious about your research process – mythological, literary and historical. Do you start with a historical concept – say, the use of the shield wall – and then build a scene around it? Do you write a scene and then look for facts to give it a realistic touch? How does research relate to the creative process?

Featherstone's Skirmish Wargaming

ML - I have a background in wargaming and have read a lot of military history in this period. I think my first contact with berserkers came in a book called Skirmish Wargaming by Donald Featherstone when I was around 11 – shortly before I started playing Dungeons & Dragons. My characters in D&D were often berserkers (pre-dated the barbarian character class and so much cooler). Even then I was interested to get stuff right, so I did a lot of reading about Vikings and Norse myth. So this mythology and history has been a large part of my imaginative life for many years. There’s plenty of stuff that I don’t need to research because I just know it.

The shield wall, for instance, is something I was very familiar with. What I didn’t know was what it was like to be in one. For this reason, I used research material from battle reenactors. I think they have a lot of valuable stuff, because they try to recreate the fighting styles and lives of the Vikings and therefore encounter similar problems and emerge, you would presume, with similar – or at least plausible – solutions.

Reenactors who haven't quite mastered the shield wall

There actually isn’t that much evidence for the use of a shield wall as a Viking tactic in this early period. There is evidence for its use soon after, though, so I thought I was justified in using it. You also have to use your common sense. OK, some people in the line have formed a shield wall before, some haven’t. What does that do to the organization of the wall? Also, my experience of being in football (soccer) crowds when the police are herding you made me realize how difficult it might be in such a press to actually draw or use a weapon. The old exit to the Arsenal ground at Highbury or the old Chelsea Stamford Bridge (a good Viking association there!) were narrow funnels at points, and you literally couldn’t get your hand to your head to scratch your ear sometimes.

On the deck of the recreated Viking ship Íslendingur (built 1996)

My research process is to read a lot of background stuff, making occasional notes if something strikes me as particularly interesting. I’ll read three or four good, authoritative books on the subject. In fact, for Wolfsangel, I read more than that, including revisiting the Eddas and the sagas. Then I write. As I write, I might encounter a question that needs answering. If I can’t find the answer immediately (five or six minutes), I don’t worry about it and write on. Then I address the missing information when I’ve finished the book. It’s always the really little things that are difficult to discover – how extensive was the deck on an early Viking longship? Even though East and West Norse were intelligible to each other, would accent have proved a problem? If you think this is unlikely, listen to this version of someone speaking Geordie – a British dialect that bears a lot of traces of Old English. He’s speaking your language and this is not a particularly extreme form of the accent.

Robert E. Howard's room in Cross Plains, Texas

KS - You have said that "writing is an oddly magical process. It’s something that I don’t know where it comes from, and – when it’s going well – it literally feels like I’m the first reader of it. I don’t feel that the intellectual side of my brain has much input into it . . . When I’m writing, it genuinely feels like it comes from a place that is beyond the influence of my conscious thought." This reminds me of Robert E. Howard’s description of writing the Conan stories: "The man Conan seemed suddenly to grow up in my mind without much labor on my part and immediately a stream of stories flowed off my pen – or rather, off my typewriter – almost without effort on my part. I did not seem to be creating, but rather relating events that had occurred." I’ve often experienced this phenomenon when composing music. My best pieces have popped fully-formed into my head, and I feel that I’m just transcribing them – that I didn’t consciously create them, but that I’m hearing them from “somewhere else.” Isn’t this experiential event what the ancient Norse called "Odin"? I mean, don’t you think that they experienced the same creative rush – and its subjective experience as something coming from outside the conscious mind – and attributed it to the god who possesses, who inspires, who brings frenzy?

ML - I think you’re right. I’m always wary of sounding like a lunatic in interviews on this subject. I don’t think the creative impulse comes from outside but that’s certainly how it feels. This is why I have difficulty answering some of your questions where you ask exactly where certain things originated and I feel almost that the best reply I can give is, "Er, somewhere."

Hesiod Listening to the Inspirations of the Muse by Aman-Jean (circa 1890)

There have been many names for this experience throughout history. The most common, of course, comes from Greek (rather than Norse ) culture in the shape of the Muses. The Muse visits the writer at his desk – or the musician or the dancer – and grants them their art. And sometimes, even for the best artists, the Muse simply fails to turn up.

KS - You write that "Authun was a Volsung, a direct descendant of the gods and was a vessel for their powers," but that the "battle-fond poet [Odin] felt threatened by his fierce descendant and had cursed Authun to sire only female children. He could not risk him producing an even mightier son." This is the exact opposite of the relationship between Odin/Wotan and the Volsung family in Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelungen, in which the god manipulates events specifically to create the mightiest human warrior possible. In Norse myth, Odin wants to gather the greatest human warriors to build his army for the final battle with the forces of chaos at Ragnarök. Why did you decide to flip this relationship between Odin and his descendants on its head?

ML - Again, I can’t claim premeditation. It just seemed right, seemed to fit with the feel of Norse mythology and of my story. To talk of "decision" in creative writing misses the essential nature of the process. I did not decide. I just wrote it. The decision, I suppose, came in the editing, when I decided to leave those words in. You’re right, though – the sentiment seems more Roman or Greek than Viking. I suppose it does tie in with Odin’s treacherous nature, however, and partly explains it.

The Binding of Fenris by Dorothy Hardy (circa 1909)

KS - Describing the Fenris Wolf, you write that “the tale said the wolf would lie there until the twilight of the gods – Ragnarok – when it would break its bonds and kill the All-Father Odin. It would usher in a new age, ruled by beautiful, just, fair spirits, not the corrupt, battle-mad, vengeful, and deceitful gods they called the Aesir, of which Odin was the chief.” You’ve written that "you might argue these [Snorri’s works] are examples of the new religion denigrating the old by turning its gods into men, but the whole body of Norse myth is written by Christians. Our only view of the old religions comes through the writings of Christian scholars." So, are you reverse-engineering the Edda by purposefully flipping the roles of the major characters? Do you think it’s possible to give the Eddas a postmodern reading that makes Odin the villain and Fenris the hero?

ML - It’s possible. Fenris gets treated pretty badly. He hasn’t actually bitten anyone by the time he gets tied up and seems quite a civil sort of wolf. I tend to do that by instinct, to look at things backwards. As I say, I don’t really deal in heroes or villains – at least not in this story. It’s just a matter of seeing the various interests of the competing characters. The gods want to live, they’ve restrained Fenrir because of that. That doesn’t make them evil, it makes them pragmatic. The wolf wants to kill them. Again, that doesn’t make him evil – it’s an understandable reaction to being tricked and trapped. It’s possible to have a story where everyone is acting correctly according to their morals and for them still to be in opposition with each other.

The Wild Hunt / Furious Host by Emil Doepler (1905)

KS - You repeatedly refer to Odin as insane, which seems more Germanic than Scandinavian. The German Wodan is rage and fury personified as he drives the Furious Host through terrifying winter skies. The Scandinavian Odin is the god of wisdom who outwits wise giants in riddle contests, brings poetic inspiration to humankind, gives ecstatic wisdom performances. In some Eddic tales – especially as Bölverk (“evil-doer”) – he does heartless and wicked things, yet he seems more cold and calculating than insane. Your version goes against high-profile interpretations of the last 200 years, including Wagner’s devious Wotan, Tolkien’s wise Gandalf and Branagh’s Old Testament Odin. However, I must admit that the vision of Odin that Loki gives Saitada in Wolfsangel does seem psychologically right in portraying the mythic god who stirs battle in the world: "The expression on the man’s face was terrible. Saitada had seen it before. It was the look men wore at cock fights or when cheering two dogs to rip into each other, the look the smith’s friends had worn as they’d held her down – a look of delight in violence and lust for more." Do you really see the mythic Odin as such a wholly negative character, or did you simplify his complexities for plot purposes?

ML - My Odin is just one aspect of the mythic Odin, but my interpretation is justified by looking at his names. Bale-worker, Gallows-burden, Raven-friend, Ghost King (not sure about the translation on that one), Frenzied One, Deceiver, Lord of the Hanged, Ruler of Treachery, Slain God. I wouldn’t call him negative. I’d say that he is unguessable, alien, godly, mystic and inhuman. One of the central horrors of Wolfsangel is that the characters are trapped in the schemes of a god whose mind is too alien for them to grasp.

Odin by Carl Emil Doepler (1882)

I happily admit that I’ve conflated Wodan with Odin and brought out one side of him. I did so for dramatic purposes. Magic to me – and Odin is king of magic – is a scary, unpredictable, unknowable force that can easily turn on its practitioners. It’s also very akin to madness. It was lodged in my head that Odin was god of magic, madness and poetry (among other things), and I admit I didn’t check the source material on that. I still think it’s an interpretation that stands up, but I would concede that the insane nature of the god, while there in Norse myth, isn’t to the fore.

I wanted a god that was appropriate to my idea of magic – something won by great privation and self-sacrifice and also something that is very dangerous for the practitioner. This comes from a variety of sources but primarily from Odin’s sacrifice of his eye at Mimir’s well and his hanging on the tree. It’s a matter of feel, really, and my Odin felt right both in respect to the myths, to the names he’s given in the sagas and the Edda, and to what we know of some of his actions. I’m not pretending to offer a mythologically-complete version of Odin, just a dramatic and plausible interpretation. And he’s certainly more true to the myth than the Thor film version – a peace-loving patriarch!

Tollund Man - possibly sacrificed in a bog (circa 300 BCE)

So, in short, there was no conscious decision to set my Odin against anyone else’s. There was just the desire to make the god consistent with the idea of magic in the book and to draw in certain other elements that aren’t strictly Norse but do chime with the god’s Germanic counterpart – such as the bog bodies. If I had a symbol for my idea of magic it would be the bog bodies. There are lots of explanations for how they got there but, in my interpretation in Wolfsangel, they are magical practitioners indulging in extreme rituals that go wrong.

KS - At one point in the novel, the character Vali decides that "one day he would drink Odin’s blood, tear that god down and make him pay for his corpse lust." Although Norse myth has many instances of Odin’s ambivalence and untrustworthiness, he is also the chief god in the Eddas, provides the gnomic wisdom of Hávamál ("Sayings of the High One"), brings life to humanity, and gives wisdom, poetry, runes, and so on. Doesn’t this use of Odin as villain forward the contemporary fantasy trope of focusing on auxiliary characters as protagonists and questioning central figures? Prominent examples of this trend include John Gardner’s Grendel (1971), Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon (1983) and Gregory McGuire’s Wicked (1995). There is a real postmodern delight in taking the side of the underdog or villain of the piece. Is Western society so jaded that we can’t get any pleasure from C. C. Beck’s Captain Marvel, but must always insist on Frank Miller’s Dark Knight? Are we in such a dark place as a culture?

The Dark Knight and the Big Red Cheese

ML - I would accept that, in some ways, Wolfsangel is a postmodern narrative, but I’m not sure it is in the way you seem to imply or in a way that would be accepted by postmodernists. It is postmodern in the sense that it doesn’t have sharply drawn villains and heroes, and there isn’t an immediate apparent overarching concept of good and evil. People fight for their own interests, which are seen as culturally-determined rather than absolutes of good and evil.

However, that’s as far as it goes. I think there is a definite value system in Wolfsangel which is modern but not postmodern. It’s certainly not Viking, though the characters themselves display Viking ways of thinking – with the exception of Vali who is characterized as a very progressive individual. Wolfsangel is not relativist. It upholds the values of humanity and almost of the mundane. It champions ordinariness against heroic action while – in a way that is either postmodern, ironic or hypocritical, depending on your view – centering the narrative almost exclusively on heroic action.

Vali wants to be a farmer, not a hero; Feileg wants to be a man, not a half-wolf. The gods are not the central focus in Wolfsangel – the people are. It’s a human story and the humans in it are, on the whole, flawed but decent people.

Nicholas Cage in The Wicker Man (2006)

In pitting the humans against dark and strange gods, I hope that my story moves away from the "scarred hero" cliché (which surely reached its nadir in the Nicholas Cage remake of The Wicker Man, but don’t get me started). In this way, Wolfsangel isn’t a postmodern story at all; it’s nearer to an old fashioned tragedy – starcrossed lovers finding themselves challenged and torn apart by a merciless and cruel world. It has more in common with Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago than it does The Dark Knight Returns. Notice how I effortlessly compare myself to an author who won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Odin is not a villain. He is the enemy of one of the central characters, true, but I don’t think that equates quite to "villain." And remember that Odin is in the story in many forms, and, like every other character in it, he’s seeking primarily to protect himself or what he holds dear.

Spider-Man, God of Thunder

If you want to equate the story to a comic book, I’d say it’s not near to Captain Marvel or Frank Miller. Although it’s vastly different in tone, it’s closer to Spider-Man. There you have a human hero who is forced to come to terms with the reality of what he is and to try to retain the vestiges of a normal life the best he can. He is neither a paragon of heroic virtue nor psychological damage. If I had to come down in one camp or the other, Captain Marvel or the Dark Knight, I’d say the book is nearer to Marvel. The character of Feileg, in particular, is straightforwardly heroic. Yes, he’s suffered, but that makes him a realistic character rather than a postmodern cipher for alienation and the collapse of meaning. In fact, Feileg is anything but alienated, and he sees his life as full of meaning. Vali’s entire journey is a quest to hold on to meaning and to reaffirm it.

Bradley's The Mists of Avalon

I loved The Mists of Avalon when I read it (although I’m convinced I read it in 1981 – seems I couldn’t have), and I do think it’s interesting to approach some stories sideways. We always like a new view on things. You don’t need to go as far as to call it postmodern. A better word is, perhaps, "novel." The novel has always undermined things and turned them around from its very foundations. When the novel takes on myth, it inevitably alters and skews it to its own ends. No one called Don Quixote postmodern, but it took an existing form – the heroic romance – and turned it on its head. That was written in 1605 and, as such, is a seminal moment in the creation of the modern novel. So the "Frank Miller" impulse has been with us from the start, and if we’re in a dark place as a culture, we’ve been in it for a long time.

INTERVIEW WITH M. D. LACHLAN (WOLFSANGEL), Part One

2011-08-16T20:59:00.002-05:00

Cover to Wolfsangel

Set in the Viking Age, British author M. D. Lachlan's novel Wolfsangel is the first book in an important new historical fantasy series. Lachlan uses Norse myth in a brilliantly imaginative way that is at once traditional and radical. Unlike the myth-inspired yet newly-created characters in The Lord of the Rings, several figures in Wolfsangel come straight from the Eddas and sagas – including Odin, Loki, berserkers and werewolves. However, Lachlan's portrayal of their actions and his interpretations of their motivations are anything but orthodox. Through a heady mixture of research and inspiration, Lachlan has created a polyphonic work that is both allusive enough to engage readers with a knowledge of Norse myth and elusive enough to create a page-turner reminiscent of Patricia Highsmith's best.

As Mark Barrowcliffe (his real name), Lachlan has published Girlfriend 44, Infidelity for First-Time Fathers, Lucky Dog and Mr. Wrong. His 2007 book The Elfish Gene chronicled a youth obsessed with Dungeons & Dragons. Fenrir, the sequel to Wolfsangel, is due to be published by Pyr in the United States in October.

In the first part of what he has called "the most involved interview I've ever had in my life," Lachlan discusses his influences, the nature of writing historical fiction, kitsch in the fantasy genre and Viking cosmetic dentistry.

KS - The series of novels that begins with Wolfsangel will, according to the publisher, "spill over into countless bloody conflicts from our history." I imagine a series that starts in the Viking Age as historical fantasy, moves through various eras and genres like steampunk and alternate history, and ends up in the far future with a hard SF novel. Is your series going to have this large of a scope?

ML - Only to the present day. I’d be a lousy SF writer. Fantasy is in my blood, SF isn’t. I like SF, but I dreamed of dragons and swordfights as a kid, not spaceships and lasers. I will be going forward in time for as long as the series proves popular. It will end up in the Victiorian era, should I and the series last that long, but I will be avoiding steampunk tropes. This is for two reasons – the first is that I’ve never read a steampunk novel so wouldn’t know how to reproduce their tropes if I tried. The second is that – as with SF – you need to have a real love for something to make it work. My love is for real history, so I would try to engage with the Victorian period by making my story as realistic as possible – the fantasy elements aside. I have some ideas, but I won’t go into them here.

Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White

When fantasy engages with Victoriana, then it tends to do so in a fairly limited way, from what I’ve seen. Steampunk has quite a narrow focus, from what I understand of it. The Victorian era has a huge scope, and I’d hope to explore some of that. The novel I’ve admired the most that’s set in that period is Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White. It explores some of the big fractures in Victorian society. I must read [William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's] The Difference Engine, though. I’ve been meaning to get around to it for years.

The WWII story is written and currently in two forms. The most likely form to emerge is a detective story. However, it will depend on my books selling very well, as publishers might fight shy of publishing something that has moved so far away from the original.

KS - The idea of a series that takes the characters over a great span of time and literary styles probably found its apotheosis in Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy, which was published over a thirteen year period (1946-1959) and evolves from Gothic fantasy to a sort of Kerouackian Bildungsroman. Was Peake someone that influenced you as a writer?

One of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast manuscripts

ML - No. I’ve tried several times to get through Gormenghast and never managed it. This sounds dreadfully philistine, but the story doesn’t present itself quickly enough for me. I find the detail that Peake puts into his work can be grueling. He’s clearly a very important writer, and I’m sure that I write to an extent in his shadow without ever having read him all the way through. I was a big [Michael] Moorcock fan, and Moorcock has influenced my work. Peake’s an enormous influence on Moorcock, so inevitably on me too.

I will try Peake again one day, but I think life is too short to read books you don’t enjoy – no matter how much you might be able to admire them.

KS - The great realism of your novel – especially the intensely personal description of battle – is reminiscent of Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon Stories. Were his works of historical fiction an influence on your series? Do you read much historical fiction or history, in general?

ML - I deliberately avoided Bernard Cornwell because I didn’t want to end up reproducing his style or, worse, writing against it. The realism, if it comes from anywhere, comes from my own martial arts and fencing experience. The nervousness you get before a judo contest or going in for a session of heavy sparring at boxing informed how I described the people’s feelings in a battle. Everyone feels nervous in those situations, everyone has moments of doubt and has to fight down their fear. And that’s in modern, regulated sport. How much more nervous will you feel facing an armed and lethal enemy?

Bengtsson's The Long Ships

I read an awful lot of history and some historical fiction. I particularly enjoyed Frans G. Bengtsson’s The Long Ships for its ability to capture the Viking character. I’ve read a lot of Robert Harris and also enjoyed stuff such as Q by Luther Blissett and The Name of the Rose [by Umberto Eco]. I’ve read little historical fiction about war. I don’t find this a drawback when I write – I like to come at things from my point of view, not carrying respect or dislike for another writer’s way of doing things.

I’m glad you used the word "realism." The "ism" is crucial. What I’m offering isn’t an academic document that will act as a reliable guide to life in the Viking Age. I’m offering a well-researched novel. There’s a big difference. I have much greater license than historians do when approaching their work.

For instance, the berserker cult of "Odin the Frenzied" relates strongly to descriptions of berserkers, the full body tattoos are inspired by Arabic descriptions of Vikings, but there are elements to them that I simply don’t have the evidence to support. My berserkers appear as sort of violent ascetics of Odin – they spurn personal wealth, they don’t really wash (very un-Viking-like, from what I understand) and they work as mercenaries largely for the reward of battle. They’re clearly fictional creations. They do fit with the feel of Norse myth but there’s no evidence such people existed. In fact, the berserkers of the sagas seemed very interested in personal wealth. But my berserkers do feel real to me in the story. So they’re not real, but they are realistic.

Moorcock's The Weird of the White Wolf

KS - You have mentioned Michael Moorcock as an early influence, and I can see echoes of his concepts in Wolfsangel. The idea that the werewolf is reborn as a different character in each novel of your series is somewhat analogous to Moorcock’s idea of the Eternal Champion that ties together so many of his own works. Your character Authun is nicknamed the White Wolf, which can be seen as an Odinic reference or an homage to Moorcock’s Elric, who was also known as the White Wolf. Authun calls his weapon the Moonsword, and you write that "it came from 'beyond the dawn,'" which seems like a tribute to Moorcock’s Hawkmoon novel, The Sword of the Dawn. Was all this done purposefully, or do you think that Moorcock’s works are simply bubbling around in your creative subconscious?

ML - I’d forgotten Elric was called the White Wolf. It seems these works are bubbling around in my head, as you say. If Authun is equated with anyone it’s Vidar from the Edda – Odin’s son, second in strength to Thor. There are correspondences with the Eternal Champion, but the real influence on Wolfsangel is Alan Garner’s The Owl Service. There, the characters find themselves acting out a mythic story. The characters in Wolfsangel are reincarnated, but it’s more that they are reborn still trapped in a repeating story – or at least a story that tries to repeat itself. It’s up to them to fight against it.

Moorcock's The Sword of the Dawn

The expression "beyond the dawn" was simply a poetic way of saying "the east" – a manner of description I thought the Vikings might apply to a mythic weapon.

Moorcock is a great visionary and a storyteller and also a very good phrasemaker – he comes up with very evocative one liners. "Blood and souls for my Lord Arioch" was the calling cry of my youth. He’s also a very good creator of the still image. You can really picture Hawkmoon looking up at his ornithopters or Elric sitting on the dragon’s back with Stormbringer in his hand. I tried to get that feeling with the witches and when the wolf is watching the shamans in the cave.

A key difference between me and Moorcock is how we pitch our level of exoticism. I mean this in no critical way at all when I say that Moorcock presents a surface exoticism. There’s a lot of glittery stuff in Moorcock – albino warriors, fantastic armor, ranks of animal-headed soldiers, ships that sail on the land. That’s a big reason a lot of people love fantasy and Moorcock does it brilliantly. I never got through the Jerry Cornelius stuff, so perhaps he goes deeper than that there, but there’s really no need to. Elric, Hawkmoon and Corum all sparkle in a beguiling way.

Reconstructed Haithabu Viking village in Schleswig, Germany

The exoticism of my stuff is that of history, which can offer a different sort of weirdness – such as when Vali doesn’t know what a tower is, because he’s never seen one, or the "vastness" of Haithabu – a town of around 100 houses. And Moorcock, of course, has invented his myths whereas I’ve taken mine from history and adapted them. So my writing has an exoticism that’s pitched at the level of what people think and, sometimes, do – which can seem odd to modern readers and, I admit, is potentially alienating.

For instance, one reader commented that he didn’t find it realistic that the berserker Bjarki and the merchant Veles would arrive at their destination island to find it covered in mutilated corpses and still explore it. They would turn and run. I argued that it would be more unrealistic for Bjarki not to explore it. He’s a berserker, a man who lives by the creed that "One thing I know that never dies / The fame of a dead man’s deeds." He would need to seem brave in front of his men and would welcome the chance of killing a famous monster or proving himself against great danger. Veles is simply dragged along with him at this point.

Site of Viking longhouse in Iceland, with replica in background

Another thing that is strange to modern readers – and to me – was discovering how the Vikings lived. The idea of a village, to me, would have been a collection of about 20 houses. To the Vikings, though, this would have been a good-sized town, very few of which existed. The needs of the story in Wolfsangel meant that I put Forkbeard’s hall among some other buildings. That’s historically accurate – such conglomerations of buildings did exist, but they were rare. It’s a dramatic necessity, though – for the action to unfold as it does you need a fair few people together. The chances are that the king’s hall would have stood completely alone – as would many of the longhouses. At this point, many Vikings lived apart from each other on their own farms, separated from neighbors by quite a distance. It’s a very isolated existence from the modern point of view.

Tegnér's Fridthjof's Saga

KS - Your evocative description of the Moonsword is that it is "long and thin with a pronounced curve to it. It was stronger than any straight sword and, though lighter, had cut enemy weapons many times. Authun had bought it for a fortune from a southern merchant who said it came from 'beyond the dawn' – by which Authun had supposed he meant the east. Wherever it came from, Authun knew it was enchanted, forged – as the merchant said – by magical smiths in the legendary kingdoms of the sands. The merchant had named it Shamsir, and Authun had kept the name as it seemed to contain the stir of the desert winds, or at least how he imagined they would sound." This is all reminiscent of the legendary sword Angervadil, the name of which means “wader through sorrow” – very appropriate for the weapon in your book. Angervadil belonged to saga heroes Viking, Thorstein and Fridthjof. It was described by Esaias Tegnér in his poem Fridthjof's Saga (1825):

Angervadil the brand was hight, and the brother of lightning.
Forg’d had it been in some eastern land (saith ancient tradition),
Harden’d in dwarf-fires red . . .
When in wide hall drawn it glitter’d
Like quick lightning flash there through, or a sky-streaming northilight.
Hammer’d gold was the hilt, but the blade was cover’d with runics
Wonderful, all unknown in the North, but known at the sun’s gates –
There, where our fathers dwelt, till th’ asas led them up hither.

You call the sword a shamsir, which is a curved Persian sabre. Was Tegnér’s poem (or its source sagas) something that you read in researching your novel, or is this idea of the eastern sword something that has seeped into the fabric of fantasy fiction, divorced from its original source?

ML - Having characterized Moorcock’s work as full of glittery items we come to . . . a glittery item of my own.

Turkish shamsir (19th century)

The sword is a scimitar, which is basically a mild anachronism. "Shamsir" is simply a Persian name for a sword of any description – but it tends to refer to a specific type of sword when used in English, rather like the French épée.

I am stunned by that correspondence between my description and Fridthjof’s Saga. I would love to say that I took the inspiration from there, but unfortunately I didn’t. I just saw a scimitar in Authun’s hand when I pictured the scene on the beach – though it’s possible, I suppose, that I’ve read this poem and forgotten about it. I do read a lot in the area, and I forget – or bury – a lot as well.

I knew the Vikings had contact with the Caliphate, so wondered if it might be possible he had bought it from a trader. Scimitars were in use in the 8th century but not in the style of Authun’s sword. However, I thought it plausible that certain pioneering smiths may have come up with the weapon, so I didn’t feel I was being too cavalier by giving one to Authun. Again, I’m a creative writer, not a historian, so I didn’t feel too bad about this leap.

Fridthjof and Angervadil (1909)

Later, and after the fact, I thought to equate the Moonsword to the sword called the Wand of Destruction, Lævatein, forged by Loki at the doors of death. So the idea of the sword came first, and then I recalled the myth and thought it might fit my purposes.

By making the sword a scimitar I also wanted to make a point about the multiculturalism of the Vikings.

KS - The Lord of the Rings clearly makes use of Norse myth and saga as its primary source material, but "the names have been changed to protect the innocent." You decided to keep the references explicit, to set the action in the actual world of Scandinavian myth and legend – choices that move the work from epic fantasy to historical fantasy. Whatever genre name you use, how would you describe the difference between the literary end results of your and Tolkien’s decisions?

At the Grey Havens by the Brothers Hildebrandt (1978)

ML - Gosh. More and less successful would be one way. Who can argue with Tolkien? He’s one behind God when it comes to numbers of books sold. I think Tolkien provides a much more reassuring world than I do. Things are set right at the end of Lord of the Rings, evil is defeated at a cost and our heroes retire to live indefinitely in the Grey Havens. In my world, the heroes are caught in the schemes of the gods as if in some crushing machine, and they have to struggle terribly and pay an awful price if they have even the chance of an escape.

J. R. R. Tolkien

Tolkien is, in some ways, reacting to the same forces that informed modernism. He sees the world falling apart, the threatening future, just as T. S. Eliot did. And, like Eliot, he uses myth to stitch it back together again. He has a very solidly Christian moral outlook.

In my world humanity is not just threatened, but doomed by fate. That’s the Viking view.

I would say Wolfsangel has a much less solid idea of good and evil – one that I tried to interpret from Norse culture. There is right action and wrong action, but no one is intrinsically bad, not even the Witch Queen. Also, characteristics such as being uncompassionate or bloodthirsty can be seen as good things in my world – or at least as strengths.

Ted Hughes

Tolkien’s grounding in Norse myth is much deeper than mine. In fact, it was much deeper than virtually anyone’s, so the detail of his vision is stunning. I don’t go in for anything like that level of detail. I’m about impression and feeling, atmosphere and character point of view. If I had to name an inspiration for Wolfsangel from another writer who is inspired by myth, it wouldn’t be Tolkien but Ted Hughes, the poet. The atmosphere of his poems is remarkable – showing nature in all its ferocity, beauty and strangeness and underpinned with a mythic sensibility. That’s what I’m aiming towards in my writing.

KS - One of the most interesting things about Wolfsangel is that its fantastic locales are not fantasy; they are actual locations in the real world. Part of the book takes place near the port of Eikund, which is now known as Egersund in Rogaland, Norway. Authun is King of the Horda, and Hörðaland is a county in Norway named for an ancient Germanic tribe. Your Haithabyr is Heiðabýr (also known as Hedeby), a Viking trading center on the border of Denmark and Germany. The mystic Troll Wall that is so central to your story is – almost unbelievably – a real place on the Norwegian coast known as Trollveggen. This is something that, in a way, makes your book deeper than Tolkien’s works; the magic of the novel seems more real, because it occurs in real locations. I would have loved for the book to have a Tolkien-style hand-drawn map in the front. Was this ever an option discussed with the publishers?

Troll Wall in Norway

ML - No, because of cost. The most fantastic location – and one I visited for research – is definitely the Troll Wall in Norway – a kilometer-and-a-half high overhanging cliff. I went to the top and couldn’t see the ground – thank God – because of cloud. I would have loved a map too – though I think their use is becoming a little kitsch by now. Fantasy – at least good fantasy – is in a constant struggle with kitsch, or at least a negotiation with it. We all have our ways of dealing with it. Mine is to root my stuff in myth. Others go for a hyper-real approach, letting the characters swear, having cynical and amoral heroes, being shockingly violent or using knowing humour. Some people, of course, embrace the kitsch, and that seems very popular too. I, probably unfortunately for my bank balance, have an inbuilt loathing of kitsch and try to cut it out of my work as much as I can. But there are people – and a lot of them – who love it. Although, if you call it kitsch they sometimes get a bit angry.

Helgi und Sigrun by Johannes Gehrts (1901)

KS - I won’t give away the conclusion of the novel by saying who does what to whom, but one character says to another at the end of the book that, "If you die, my love is so strong that it will call you back from the halls of the dead." This brings to mind Hermóð’s journey to Hel’s realm in attempt to bring Balder back to the land of the living, but is even more closely related to the prose coda attached to the Second Poem of Helgi Hundingsbani, which describes the fate of the lovers in the poem: "There was a belief in the pagan religion, which we now reckon an old wives’ tale, that people could be reincarnated. Helgi and Sigrun were thought to have been reborn." You’ve credited the publisher Gollancz with the idea to "go through history. Start in the Viking period and nine, ten books later get to World War Two." Was reincarnation integral to your original concept (and suggested by Norse myth), was it something that became a necessity to spin the first novel out into a series, or did the idea occur "naturally" as your wrote the book?

ML - Yes, reincarnation was always at the heart of the story. My central idea was that the werewolf is looking for his lost love, who is reincarnated in many lives. In the original version, the werewolf was immortal – or at least unageing – and he searched for Adisla down the centuries. That side of the story has yet to be developed – but the werewolf will very likely pass from reincarnation to being unageing. This brings up lots of problems for him as he’ll have to watch his loved ones age and die.

Filed Viking teeth - very stylish!

KS - You write of Authun that "his cloak seemed alive with sparks and even his mouth, the teeth inlaid with tiny red sapphires, seemed to burn." Was this inspired by the relatively recent discovery that Vikings – for decoration or intimidation – filed horizontal marks into their visible teeth, or was there another source for this idea?

ML - Like a lot of what I write, I can’t remember where I got the idea from. I knew – or thought I knew - that Vikings inlaid their teeth but that was before the news of the teeth-filing came out. This can only be proof that I am myself an immortal Viking who has let these insights slip and so compromised his secret. Either that or I read it somewhere else and forgot about it. Or, more oddly, that it just felt right and was one of those things that I invented that had a coincidental correspondence with reality. My bet is on number two.

I suspect this has been known for a long time, I’ve read about it and forgotten about where. I don’t log my sources in the same way an academic writer would – I’ve no need to, until I face interviews like this one! In making Authun appear as exotic, I was trying to capture the idea that the Vikings would have seemed like alien invaders to the people they attacked – strange boats, strange dress, strange language. The Vikings are conscious of this and Authun actually dresses up before the attack in order to appear more other-worldly and threatening.

INTERVIEW WITH HILMAR ÖRN HILMARSSON OF THE ÁSATRÚARFÉLAGIÐ, Part Three

2011-07-12T12:20:00.002-05:00

Hilmarsson at Þingvellir - June 24, 2010

KS - Ásatrú in Iceland seems to have no set dogma or theology. Is Ásatrú a religion, or is the Ásatrúarfélagið more of an interest society? How would you personally define what a religion is?

HÖH - It is a religion. I think it’s a way of looking at life. It’s also how we attach ourselves to creation. The Latin word religio and the verb religare have the meaning of "binding together." We talk about the gods as höpt or bönd, meaning fetters or ties - they are the ones who bind us to our surroundings, and we are tied and bound to the gods in an intimate way. The nature of the gods is within us, as well, and we can also mirror the [gods].

Nature around us is also a living being, a living force. We can feel it, like with the volcanic thing where we start to anthropomorphize the volcano. We are saying the volcano is reacting to the pressure from the British, and so this is why the British got all the ash over them.

We are really quick at seeing nature before we set a task for [ourselves] - or maybe [nature is] forcing us into doing certain things. I think it’s a very cohesive worldview. We are intimately linked with nature and the forces around us. For some of us, the gods are personifications of natural forces. For others, they are archetypal influences. Then, of course, for others, it’s a nice historical thing because it rhymes with an atheist sort of mindset.

KS - Some followers of Ásatrú in the United States seem to practice their religion in a very American mode of true belief - if you pray to Thor, he will answer you. They read the Eddas in a way that is similar to literalist interpretations of the Bible.

HÖH - Yes. It seems to be a fundamentalist mindset. You move away from being a fundamentalist Christian into being a fundamentalist Ásatrúar. You get into Edda-bashing, which is an unbelievable thing to do. Ha!

KS - Do you think that kind of mindset is absent here?

HÖH - Yeah, absolutely. I have yet to meet anyone like that in Iceland.

Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson at Summer Solstice at Þingvellir - June 24, 2010

KS - In 2003, you raised a níðstöng (“scorn-pole”) in opposition to the Kárahnjúkar Hydropower Project. How do you find a balance between your political views and your role as a religious leader?

HÖH - I’m just doing things that Sveinbjörn did early on. He was also against the damaging of nature in Iceland by the multinational companies who are, basically, sucking out all the profit and leaving nearly none of it here in Iceland.

It’s part of my oath that I will fight with nature [i.e., on nature’s side] and respect the . . . how can I say it? We sincerely believe that, when we settled this country, we did it in good connection with the nature spirits and the spirits of the land. When we do our ceremonies, we are also offering our greetings and pouring out beer for the genius loci - the local spirits. I think it’s really important that we should give this country in better shape to our children and grandchildren than we receive it. If you have to take a political stand, so be it.

I know I was really on a real tightrope walk about not making this something against the local government in the east of Iceland, who actually thought that this would be of immense profit to the east of Iceland, which was having problems - all the parts where people are leaving and flocking into Reykjavík. Of course, I respect that they think that this would do nothing but good, but it’s done no good, because people are still flocking away from the east. I don’t think there’s any big future in having the east of Iceland providing a lot of unskilled laborers for the aluminum factory. I think we should give nature the benefit of the doubt and rather think about education and stuff like that.

The area they were sinking for this hydroelectric dam was unbelievably beautiful. There was a lot of propaganda going on from the government and the people in charge saying, “Well, this is a dead desert. There’s nothing there.” There was lots there! Green meadows, nice natural warm springs where you could bathe. There’s wildlife like you’ve never seen it before - reindeer, whole species of birds living just in this area. It was a horrible mistake, but I think most people realize it now.

Hilmarsson at name-giving ceremony at Þingvellir - June 24, 2010

KS - Ásatrú is probably unique in that its holy texts - such as they are - come from collections of poetry and prose gathered and written down by Christians well after Iceland’s conversion. This is a situation quite different from Christianity, Judaism and Islam, each of which has books written by believers. How do you think this has affected the development of the modern version of the faith?

HÖH - If we look at Snorri’s Edda, it comes up with some nice and amusing connections which are probably Snorri’s rewriting and imagination. I think that comes more from the poet Snorri than the Christian Snorri. I don’t think that Snorri’s supposed Christian beliefs interfered with those. He - or whoever wrote the Prologus to Snorri’s Edda; it may not have been him - he had a very clever way of doing this so the clergy wouldn’t react against it, by building up this euhemeristic story about the origin of the gods.

What I think, personally, is that Snorri had just - when he was writing that, or whoever did - had just been reading the story of the English kings by Geoffrey of Monmouth, which does the same thing as the Preface.

KS - With Troy and everything.

HÖH - Yes, yes. I think it’s Snorri just being a man of the world and being able to read the bestsellers that were going around Europe and saying, “Yes, us too.”

KS - Some scholars argue that Snorri was a Christian who presented the myths solely for literary and nationalistic reasons, and others say that he was a pagan in all but name. What do you think his relationship was to the material he recorded?

HÖH - I think he was certainly interested, and he certainly had access to a lot of things that have been lost. He's quoting the poem Heimdallargaldur, which is totally lost - there is only one verse from it preserved in a quotation by Snorri. He had a different version of Völuspá than we have in Codex Regius. He must have amassed a lot of things.

Also, Snorri is in contact with a Swedish jarl, Hákon, whose nickname is "Galinn," which may be connected with that people thought him mad or connected him with galdur - a magical practice or a heathen practice. We know that, in Snorri’s time, there was some heathenry left in Sweden, and Snorri travels to Sweden. It’s not unlikely that he may have had access to some people there.

HÖH (with horn) & KS (with rune flag) at Þingvellir - June 24, 2010

As I said, we’re really bad Christians [in Iceland]. We converted, but what happened was that the old goðar, they became kirkjugoðar. They just put “church” in front of their old term. The old goðar system went on for three hundred years, so Snorri had this goðorð. So the whole thing was intact for a very long time with this thin Christian veneer spread over it. I don’t think we were as serious about Christianity as other people.

Of course, Snorri had a valid point when he was writing down the Edda, the Skáldskaparmál. Unless you know the mythology, you can’t write court poetry - dróttkvætt. All the kenningar and all the heiti - they have a root in the old pagan stories, in the pagan mythology. So you have to know your paganism to be able to be a good poet.

KS - As Christianity took over northern Europe, völur became witches, seid became witchcraft, gods became devils, and elves became demons. They were all recast as negative things in the new Christian world. How much of what we now call the occult do you think is a translation, remnant, perversion or misunderstanding of original northern European religious practice?

HÖH - I think you can actually see how a lot of the old folk beliefs were taken over by the church. You had churches being built on old pagan sites and holy sites. Of course, you had the Roman Catholics, who did some clear, clever appropriation. Saint Bridget is basically the old Irish goddess Brigid. In a way, they took over some of the old pagan things and just took the whole pantheon through the saints.

Of course, there was a lot of demonizing going on, as well. We can see that Freya was probably turned into Grýla, this mythological being that eats children and has the Christmas Cat that comes and eats the poor children around Christmastime. Certainly, we can see that the gods were demonized to a certain extant here, as well. A lot of them just went into the folk beliefs. Our big obsession with the hidden people and the elves and stuff like that is remains of the old beliefs in the land wights and even the gods themselves.

HÖH (with horn) & KS (with rune flag) at Þingvellir - June 24, 2011

The wise women were made into witches, and the whole witch hunts in Europe were - to some extent - a reaction against some of the old pagan views. I don’t think it was like . . . Margaret Murray theorized that there was a witch cult that lived in western Europe, unbroken for centuries. I think that’s fantasizing.

The funny thing is - if you look at statistics - most of the people executed in Europe were women witches. But in Iceland, it was twenty-three men and one woman, and that one woman may not have been executed for magic. So we have no witchcraft tradition here in Iceland, but we still had magicians.

KS - Were the Icelandic magicians drawing on pagan ritual?

HÖH - They were using some pagan ideas. There’s a book from the 16th century - Galdrabók [“magic book”] - which is a strange fusion of cabalistic ideas and then old pagan ideas. It has some magical incantations around Odin and Thor, but then you can see that the one who wrote it must have also had some access to pretty amazing things for that time and age.

We know that Cornelius Agrippa’s books on magic were part of the library of the bishop in Skálholt. We always see Iceland as being really isolated in those times, but if you look at the library of Bishop Brynjólfur Sveinsson, you see that we were totally up-to-date with what was happening in the rest of Europe.

KS - Do you think that the later English and continental occult is translated pagan ritual?

HÖH - The gods had to come back. You can see how the gods are coming in the 19th century. We had some years of rationalism - the Industrial Revolution, people losing their ties with nature and repressing religion and focusing on science and knowledge. You had the president of the French scientific academy proclaiming that we’ve more or less found out everything that there is to be found out - we only need to polish some theories. In an atmosphere like this, the gods need to come back, because they’ve been repressing them so long. Ha!

KS - Well, I got all my questions out before the battery died. Thank you!

HÖH - Yeah, yeah. Okay!

This concludes the Norse Mythology Blog's interview with Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson. More information can be found at the Ásatrúarfélagið website.

INTERVIEW WITH HILMAR ÖRN HILMARSSON OF THE ÁSATRÚARFÉLAGIÐ, Part Two

2011-06-30T00:43:00.014-05:00

HÖH at site of future Ásatrú temple in Reykjavík - June 26, 2010

KS - Your role as allsherjargoði seems quite different from that of other religious leaders in the western world. You do not set or enforce doctrine, and you do not define a specific theology. How would you describe your role?

HÖH - This is a good thing about polytheism versus monotheism. Monotheism is one truth for the masses, but polytheism is many truths for the individual. In a way, it’s just turning the tables. Basically, you can believe in whatever god or goddess you would like at any given time. You may have a need for Freya on Monday morning, and Thor may be absolutely essential for you on Tuesday afternoon. Nobody can teach you. You have to find it yourself.

I think my role is to teach people respect for this wonderful heritage that we have, [which is] hauntingly simple but still a really workable way of behaving and ethics. I think the Hávamál has a lot of teachings that are as essential now as they were a thousand years ago. It’s analogous to the Analects of Confucius in China, which are still the best precepts you can use to live by.

We don’t have a revealed truth. It’s not a revealed religion. We don’t have the final truth hewn in stone like in Judaism and Christianity and, later, Islam. It’s more up to us, really.

KS - I recently read a description of the four men who founded the Ásatrúarfélagið as a poet, a hippie, a theosophist and a Nýallist. Do you think that these elements are reflected in the organization today?

HÖH - I think it’s evolved. Things even evolved a lot with Sveinbjörn [Beinteinsson, allsherjargoði 1972-1993]. Of course, Jörmundur Ingi [Hansen, allsherjargoði 1994-2002] was a very important person, as well. Jörmundur was very good with the press. Press interest was far out of proportion with our membership in the earlier days. I joined eleven months after they got legally recognized. I was member number thirty-six. I was just waiting two years for my first blot - we weren’t really doing it. Me and Halldór Bragason - who’s now part of the board of directors - we were the “youth movement” of the society for many years. Ha!

Sveinbjörn actually said that his idea of founding [the Ásatrúarfélagið] - he’d been thinking about it since the early 1960s. He thought to himself, “This is my path. This is what I believe in.” Then, around 1970, we had these so-called Children of God that came to Iceland. This was a Christian sect founded by a man who called himself Moses David, who was a very strange character - a very sick character, it came out later. He sent out young people to hand out leaflets and say, “Come back to Jesus” and stuff like that. Sveinbjörn was looking at this and saying, “Why do we have these young foreigners coming to tell us to go to Jesus? Why can’t we just say to them, ‘Go back to Thor and Odin’?” That was, in a way, an inspiration for him.

Nýall was a theory from a strange series of books by this Icelandic geologist called Helgi Pjeturss, who was also mad. Ha! Totally mad, actually. When you come to my place, I’ll have to show you his copy of the Eddic poems, because he’s done some really strange things in his marginalia. Helgi was an extremely brilliant person who wrote probably the best Icelandic prose of everybody. Halldór Kiljan Laxness - our Nobel Prize winner - says his writing is absolutely fantastic. He actually uses him as a character in one of his books.

Helgi had this idea that, while we’re asleep, we’re actually living somebody else’s life on another planet, so what we dream is our life on another planet. There’s been this whole society of people who have been meeting for decades now. A lot of them come from the Borgarfjörður area where Sveinbjörn was brought up. Now it’s a dwindling society - which is a shame, because it’s wonderfully eccentric. They used to have these séances every Thursday where they would contact the Crab Nebula and speak to Dr. Helgi, who was there teaching Icelandic. One of the teachings is that Icelandic is the most perfect language in the world, so they’re teaching it all through the Milky Way galaxy.

It was really nice. I went there once and a medium was saying, “Thor here and Helgi here and Egill Skallagrímsson here.” It’s fantastic. What I always found amazing was that this woman who was the medium would be with them on Thursdays, and on Saturdays she’d be at the National Spiritualist Society, and she would be contacting the other shore, in spiritualistic parlance.

Detail of Beinteinsson memorial in Reykjavík - June 26, 2010

KS - Sveinbjörn Beinteinsson said that one of the impulses to start the Ásatrúarfélagið came from “the desire that Icelanders could have their own faith - and nourish it no less than imported religions.”

HÖH - Yes.

KS - This must have to do with the time of the Children of God.

HÖH - Yes.

KS - Do you feel that Ásatrú - as practiced in Iceland - is a specifically Icelandic national movement based on the Eddas and sagas, or do you think that it is fundamentally connected to the German worship of Wodan and Donar, the English worship of Woden and Thunor, and the other forms of paganism that existed in northern Europe as a pre-Christian, pan-Germanic religion?

HÖH - This is how it ended up in Iceland. We know that a lot of the heroic poems were recited all over northern Europe, and we have runestones showing Sigurd and the dragon. A lot of these stories were universal. The Wessobrunn Prayer - an old German prayer that we know - uses lines from Völuspá: “ero ni uuas no ufhimil” [“earth was nowhere nor the sky above”]. There are variants found in Heliand, rune stones in Sweden and the runestaff in Ribe in Denmark - which shows that this phraseology and these ideas [were widely dispersed].

We know that lots of these ideas - and maybe some of the poems - were known in northern Europe. We have a lot of place names in Sweden which show us the god Ullr. We know really nothing about him except that there’s a kenning for a shield called Ullar skip ["Ullr's ship"] in Icelandic - also Ullar askur and Ullar sundvigg. He seems to have been worshiped in certain areas in Sweden. We know that there were a lot of deities written down here with little or no stories attached to them, but there are some place names in Norway and Sweden and even Denmark which show that their worship was probably bigger there than here.

In that sense, it is a religion that was practiced all over northern Europe. Sadly enough, there’s so little to go on, most of the sources having disappeared. We have a small section of the Merseburg prayer in German which is referring to Odin, and we have a runic inscription talking about Logaþore and stuff like that. There are little references, but it’s more productive if we look at some of our sister religions like the old Persian religions, which have a similar creation myth with Ymir being Yima - and Yama/Yami in Hinduism.

Also, in Hinduism, we have Indra - who is a cognate with Thor in Indo-European - who was a dragon-slayer. It’s also good to look at some of these connections. Hinduism moves into Buddhism, which is sort of a protestant movement within Hinduism, at one stage. Of course, it turns into something else. It’s a nice way of looking at some of the sayings and some of the thought that we have.

Tibetan Buddhism is a fusion between the native Bönpo religion - which is a native shamanistic tradition - and the incoming Buddhism. There, we have a lot of nature deities which are quite similar to the vættir that we have. We have dakinis riding on horses and picking up the dead people in Tibetan Buddhism, so it’s very close to our valkyries and stuff like that. There are a lot of connections you can explore to deepen your understanding of what we have here.

KS - Do you think the development of what is now called Ásatrú was influenced by Norse contact with Lapp shamanism?

HÖH - I think there is a big connection with the Saami traditions. Lapp is a derogatory term; they would like to call themselves Saami. Lapp is someone who is wearing really patchy clothes. It’s a Swedish term. Leppur in Icelandic has a similar meaning - terrible clothes.

There’s a wonderful book written by Hermann Pálsson taking up a lot of these stories about our connection with Finland and Finnmark, which is in northern Norway. He’s showing that there was some intermarrying with people from there. A lot of the older stories about magic and the practice of magic seem to be connected with the Finns.

One of our oldest and most beautiful odes - and ode that we still use in the Ásatrú society - is an ode called Tryggðamál. You find it in Grettis Saga (in a corrupt form) and you find it in Staðarhólsbók and you find it in Jónsbók. It’s an ode talking about [how] you will keep your word as long as the earth revolves, snow falls, a ship sails, and a Finn skis.

First comes the Oath (“I will be steadfast . . .”), then a rough translation would be:

While fire burns,

Hilmarsson in Reykjavík - June 26, 2010

Earth is fertile,
A child (which can speak) calls upon its mother
And mother gives birth to her offspring,
Men light fires,
A ship glides,
Shields flash,
Sun shines,
Snow falls,
The Finn skis,
Fir grows,
The falcon flies
On a spring day,
The breeze carries him
Under both wings,
The heavens revolve,
The world is settled,
Wind blows,
Waters fall into the ocean,
Men sow their seeds (of corn).

So when you’re talking about the eternal things - things that will go on eternally - it shows you that people have actually thought highly of [the Finns].

KS - Dagur Þorleifsson described Ásatrú as a movement back to nature and away from the negative aspects of industrial civilization. This reminded me of the Nature Boys, the German and German-American proto-hippies that inspired Hermann Hesse. Do you know if there was any exchange of these sorts of ideas between Iceland and Germany in the early twentieth century?

HÖH - That’s a funny thing, because you had the hippie movement in Germany around the turn of the century and even earlier. You had the artist colony in Monte Verità [“mountain of truth”], as they called it, where you had all the nudists and the freethinkers and the homeopaths and all the people who were into eastern religions and stuff like that.

I’ve been trying to trace some connection. There may be a slight connection, because Helgi Pjeturss’ sister was married to a German nobleman who was intimately connected with the Nietzsche family and a lot of radicals. Helgi corresponded a lot with some strange people - both in Germany and England at the time. When he couldn’t find a publisher for some of his stuff, it was being published by The Occult Review in the 1920s and '30s in England. I think it’s safe to assume that Helgi, in his time, was in touch with some of these strange people, but I don’t think there was a direct influence on anything with the Ásatrú society early on.

KS - The Icelandic Lutheran Bishop Sigurbjörn Einarsson was a Nýallist and a pagan in his youth, but he became an adamant public opponent of the Ásatrúarfélagið being granted government recognition as a religious organization in the early 1970s. How is the relationship today between the Ásatrúarfélagið and other religious groups in Iceland?

HÖH - It’s pretty good, actually. We had some strange years around the year 2000 when there was the millennium celebration of Christianity in Iceland and our poor bishop - who is a son of Sigurbjörn, Karl Sigurbjörnsson - he made an ass of himself, to speak bluntly, in the way he tried to treat us. It came out really badly, and public sympathy shifted. This is when the first flux of people started to join the Ásatrú society.

KS - That’s when the membership went up?

HÖH - Yes. So we are really grateful for that. Ha! He was a bit paranoid about us for some time, but now everything is very cordial between us. We are in good contact.

Also, we are part of an inter-religious group that meets up and talks about ethics and how we can prevent hatred between different religious groups. I’ve done co-religious ceremonies with many priests from the state Lutheran church, and also I’ve done some ceremonies together with the Free Lutheran Church, which split from the state Lutheran church. That took place in 1899, if I remember right. They are the largest denomination outside of the state Lutheran church - about 8,000 people, I think. We’ve been basically trying to build bridges, rather than to build walls.

KS - American Ásatrú groups seem determined to create their own version of the Catholic Church.

HÖH - Yes.

KS - They have the Nine Noble Virtues instead of the Ten Commandments, and they have standardized beliefs and ritual practices. You can order their instruction manuals in paperback on Amazon and learn how exactly how to be a pagan in ten easy steps.

HÖH - Yes.

KS - When I visited with the members of the Ásatrúarfélagið here in Reykjavík, there was a great diversity of beliefs and difference of interpretation among the members. Do you think that this diversity of beliefs and lack of standard dogma is an inheritance from Iceland’s independently-minded settlers of the saga period, or is it a reflection of the difference in spiritual attitudes between the post-religious European mindset and the evangelical American idea of true belief?

HÖH - If you look at the way that people looked at the gods - they could mock their gods, like in Lokasenna, where they are making huge fun of the gods and Loki’s talking about Odin being a cross-dresser banging a drum and probably f**king some males, as some say. It’s total irreverence. At the same time, people felt good about their gods. They were their friends. They’re not the Other - they’re not different from us.

This is the religion and the type of faith we’ve had in Iceland. We’ve never been good Christians. All our bishops married and all our priests were married in the so-called Catholic times. Rome was sending out angry letters and saying, “Why don’t you just shape up and do things like you’re told to do?” They would say, “If you sent this letter fifty years ago, the ship must surely have been lost at sea. We never received it, so . . .” Ha! This is the way we’ve been practicing religion ever since the settlement.

INTERVIEW WITH HILMAR ÖRN HILMARSSON OF THE ÁSATRÚARFÉLAGIÐ, Part One

2011-06-23T10:35:00.002-05:00

Hilmarsson & Seigfried in Reykjavík - July 5, 2010

Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson joined Iceland's Ásatrúarfélagið (“Æsir Faith Fellowship”) at age sixteen, shortly after its founding in 1972. Since 2003, he has served as allsherjargoði (very roughly translated as "high priest") for the pagan religious organization, which was officially recognized by the Icelandic government in 1973. In this role, he has led interfaith services with Tibet's Dalai Lama and with the Reykjavík Free Church.

During Hilmarsson's tenure as allsherjargoði, the Ásatrúarfélagið has engaged in a number of progressive projects - including fighting for the right to marry gay couples. The group has also focused on ecological action, such as working on forest reclamation with the Icelandic Forestry Association; in 2003, Hilmarsson erected a níðstöng (“scorn-pole”) against the Kárahnjúkar Hydropower Project. In 2011, he has joined other religious leaders in calling for an amendment to the Icelandic constitution that will end the special status of the National Church of Iceland.

Hilmarsson's career as a professional musician dates back to the early 1970s, when he performed in various bands on drums and synthesizer. Over the decades, he has worked with Björk Guðmundsdóttir, Current 93, Grindverk, Psychic TV, Sigur Rós, Þeyr and many others. He has composed soundtracks for more than twenty-five films, including the award-winning score for the Oscar-nominated Children of Nature (1991) and the intensely powerful music for Beowulf and Grendel (2005). Since 2007, he has taught composition at the Iceland Academy of the Arts.

Dr. Karl E. H. Seigfried of the Norse Mythology Blog interviewed Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson in Reykjavík on June 23, 2010. This is Hilmarsson's first English-language interview on Norse mythology and religion.

KS - In 2002, you composed and performed a work with the band Sigur Rós called Hrafngaldr Óðins (“Odin’s Raven-Magic”). Can you describe the piece?

HÖH - Hrafngaldr Óðins is a poem that was part of the Eddas until 1864, when the Norwegian scholar Sophus Bugge decided that it was a latter-day forgery. This was shortly after the whole big thing with the poems of Ossian, when MacPherson was found out to have forged the whole Ossianic Cyle. I think Bugge was trying to do a similar thing. All his reasoning [was based on the fact that] it only existed in latter-day paper manuscripts, which of course can be suspect - but a lot of the older poems do, as well. They’re not all part of the Codex Regius and Flateyjarbók. Basically, if you look at it from a linguistic point of view, it’s much older than Bugge thought. Possibly, it’s from the 12th century - somewhere between 1000 and 1200 and something.

If it’s a forgery, it’s a very strange forgery, because it’s alluding to myths that only exist in this poem. It’s building on older material, and it’s very interesting. I think it’s missing the beginning and the end, because it ends very abruptly. The poem is absolutely beautiful. Its language is wonderful. It’s got this incredible imagery. Everything is falling - going down. It’s always using these beautiful metaphors and imagery, saying things are in decline. The world is starting to freeze over from north to south. The gods are partying and just too drunk to notice, but something really bad is going on.

I’ve been totally in love with this poem for over thirty years. Ten years ago, I just decided that I would sell this idea to Reykjavík Festival of the Arts and do something with it. This is when I was starting to work with Sigur Rós, so I decided, “Okay, let’s do a joint project using Steindór [Andersen], using an orchestra and a choir.” We took it from there.

KS - The poem isn’t included in any modern translations of the Eddas.

HÖH - Only in East German editions, because it never got thrown out in Germany. After [Bugge’s pronouncement of forgery], nobody in Scandinavia or the rest of the world has used it.

I was also doing this in ’02 to out one of our scholars, Jónas Kristjánsson. In our wonderful Icelandic department at the Árni Magnússon Institute, the old scholars have a monopoly on certain things, and the young scholars wait until they have finished. Jónas said in 1962 that he was researching the poem, which meant that it’s just been off-limits for everybody else. Jónas, at that time [2002], was retired and well into his eighties - and hadn’t published a single word. I was using this as a whip on him, saying, “Jónas, just come out with it!”

KS - There was nothing since 1962?

HÖH - Yes. Ha! So he finally published something. He just did a short thing, but now we have one Danish scholar who is actually coming to more radical conclusions. She actually thinks it’s a very old poem. There’s an Italian scholar who is studying it, as well. There are a lot of people now looking into it. As Jónas told me - we have what we call Eddica Minora, the Lesser Edda, which is poems from the heroic sagas - next time, when that is published, Hrafngaldr will certainly be a part of it.

KS - I’ve read that you have an interest in Aleister Crowley. Do you think there is any relationship between his ideas and contemporary Ásatrú ("Æsir Faith")?

HÖH - There are certain parallel ideas, but I think - in a way - he was looking for the wrong gods. He was ending up in Egypt and doing things in Pidgin Egyptian and, of course, with the Greek and the Roman sources. At some stage, he seems to have stopped reading the old Scandinavian mythology, although you can see that he was doing it when he was doing his first edition of 777. Also, there are echoes - “As brothers fight ye!” in The Book of the Law, which is something like “Brœðr muno beriaz oc at bönum verðaz” [“brother shall fight brother and both fall”] from Völuspá ["Prophecy of the Seeress"].

Probably there is a subconscious influence of Aleister. I was interested in him because he wrote most clearly about ritual ideas, and he was a person who was trying to fuse together the use of oriental systems and the western systems. I think, in a way, he can be a great source of inspiration. Also, last but not least, he was a rather failed teacher. It’s very good to learn from his mistakes. He was very honest about writing about his mistakes. It’s a nice way of [learning], “Don’t go down that road, because it will end in tears.” Ha!

KS - I first learned about Wilhelm Reich’s orgone theories from the Robert Calvert song “Orgone Accumulator” (recorded by Hawkwind in 1972) and from the scene in On the Road when Jack Kerouac visits William S. Burroughs, who has actually built an orgone accumulator. What was your organization Miðgarður, and how was it related to Reich’s ideas?

HÖH - It was actually an informal thing. I got to know this really nice person called David Boadella who was a psychotherapist who wrote a biography of William Reich. We became great friends. He wanted to set up a training system here in Iceland, so we set up this thing where we set up courses and he got some interesting people from England - and from all over the world, really - to come and lecture and do some teaching.

I went through a very Reichian phase in my teens and my early twenties. I thought these ideas were really interesting. He’s another madman, which I really like from afar. Ha!

KS - You had a band in the 1980s called Nyarlathotep’s Idiot Flute Players. The name references H.P. Lovecraft, whose writings blend the traditional folklore of New England and the progressive science of his time with a nostalgia for days long gone and for older ways of living. His work seems like a forward echo of the Ásatrúarfélagið, with its ecological concerns and its combination of a modern worldview with a very ancient system.

HÖH - Lovecraft was a strange character, really - another sad madman. Ha! He’s really interesting, and his correspondence is really interesting. His correspondence with Robert E. Howard is interesting. I think if Howard had lived today - and managed to move out from his mother - he would probably be an Ásatrúar. Ha! I think Howard did research, but of course some of it was crazy stuff. It’s obvious that he’s been reading Blavatsky, and some of her ideas [appear in his works]. Hyperborea is Blavatsky’s.

KS - Do you see contemporary Ásatrú in Iceland as a continuation of a living tradition that goes back to ancient times, as a recreation and revival of a practice that had ended, as a descendent of 19th century nationalist romantic mysticism, as a post-war rejection of modernity, or as a post-1960s counterculture movement?

HÖH - I think, probably, I would say “yes” to all those things. The influence of this seems to resonate with Icelanders. The poems never really went away, and they’ve been treasured ever since they were handed down orally and written down. I’m pretty certain that the people in the learned places of Oddi and Reykholt and [elsewhere] were reading Ovid and Roman mythology, and they realized, “My god, we have this thing here which is a living and vibrant thing, and this is what my great-grandfather believed in,” and stuff like that. I think it never really went away.

It was said - after the conversion in 1000 or 999 - that you could not worship the old gods except in secrecy. That was part of the truce. People carried on secret worship for at least two centuries. I don’t think it ever really went away. To illustrate that, I met this old man in the shop yesterday. He came up to me and shook my hand, and he told me that - when he was confirmed in the early 1920s - his grandmother came to him and gave him a book with the Eddic poems and said, “You should read that, because this is what we also believe.” She thought, “Christianity is okay, but you should not forget your roots.” Ha! I think that’s really a telling story.

That’s, in a way, how I was brought up. My father caught me reading a Superman magazine, and he just gave me Grettis Saga and said, “Okay, this is the real Superman.” We have 380 bon mots or sayings from this saga which are still used in modern language. A lot of the saga material is still part of everyday language. We have things from Hávamál [“Sayings of the High One”] written on headstones in Christian cemeteries. It’s so culturally ingrained. We can’t really escape it.

Sveinbjörn Beinteinsson memorial in Reykjavík - June 26, 2010

I’m certain that a lot of people - like Sveinbjörn Beinteinsson [Ásatrúarfélagið allsherjargoði from 1972 to 1993] - were brought up with what he called “mild Christianity.” They were told to respect nature in a way that has gone from generation to generation for centuries.

I think there is an unbroken tradition of thought, because the poems have never gone away. They’ve always been treasured. If you look at the list of what people took with them to the New World when there was a mass emigration to America, people were taking their Eddas and their sagas with them. That’s most of the things on those lists of books that they took with them.

Of course, we really liked the attention in the late 19th century, when you had the Grimm Brothers trying to reinvent Germanic mythology - which is ninety-nine percent taken from the old Icelandic sources, even if they try to come up with some clever etymological things about Forseti being connected with Fosete and Foseteslant in Germany. Basically, all they have are spurious linguistics, and then the true kernel of the whole thing is the Icelandic sources. The same thing with Wagner, when he was doing his Ring Cycle. Eighty percent of what he used was the old Icelandic sources. The Nibelungenlied was only used for dressing.

KS - I remember being disappointed when I read a translation of the Nibelungenlied as a child. My father had told me the German stories about Siegfried bathing in the dragon’s blood and so on. Reading the Nibelungenlied, I kept waiting for Wotan and the dragon to appear, but it’s really a medieval Christian epic. There’s almost no actual German mythology in the Wagner operas.

HÖH - Yes. There’s a wonderful book by Árni Björnsson on Wagner and the Völsungar. He’s done some serious research into Wagner’s sources. Even pretty new Wagner biographies were pouring scorn on the idea that Wagner had actually studied the Icelandic sources, but you can see from his library that he’s annotated and gone through the Eddas really seriously.

Of course, this whole völkisch thing went too far, because Germany needed an identity, needed some unity. I think Jacob Grimm was actually a Romantic, but then you have all the lunatics - Lanz von Liebenfels and these people who took it to really nefarious ends and twisted and destroyed the whole thing.

KS - A lot of the material published these days on runes and rune-reading seems based on Guido von List . . .

HÖH - Yes.

KS - And other 19th century mystics . . .

HÖH - Yes.

KS - And it has very little connection to Eddic sources.

HÖH - No, it’s crap. I have some wonderful cranky German books like Baldur und Bibel ["Baldur and Bible"], which is basically "proving" that Christ is a rip-off from Baldur.

Of course, what they were doing - these so-called Ariosophists - they were saying, “We invented everything. We invented yoga.” So they came out with these really ridiculous runic postures [imitating rune-shapes]. Then of course, the Indians have their mantras, but we can go, “Fffffffff-feh, feh” and “Urrrrrrrrr.” They’re trying to prove that, of course, everything came from us. Ha!

You have these fanciful things. Now the latest gimmick is this so-called old Norwegian fighting tradition which they call stav - which is basically aikido dressed in Norwegian clothing. Ha!

KS - This week, I saw the architectural plans for the Ásatrúarfélagið hof ("temple"). When built, it will be the largest and most sophisticated Ásatrú temple in the world. The inevitable media coverage will definitely raise the visibility of the organization - locally, nationally and internationally. What do you think that this kind of attention will mean for the Ásatrúarfélagið?

HÖH - It will put us in a bit of a dilemma. We decided in the mid-‘80s - me and Sveinbjörn [Beinteinsson] - that we would cut all ties with foreign Ásatrú groups, because we’ve had rather sad experiences with a German group which seemed to be really good on the surface but were rampant nazis when you looked closer. Then we had one of our older members - a really nice man but with a strange chip on his shoulder when it came to race - he was corresponding in the name of Ásatrúarfélagið with some people and exchanging racist ideas. So we basically had to cut him off as well - sort of push him into the mountain. I really hated to do it, because he was a nice man, but this was a big problem. I don’t think we should be connected with racist politics in any way.

I think what we need to do is set a good example, like we did with Denmark. In Denmark, [the pagan church] got recognized. They took a lot of their ideas from us, because one of their founders was [Ásatrúarfélagið member] Óttar Ottósson, who was living in Denmark for twenty years. Óttar was a good influence there.

We’ve had Norwegian Ásatrú societies with a common goal, but they always end up with the right-wing extremists infiltrating and taking over - same thing with Sweden. The terrible thing with Norwegians . . . I think there is a certain lack of humor in the Norwegians. Ha! You have these young Norwegian death metal rockers who really think that Ozzy Osbourne is a satanist and that burning a stave church - which is probably the closest thing to a pagan hof you can get - is a very nice pagan act. Ha!

INTERVIEW WITH ERIK EVENSEN (GODS OF ASGARD), Part Four

2011-06-15T21:34:00.000-05:00

Heimdall & lur by Erik Evensen

KS - You portray Heimdall’s horn as a lur (an ancient Scandinavian wind instrument) instead of the animal horn that appears in many representations. Why did you make this choice?

EE - The lur is Germanic and Nordic, it predates the Vikings, and looks and sounds awesome. In the Icelandic sagas, similar horns were used as war instruments to rally the troops. That’s exactly what Heimdall does with it, so it seemed to fit. Did I mention that it looks and sounds awesome?

KS - Since the 19th century, artistic interpretations of the Norse gods have tended towards the bombastic and the fantastic. Your gods are human-like figures in realistic settings. Why did you decide on this approach?

EE - I see the gods as extensions of humanity, in many ways, especially because of their relevance as characters. They seem to work best that way. Stripping away the religious elements, most of the big stories we know come from tales that were told around the campfire – more for entertainment value than spiritual practice. The gods served as familiar characters, and Thor, specifically, is meant to represent the everyman and be identifiable to people. I went with an approach that treats the gods as extensions of their own people.

The Midgard Serpent by Erik Evensen

KS - In your version of “Thor vs. the Midgard Serpent,” the god of thunder doesn’t swell to gigantic proportions, like he does in the Edda. Was this part of a conscious decision to downplay fantasy elements of the mythology?

EE - More or less. I didn’t see any reason for him to do this, because it seems to downplay the epic threat of the serpent and it’s not a trick that he frequently uses.

KS - You depict Andvari as a dwarf, not in his fish-disguise (as in the source mythology). Was this part of an attempt to bring consistency to the stories by connecting him to other dwarfs that Loki deals with?

Loki & Andvari in Gods of Asgard

EE - Actually, yes. I liked the concept of the dwarves I had come up with and wanted to use it again. Plus, dwarves have treasure hordes, and I didn’t want to confuse things. Since it parallels Loki’s previous dealings with dwarves, it gave me a chance to emphasize how much darker and meaner he is now.

KS - When Loki delivers Andvari’s cursed treasure as a ransom for Odin and Hoenir, you conspicuously leave out any mention of Andvaranaut – the mystic ring that was so important to both Wagner and Tolkien. Why did you decide to remove it from the narrative?

EE - Ha! I don’t know. I did start an adaptation of the Völsunga Saga, and of course I used it there. Either I didn’t find it relevant to the narrative within the context of Gods of Asgard, or it was simply sloppy storytelling on my part. I’d believe both.

KS - In some ways, Gods of Asgard reminds me of the old Classics Illustrated comic books that adapted great works of literature. Did you read that series as a child?

EE - I didn’t. I did read a lot of Spider-Man, Calvin and Hobbes, The Far Side, and Dick Tracy, and gradually worked more and more mainstream comics into my rotation as I got older. I wasn’t even aware of Classics Illustrated until I was an adult, but I’ve found that many fans of my book are fans of that series, as well.

Freya & Valkyries by Erik Evensen

KS - Your book includes detailed notes and insightful commentary on the myths, but the graphic presentation itself gives straightforward depictions of action. Can the medium of the graphic novel integrate deeper meaning or ambivalence – or does its visual nature predispose it to literal representation?

EE - I think it can, and I think, ideally, it would. One of my traits as an interpreter, for good or for ill, is that I ground these stories in a believable world that works in ways we understand when we see it. I’ve seen other people who have some very interesting interpretations that I wish I had thought of. Chris Studabaker, who worked on Power of the Valkyrie, is one. His interpretation of Yggdrasil and the Nine Worlds as different metaphysical planes is great – and not something I was able to come up with at the time.

Loki in Gods of Asgard

KS - You write that the story of “Loki’s Insult” contains references to “several events that do not appear in any of the existing mythological documents” and that “this is one reason why it is assumed that many of the original stories of the gods and goddesses were somehow lost.” When you write Gods of Asgard II, will you take on the challenge of imagining and illustrating these lost tales?

EE - I would love to fill in some gaps, to be honest. I’d love to do something with Ód, Freyja’s husband, or some of the minor characters that flit in and out of the myths.

Cover to Gods of Asgard

KS - The cover to Gods of Asgard features beautifully-rendered color images of your characters – images that seem almost three-dimensional. The interior, however, contains stark line art with solid blacks. Did you originally intend to color the art with Photoshop? Will there be a color edition in the future?

EE - Thank you. I didn’t originally plan on coloring the book. The reason was mainly production costs, but the number of pages and amount of time it would take to do a good job was intimidating to me, too.

KS - Your fantastic color art is also featured in the film you created for Twilight of the Gods, your collaboration with composer Andrew Boysen, Jr. How did this piece for wind ensemble come about?

EE - Well, Andy and I have known each other for a long time. I was a sophomore at the University of New Hampshire when he was hired on as the Director of Bands, and – as a band kid – I knew a lot of people in the music department. We stayed in touch, and when I started Gods of Asgard, I shared some of the artwork with him. He had the idea to write a piece using some of that artwork, and when a commission came in, he asked if I’d be interested. I said, “Why use old artwork when we could create something new?"

KS - What role did each of you play in the creation of the work? How did the art influence the music – and vice versa?

EE - We started by determining a story. Andy likes to work dark, so – after toying around with a few options – we settled on Ragnarok as a theme, because you can’t get much more epic than that. Then, we worked out story beats, and there were an awful lot of back-and-forth phone conversations that gave us that structure. I sketched out key scenes as thumbnail sketches, and Andy sketched out musical structure, and we shaped the story to fit. After that, we kind of worked on our own, then I assembled everything in a video format.

The Midgard Serpent & Thor by Erik Evensen

KS - Have you looked into the possibility of producing a fully-animated version of Gods of Asgard?

EE - I have not, but if anyone is interested, they should get in touch. That would be great!

KS - Do you have any upcoming projects related to Norse mythology?

Erik Evensen

EE - I sure do. I’m working on a book illustration project for Saga Publishers International which will essentially illustrate the Saga of Fridthjof the Bold and his ancestors. It won’t be a comic, but it should be pretty cool. I’ve got an adaptation of the Saga of the Völsungs in the works, but I shelved it because I was afraid it was too similar to P. Craig Russell’s Wagnerian adaptation. But I’d like to pull it back out, someday.

This concludes the Norse Mythology Blog's interview with Erik Evensen. More information on Erik's book can be found at the Gods of Asgard website.

INTERVIEW WITH ERIK EVENSEN (GODS OF ASGARD), Part Three

2011-06-09T09:56:00.000-05:00

Loki in Gods of Asgard

KS -Would you explain your interpretation of Loki’s character and meaning?

EE - I really love Loki, despite his faults. He’s a really, really clever guy who can sometimes act impulsively and sometimes be cold and calculating, but he’s always simply trying to amuse himself. He’s a sociopath, narcissist and “social engineer.” He’s used to being the smartest guy in the room, and it bores him. I also love that people connect him with fire. I know it comes from a false cognate with Loge, but he is very much like fire – lots of capacity for warmth, lots of capacity for destruction, and it must be tamed and kept in check at all times or it will consume and destroy you.

KS - You write that Loki “loved to stir up trouble, to keep himself entertained. Loki always seemed to be testing everyone, and testing their patience.” This also sounds like a description of Odin as he is portrayed in the Edda. Did you play up similarities in their characters to emphasize a logical reason for their blood-brotherhood?

Odin & Loki in Gods of Asgard

EE - Of course! Odin and Loki are soulmates in many ways. Odin brings him into the fold of the gods, and they are the only ones who can keep up with each other, mentally. They’re both cunning, clever and have questionable personality traits. They also show no fear of what would culturally be considered “feminine things,” such as magic-use and gender-switching. They’re like the Jay and Silent Bob of Norse myth.

KS - In “The Marriage of Skadi,” you make the story of Loki and the goat very clear, without the use of pictures. That’s a difficult tale to tell in a family-oriented book!

Loki, the goat & Skadi in Gods of Asgard

EE - That was exactly why I chose to present it using only Skadi’s expressions! There are a few areas that had to be treated with sensitivity in that way. You might have also noticed that Gjalp and Greip, Geirrod’s daughters, have a slightly smaller role than they should.

Loki - before & after - in Gods of Asgard

KS - At the beginning of Gods of Asgard, Loki is young and beautiful. As the book progresses, his visage becomes increasingly scarred and corrupted – like the painting in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Does Loki’s visage reflect his own sins, or does it – like the canvas in Oscar Wilde’s novel – hold a mirror to the gods that shows them their own failings?

Loki & Hel on Naglfar by Erik Evensen

EE - It was mainly a convenient way of visually tracking this handsome, charming guy’s descent, and his descent pulls the Æsir down with him. Loki has, by far, the most interesting character arc in the Norse pantheon. I love that he essentially just tries to keep himself entertained, but this requires more and more malevolence on his part, until eventually his jötun nature takes over, and he becomes an uncontrollable force of evil. But he does it through social manipulation and trickery, of course.

KS - You write that “the gods cannot deal with Loki without stooping to his own level.” What does this say about Norse conceptions of godhood?

EE - I think it’s really more of a statement on humanity and a cautionary tale about dealing with enemies. But it also serves as an indicator that the Norse gods are much more human and fallible than other gods in other cultures.

Freya in Gods of Asgard

Freya & Odin in Gods of Asgard

KS - You decided on “downplaying Freyja’s involvement with witchcraft and glossing over her role as Queen of the Valkyries,” instead portraying her as “the goddess of love, but . . . shallow and cunning.” There is ongoing argument over the role of women in Norse myth – some argue that the mythology is essentially patriarchal and misogynistic, others insist that it contains strong and complex female characters. How do you see the role of female goddesses in the myths?

Hel in Gods of Asgard

EE - Well, for one, I am not truly happy with my depiction of Freyja after the fact. I wish I had worked in more of the shamanistic Freyja and the Valkyrie-Freyja. That said, I love Freyja, Idunn, Skadi, and Hel as characters, and I wish there was more for them to do. I did leave out the story of Freyja and Hyndla because it mainly just lists genealogies, and I sometimes regret that decision, but I’m not sure it would make for interesting comics. To address the question, I might make a guess that the mythological stories tend to be patriarchal, but the prevailing wisdom I’m familiar with indicates that female deities were quite revered. I don’t think the stories – which are largely heroic in nature – truly represent the practical nature of the religion.

INTERVIEW WITH ERIK EVENSEN (GODS OF ASGARD), Part Two

2011-06-02T09:39:00.000-05:00

KS - You increase coherency and provide consistency between the stories in interesting ways – while also showing character development. At the beginning of the book, Hoenir can’t make any decisions while among the Vanir. Midway through, you reference this weakness in “The Theft of Idunn’s Apples.” By the final page, however, his experiences have enabled him to provide wise counsel.

The gods after Ragnarök in Gods of Asgard

EE - I am glad you picked up on that. He’s sort of like a politician who starts out as a bright-eyed idealist, but at the end of his career becomes an elder statesman and seasoned policy-maker. If we’re to believe that Hoenir and Vili are the same figure, then he must have some sense to give, since he gave thought and reason to mankind. Plus, the Poetic Edda implies he is given the “wand of prophecy” after Ragnarök, which I did not mention outright, but drew in his hands as a regal-looking scepter, carved with idols – perhaps representations of Odin and Mimir. I prefer to believe that Hoenir was not stupid, but indecisive and overly-thoughtful. I can’t see Odin and Loki having a “dumb friend,” but they’d definitely hang out with someone who is consistently lost in thought. I figure maybe he started off as a man lost in thought, but he’d have to have picked up some good wisdom by the end, after hanging out with Odin all that time.

KS - You make Thor’s goats “jötun-goats,” which explains why they are strong enough to pull his chariot.

EE - It seems there are a lot of jötun-animals roaming around in the myths. But yeah, they have to pull his massive bulk around, and they can be eaten and reborn through magic. It makes a sort of sense.

KS - In “Ottar’s Ransom,” your Hreidmar uses magic to weaken the trio of gods – which helps to explain how he could subdue and bind three powerful gods.

EE - Yeah, I’ve seen a lot of interpretations of Hreidmar as a farmer and magician and, of course, as a dwarf. I liked him as a farmer who dabbles in magic, because not only can he himself capture the gods, but his sons are remarkable, too. Regin grows up to be the advisor and mentor of Sigurd, Ottar lived as an otter by day, and Fafnir becomes transformed into a dragon. Clearly, this family knows its way around a spell.

Odin by Erik Evensen

KS - Odin is often depicted in his guise of the Old Wanderer, but you argue that myths of Idunn’s golden apples of youth imply “that generations of gods exist as relative equals.” Your depiction of Odin is quite different from other popular interpretations. What are the roots of your portrayal?

EE - Mainly, ease of storytelling. I put him in middle age for a number of reasons. For one, if you ate apples of youth all day, you wouldn’t get terribly old! Second, he still needs to be believable as the father of most of the gods. Third, Odin wears a lot of hats and has to be all things to all people, in a way. He is god of war, wisdom, poetry and death. He is a shaman and a chieftain and a wanderer and scholar. I chose to put him firmly in middle age so he would seem weathered, but he still had to be believable as a battle-hardened warrior and as a sorcerer in the same breath. We only see him as “the wanderer” a few times in my book, so I went more with the approach that he simply tries to escape instant recognition as often as he can, which I picked up from the D’Aulaires. Their character design is pretty operatic, but influenced mine a bit – especially the lock of hair over his missing eye. I like Ian McKellen’s portrayal of Gandalf as an Odin analogue, but I also like Neil Gaiman’s “Mr. Wednesday” and Bernard Cornwell’s version of Merlin as Odin analogues, as well. I tried to pay homage to all of these with my version of Odin. I personally like him as the god of inspiration – inspiration of battle, inspiration of poetry, etc. He’s a cerebral figure, a thinker, and a creator, and there’s no wonder he’s the favorite of many artists and mythology nerds such as myself.

KS - You write that, after Odin gave his eye to Mimir for a drink from the well of wisdom, “Odin became all-knowing, and Mimir became all-seeing.” That’s an interesting idea – where did it come from?

EE - I think it came from the D’Aulaires. Mimir should get something out of the deal, too, right? I think I kind of envisioned Mimir looking into the well and seeing everything Odin sees on Hliðskjálf.

Yggdrasil by Erik Evensen

KS - Another intriguing concept appears in your description of Odin’s self-sacrifice on the World Tree to gain knowledge of the runes. You write, “After nine nights, he saw that the twigs that fell to the ground formed symbols, and those symbols became words.” That’s different from the Eddic version of the story. Where did your interpretation of the runes come from?

EE - That comes from the D’Aulaires, again. This interview is causing me to realize just how much my vision of Odin is influenced by them. I must have read that book a hundred times, and they had such a great ability to make sense out of abstract concepts. It’s brilliant.

KS - When Odin arrives on his mystic horse Sleipnir at the home of Hrungnir, the giant asks (in your paraphrase of Snorri), “Who are you, who rides his horse on the wind?” I couldn’t help thinking of the opening lines of Goethe’s “Erlkönig” – “Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind?” (“Who rides so late through night and wind?”). Did you ever study German literature?

EE - Nope! I have a scholar’s sensitivity to this stuff, but I’m not a true scholar of mythology or German literature.

Thor in Gods of Asgard

KS - Your version of Thor is closer to that in Peter Madsen’s Valhalla than that in Jack Kirby’s The Mighty Thor. How did these earlier comic book versions influence your take on the god of thunder?

EE - I never read either one, really. I was never into Marvel’s Thor, because I felt they took so many liberties with the mythological aspects of it that it didn’t really resemble the Thor I was familiar with anymore. Now they’ve retconned so much that they’ve explained away some of that, but it’s still pretty removed. I knew of Madsen when I was working on Gods of Asgard, but had only seen his stuff on the internet, untranslated. His seems more targeted at kids than mine, but our character designs for Thor and Odin are kind of similar. That’s a coincidence, however. I think most appropriate versions of Thor would look like mine or Madsen’s.

Thor by Erik Evensen

KS - It’s sometimes hard for those of us who grew up in the Marvel Age to separate childhood memories of comics and mythology. Was it “accidentally on purpose” that your Freya says, “I thought nobody could lift that hammer but you, Thor”? That concept comes from Stan Lee, not Snorri Sturluson – but it works well as a taunting remark in your book.

EE - It was sort of a joke and reference to the “other” Thor, without being explicit. Clearly, plenty of people have picked up Mjölnir! I did make it really insanely heavy, though. We all know he needs a belt of strength to lift it and iron gloves to withstand its power, and he’s a pretty tough dude.

Thor & Mjölnir in Gods of Asgard

KS - You have created a striking and unique version of Thor’s hammer. When are you going to partner with a silversmith and make this available as a pendant?

EE - Thanks! I love the description of its handle being “a bit too short,” which is sort of a dig at his manhood. I tried to make it shorter than most war hammers I’ve seen, while still being usable as a weapon. But that’s a really great idea. Know any silversmiths?

INTERVIEW WITH ERIK EVENSEN (GODS OF ASGARD), Part One

2011-05-26T10:16:00.001-05:00

Self-portrait by Erik Evensen

Gods of Asgard is an award-winning adaptation of the Norse myths by American artist and author Erik Evensen. First published in 2007, the 164-page graphic novel tells tales of the mythology from Creation to Ragnarök. Well-known stories of Odin, Thor, Loki, Freya and other gods and goddesses (and dwarves and giants) are presented in new interpretations that honor the originals. Erik writes that “it was my goal to stay as true as possible to the original source material.” His success is shown in the fondness that both fans and scholars of Norse myth have for the book.

Erik holds degrees in art and design from the University of New Hampshire, School of the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston) and Ohio State University. He has taught at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, Bemidji State University and Ohio State University. In addition to Gods of Asgard, Erik’s comics art has appeared in Fear Agent, Grounded, Invincible, Johnny Raygun and Zombie Bomb.

KS - How did you first become interested in Norse mythology?

EE - I was a pretty voracious reader when I was a kid, and my family constantly plugged different books into my hands. D’Aulaire’s Norse Gods & Giants was my first Norse mythology book, and I just kept on going. I know its connection to my own Norwegian roots and my fascination with Vikings and pirates also helped. The D’Aulaires influenced me hugely, and many little ideas of theirs worked their way into my own book.

Ymir, Audhumla & Buri in Gods of Asgard

KS - Could you explain your idea that “the Norse creation myth . . . mirrors concepts from other religions”?

EE - I think all I meant by that was that many of the elements are similar to those of other cultural beliefs. The gods create humans out of inanimate material and give them life. Odin and his brothers create the world itself out of the dismembered bits of Ymir, evoking ideas of Gaia. All of this begins in an abyss. Many of these elements are paralleled in Greek and Egyptian mythology in different ways, though not necessarily in the same way, order or fashion.

KS - How do you feel Norse mythology differs from Celtic, Greek and Egyptian mythology? In your view, how do the gods express the landscape, culture and psychology of the northern world?

EE - It’s generally accepted that the Norse worldview was decidedly bleaker, harsher, maybe even darker. They lived in an area that was practically in darkness half the year, and the winters and landscape were full of weather, terrain, and wildlife that easily claimed lives. That’s not to say they were a nihilistic people, of course, just that their reference frame for understanding the world wouldn’t be the same as that of a people living in and around the Mediterranean. A lot of the popular imagery of the Norse gods borrows heavily from classical mythology and Victorian conventions, and I’ve tried to strip away a lot of that. Of course, I’m always learning more and more, and unlearning some of what I’ve learned, and I know I’d do things a little differently even now. I know I have some classical influences and misconceptions in my own book.

Gods & giants - the cast of Gods of Asgard

KS - The word jötunn is usually translated into English as giant, which conjures images of Bunyanesque titans. You have a more sophisticated view of these ambivalent figures and relate them to huldefolk, nisser, tomten and trolls – as well as “the forces of nature and the forces of chaos.” How do you characterize the relationship of the gods and the giants?

Troll by Erik Evensen

EE - Well, to me, the jötnar and the gods are the same idea – manifestations of forces, elements and concepts. The jötuns seem to tend toward the elemental side of things, with the most common being frost-giants, storm-giants and the infamous fire-giants of Muspellheim. The gods are more about concepts, such as wisdom, fertility, battle and inspiration. In this way, the gods represent the traits of human beings, while the jötuns represent chaotic, natural forces. I like to think of the jötuns as predecessors of huldefolk and their counterparts because I think they serve the same purpose, and essentially have the same conceptual roots. Peer Gynt’s journey into the mountains mirrors Thor’s journey to Utgard, for instance. I also see a similarity in how a huldra can be beautiful and enchanting and lure human men into coupling or marriage, and how several of the gods took the beautiful daughters of ugly frost-giants as their wives. I treated the jötnar as a primeval versions of the trolls, et al., from more modern folklore.

KS - Your giants and dwarves exhibit bestial traits throughout the book – animal feet, claws and whiskers. Why did you portray them in this way?

Skadi in Gods of Asgard

EE - I wanted a way to visually separate the giants, dwarves and trolls, so we’d have a clue as to the nature of different characters. I didn’t want this to be terribly off-the-wall, so I gave them some of those bestial traits to “otherize” them in comparison to the gods, who were designed to be human looking. Obviously, some of them (such as Loki or Skadi) look more human-like than others, but they always have the same “tell” of their counterparts – usually pointed ears. I took the idea of this visual signifier from the huldra, who had cow tails or bark-covered backs. There’s always a little clue to let you know they’re not of our world.

KS - Why did you decide to use Snorri Sturluson’s Edda as your primary source – as opposed to the Poetic Edda, Heimskringla or Gesta Danorum?

EE - Snorri is a pretty good storyteller, for one! But also, a lot of these sources kind of contradict each other in places, and different stories have different traditions. The stories are great, as we all know, but I had to make a lot of decisions in order to unify certain ideas and elements, and give the book a modicum of structure. I admit, it did make it easier to do this by leaning on Snorri a bit, since he did this originally. I deviated from Snorri a bit, but not as much as I originally thought I might.

KS - In typical medieval scholarly fashion, Snorri sought to organize the contradictory poetic fragments of Norse mythology into a coherent whole. Likewise, you write that you “have attempted to rectify some of these contradictions for the sake of the narrative.” We know that Norse mythology reflects elements of pre-Christian religious practices throughout continental Europe, Scandinavia and the British Isles over a very long period of time. What is the end result of trying to make a coherent storyline out of material from such a large geographical and temporal range?

Tyr in Gods of Asgard

EE - Well again, leaning on Snorri helped because he had done it before, but when I started the project I didn’t realize the extent of the incoherence! It’s one thing to read the myths – even differing versions of the myths – and it’s another entirely to try to make sense of them in written and illustrated form. What decisions do you make? Why do you make them? Is Tyr going to be Odin’s son or Hymir’s son? I wanted to create something of an arc for the book as a whole, but I also wanted to maintain as much authenticity – or at least sincerity – as I could.

KS - Your book is, in a way, an interpretation of an interpretation of a transcription of an oral tradition of an ancient belief system. With all these intermediate stages, what relationship do you think Gods of Asgard has to actual religious beliefs before the conversion to Christianity?

EE - I’m not a comparative religion scholar or a practitioner of Ásatrú, so I wasn’t even thinking about that end of it. It probably has only a very fuzzy resemblance. Like in the days of VHS, when you’d copy a movie off the TV, then copy the tape for a friend, then they would do the same – until you were several generations removed from the source. I watched a friend’s tapes of Apocalypse Now and Dune and had no idea what I was looking at the entire time. I remember fuzzy images of sandworms and helicopters and little else.

ODIN IN LOS ANGELES

2011-05-18T11:56:00.027-05:00

Last weekend, I spent three days in Los Angeles. I was flown out by a production company to be interviewed on film for a set of upcoming television documentaries involving Norse mythology. I had free time on Saturday, and I ended up spending five hours at the amazing Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).

In anticipation of the upcoming Tim Burton exhibit, the museum has devoted a small gallery to "Burton Selects: From LACMA's Collection." The filmmaker chose pieces from the museum's permanent collection that fit with his personal aesthetic - works by German Expressionists, Mannerists, Symbolists, and artists from Japan and Mexico. The museum's description of the decidedly gothy works connects them to "the haunted interiors and emotive creatures found in Burton’s feature films."

The Tree of Life by George Grosz (1927)

Walking through the exhibit, I was stopped dead by a print of George Grosz's Der Lebensbaum ("The Tree of Life"). The curved lines of the stylized tree reminded me of art and ornament from the Viking Age, and the hanging bodies suggested two passages that are well-known to students of Norse myth.

In the poem Hávamál (“Sayings of the High One”), Odin says these famous lines, describing the self-sacrifice that led to his discovery of the runes -

I know that I hung on a windy tree
nine long nights,
wounded with a spear, dedicated to Odin,
myself to myself,
on that tree of which no man knows
from where its roots run.

In the late 11th century, Adam of Bremen described the heathen temple at Uppsala that was dedicated to Thor, Wotan and Frikko.

It is customary also to solemnize in Uppsala, at nine-year intervals, a general feast of all the provinces of Sweden. From attendance at this festival no one is exempted. Kings and people all and singly send their gifts to Uppsala and, what is more distressing than any kind of punishment, those who have already adopted Christianity redeem themselves through these ceremonies. The sacrifice is of this nature: of every living thing that is male, they offer nine heads, with the blood of which it is customary to placate gods of this sort. The bodies they hang in the sacred grove that adjoins the temple. Now this grove is so sacred in the eyes of the heathen that each and every tree in it is believed divine because of the death or putrefaction of the victims.

The grim yet cartoonish design of Grosz's print seems like a perfectly poetic illustration of these mythic and historic descriptions of ritualized hanging.

Bird Girl: Sonia Gramatté by Walter Gramatté (1922)

On the same gallery wall, but separated by several works, hung Vogelmädchen: Sonia Gramatté ("Bird Girl") by Walter Gramatté. Again, this is a work that would make a perfect illustration of Norse myth. The goddess Freya is often associated with a cloak made of falcon feathers - a cloak which enables its wearer to fly through the sky.

In addition to being a goddess of fertility and love, Freya is also associated with the dead. In the poem Grímnismál ("Sayings of the Masked One"), Odin - during an ecstatic wisdom performance - describes Freya's abode in Ásgarð ("Home of the Æsir" - the Norse gods). Freya lives in Fólkvang ("Field of the host"),

and there Freya arranges
the choice of seats in the hall;
half the slain she chooses every day,
and half Odin owns.

The brooding, animalistic gaze of the girl in Gramatté's print lines up with the more frightening aspects of Freya's character, and it can serve as an antidote to the fetishistic fantasies of many male-produced portrayals of the goddess as a sort of sexed-up superhero.

To Edgar Poe by Odilon Redon (1882)

Yet a third print in the exhibition appeared like an illustration of Norse mythology. Odilon Redon's À Edgar Poe (L'oeil, comme un ballon bizarre se dirige vers l'infini) ["To Edgar Poe (The Eye, Like a Strange Balloon, Mounts toward Infinity)"] is dedicated to the American author Edgar Allan Poe, but it seems strangely like an imaginative image from Odinic lore.

In the early 13th century, the Icelandic author and poet Snorri Sturluson described the mythic well of wisdom in his Edda. He relates that Odin - as part of his endless search for knowledge of the universe and of the future - sacrifices one of his eyes in order to receive a drink from the well,

which has widsom and intelligence contained in it, and the master of the well is called Mimir. He is full of learning because he drinks of the well from the horn Giallarhorn. All-father [Odin] went there and asked for a single drink from the well, but he did not get one until he placed his eye as a pledge.

Mimir is an engimatic figure in the mythology. According to Snorri, he is a decapitated head preserved and kept alive by Odin's magic. In my (admittedly willful) reading of Redon's print, the eye of Odin carries the head of Mimir above the well of widsom as it gazes into infinity.

Winter by Jean-Honoré Fragonard (circa 1755)

Upstairs, in LACMA's European Painting collection, I found Jean-Honoré Fragonard's Winter. It portrays three frightened children gazing "off-camera" in a bleak, frozen landscape. What is it that is so scary? For a Norse mythologist wandering through the museum, the answer is obviously frost-giants.

The god Thor is regularly described as being off in the east, fighting giants. He is sometimes seen as the protector of the common people, and the jötnar of Norse myth can be interpreted as physical representations of the terrifying forces of nature. Clearly, these kids need some help from the god of thunder - and he just may be riding his chariot above the storm clouds behind them.

Fossil skeleton of dire wolf

Just down the street from LACMA are the La Brea Tar Pits, a rich source of fossils from the last Ice Age. One of the animals whose remains have been excavated is the dire wolf, a creature familiar to (full disclosure) those of us who played Dungeons & Dragons as teenagers.

Of course, "dire wolf" is also an apt description of Fenrir, the monstrous wolf of Norse myth. He is the son of Loki (with the giantess Angrboda) who bites off the right hand of the god Týr and will kill Odin in the final battle at the end of mythic time. It is strange to think that - over 16,000 years ago - large dire wolves (with massive fangs) were roaming around what is now Wilshire Boulevard.

There you have it - Odin, Freya, Fenrir and the frost-giants are alive and well and living in Los Angeles.

(ALMOST AN) INTERVIEW WITH KENNETH BRANAGH

2011-04-25T10:09:00.000-05:00

Thor director Kenneth Branagh (AP Photo)

There are three topics I had hoped to discuss with Thor director Kenneth Branagh regarding his film’s relationship to Norse mythology. My request for an interview made it past media representatives for Marvel Studios and Paramount Pictures but was denied by Paramount’s Director of Interactive Marketing. It’s a shame, since I would have loved to hear Mr. Branagh’s answers to some questions the film has raised even before being released in American theaters.

Of course, I understand that the movie is based on the Marvel Comics version of Thor, not on the ancient myths themselves. As a longtime reader of the comics, I also know Marvel has increasingly incorporated elements of the original mythology over the fifty-year history of the series. My questions for Mr. Branagh relate to choices he made as director and what those choices mean for the film as a cultural artifact of the early 21st century.

What follows is my half of an interview that never happened. To turn my notes into an article, I have expanded the questions and elaborated the context of each topic. I (hopefully) wouldn’t have gone on quite so long during an actual phone conversation!
_______________________________________________________________________

"Sif's Golden Hair" by Willy Pogany (1920)

1. VIOLENCE – Norse mythology is, in large part, the literary record of northern Europe’s pre-Christian religion. It presents the Norse gods as complex characters of multivalent meaning. Thor is an idealized version of the rough and self-sufficient freeman as he defends humanity from terrifying natural forces, yet he also sanctifies marriage, ratifies contracts, and provides rain for farmers’ crops. His wife Sif, a goddess of fertility and the harvest, is a fitting mate for a sky-god who brings life-giving rain. The myth in which Loki cuts Sif’s golden hair down to stubble and then magically causes it to grow anew is a typical Trickster tale, but it is also an allegory for the harvest and regrowth of grain. In Norse myth, Odin may be a war-god, but he is also the god of poetry, prisoners, writing, magic, cargoes, journeys and more.

Poster of Sif from Branagh's Thor

Previews for the Thor film show the title character solely as a sullen and violent warrior, and you have described him as “this hero with primitive brute strength.” Promotional posters for the movie tag Sif as “the goddess of war” (and a brunette). Odin is shown as an angry and vengeful god – more Old Testament than Old Norse. Much like Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, your film focuses on the physical violence of an ancient religious corpus while glossing over more complex meanings and messages.

Why did you choose to portray only the most violent aspects of the mythology? What do you think this choice says about Western culture in the 21st century? Are we more violent than we were a millennium ago? Are we less able to understand complex issues? Has our expression of spirituality degraded down into physical violence?

2. SEXUALITY – In recent years, Loki has become something of a culture hero to some members of the LGBT community. Unable to find themselves in Judeo-Christian mythology, they are attracted to Loki’s penchant for changing gender and his open attitudes towards sexuality. Like other Norse gods, Loki is a complex and contradictory character who is neither wholly good nor completely evil. In several myths, his changes of gender and unashamed embrace of sexuality are directly responsible for saving the gods from destruction. Over the course of a lengthy storyline that began in 2007, writer J. Michael Straczynski incorporated Loki’s gender-switching ability into Marvel Comics. Loki spent many issues in the body of Thor’s beloved Sif, and the other characters didn’t seem to bat an eye at the change from male to female.

Marvel's female Loki by Dylan Teague

At the 2010 San Diego Comic-Con, you said that your version of Asgard, home of the Norse gods, “had a heft and wasn’t kind of airy-fairy.” This led one of my readers to joke, “There will be no airy-fairy Asgard! It will be a very butch Asgard!” I initially thought I had misread your comment but soon realized that it fits squarely with your long record of public statements about homosexuality. Protestations of straightness run through your interviews and writing, and a “butch Asgard” seems to jibe well with your worldview.

In your 1991 autobiography, you quote your mother’s hopes that acting school won’t be “full of nancy boys.” In 1996, you told The Advocate (“The World’s Leading Source for LGBT News and Entertainment”) about your experiences in dance classes, saying that male students were uncomfortable wearing tights because “it's not quite a butch-male thing to do.” When a critic wrote that there were “several ambiguously gay moments” in The Road to El Dorado, your 2000 animated buddy-film with Kevin Kline, you replied, “No, it was a butch-butch thing . . . I was so butch, I woke up in the mornings and frightened myself.” In 2007, you described your reaction to a character’s intense desire for revenge in Harold Pinter’s screenplay for your Sleuth remake: “It started to make me think, well, is he gay? Is this happening in the moment, or is this part of a kind of provocation which will lead to an ultimate and yet-to-be-discovered humiliation, which we don’t get a chance to see because Jude [Law] turns the tables and says, ‘F--k off, you big poof!’"

Chris Hemsworth grips his hammer in a popular shot from Thor

Butchness (as opposed to nancy-boy-ness and poof-ness) seems to be very important to your personal and artistic self-image. However, despite your efforts to make a macho movie, the Thor film threatens to become a camp classic even before it is released in the United States. Gay websites have started posting stills from the movie with “nudge nudge, wink wink” captions such as, “Chris Hemsworth’s Thor has arms worthy of his hammer.”

Why did you decide to ignore the “ambiguously gay” elements of Loki’s character, despite having J. Michael Straczynski as a collaborator on the film? Are American comic books more socially progressive than Hollywood movies? Are our attitudes on sexuality more or less advanced than those of the ancient Norsemen?

3. RACE – Your casting of black British actor Idris Elba as the Norse god Heimdall has led to much reactionary sound and fury, signifying nothing. Others have already written eloquent rebuttals to the racist rants of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) and its call for a boycott of the film. In the system of Germanic runes, one symbol stands for both C and K, so – in the culture this extremist group claims to defend – CCC is equivalent to KKK. ‘Nuff said.

Icelandic image of Heimdall from the 18th century

I have no doubt that Mr. Elba will bring power and intensity to his role, as he always does. In his gracious response to the knuckle-draggers protesting his participation in Thor, the award-winning actor said that your casting “was genuinely color-blind.”

However, your casting decision should be seen in the context of recent releases based on Marvel Comics. Perhaps to make up for the lily-white cast of Spider-Man (2002), the Kingpin was changed from white to black in Daredevil (2003). Of all the Marvel characters that could have been portrayed by an African-American actor, the director chose the leader of a violent criminal gang. For the Fantastic Four films (2005 and 2007), Ben Grimm’s girlfriend was likewise changed from white to black. In the original comics, she is a pivotal figure in the story of Galactus and the Silver Surfer; in the films, her role has been minimized to almost nothing. Are these choices progressive or reactionary?

Poster of Heimdall from Branagh's Thor

Given Marvel’s casting record, I question why this particular character was chosen to exemplify your “genuinely color-blind” casting. In the comics, Heimdall stands outside the locked gates of Asgard and waits for enemies to attack. Inside, the rest of the deities drink, feast and engage in other godly activities. Your statement on the casting was that Elba “provides all the characteristics we need from Asgard's gatekeeper, the man who says, ‘Thou shalt not pass.’ When Idris Elba says that, you know you're gonna have a problem.” In an echo of the Kingpin casting, the one character from the comics you chose to portray with a black actor is the Bouncer of the Gods. Again, is this progressive or reactionary?

You sidestep the issue of history and culture by portraying the Norse gods as technologically advanced space aliens that humans mistake for gods. This idea goes back to Arthur C. Clarke’s “Third Law” (1961): “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” It is also connected to Chariots of the Gods? Unsolved Mysteries of the Past, Erich von Däniken’s 1968 bestseller that claimed Earth’s ancient civilizations had worshiped visiting space aliens as gods. By taking cues from these writers, you have managed to completely remove the Norse gods from the culture that created them. Thus, the race of the characters is not an issue.

If the gods are space aliens to whom human conceptions of race do not matter, why not make a more meaningful casting choice and change the race of Thor’s human lover, Jane Foster? If Thor is sent to Earth from beyond the stars, couldn’t he fall in love with an Aborigine, Arab, Haitian, Native American, Peruvian, Saami or Tuareg woman? What message are you sending with your choice of Natalie Portman, an actress who has repeatedly played the love interest of comic book, fantasy, and science fiction characters? Sagas, history, and DNA research show that ancient Norsemen married and mated with women of every culture that they explored in their travels; are we more afraid of racial and cultural difference than these “primitive” people were? Forty-three years after Kirk kissed Uhura on Star Trek, are you still worried that an interracial romance will hurt distribution numbers?
_______________________________________________________________________

Maybe these questions are too serious to ask the director of a Hollywood adventure movie. In this case, I think they are perfectly appropriate. Given Mr. Branagh’s three decades of involvement with “serious” film as both actor and director, it is reasonable to expect him to have more to say than the usual Hollywood hokum. Marvel has been using Mr. Branagh’s involvement with the project to lend some gravitas to what would otherwise be a disposable action film based on a comic book currently ranked 35th in North American sales – behind more popular Marvel characters such as Fantastic Four, Avengers, Spider-Man, X-Men, Wolverine, Captain America and Iron Man. In a few days, we will find out what Branagh’s past experience has brought to the film, and we will see whether his Thor is an art-house admixture like Ang Lee’s Hulk or a nonstop action scene like Louis Leterrier’s The Incredible Hulk.

OBAMA AND OSTARA: THE PRESIDENT PONDERS EASTER’S ESSENCE

2011-04-17T17:22:00.002-05:00

President Obama at 2010 Easter Prayer Breakfast (AP Photo)

A year ago, President Obama celebrated Easter with “Christian leaders from all across America” at the White House Prayer Breakfast. In his address to the congregants, he repeatedly referred to “the meaning of Easter” and said, “I can't tell any of you anything about Easter that you don't already know.” This article respectfully attempts to tell the president some things about Easter that he himself may not already know – things that have implications for public discourse in the 21st century.

What is the meaning of Easter, really? It does not have a descriptive name like Ash Wednesday, Good Friday or Christmas (“Christ Mass”). The word itself has no relation to Christian lore but is the proper name of a holiday that historically honored Eostre, a pre-Christian Germanic goddess whose name has ancient roots connecting her to the verb to shine and to nouns meaning dawn, morning, and east. For Christian fundamentalists who assert that Halloween is a pagan celebration, this etymology may come as a somewhat unpleasant surprise.

In the early 8th century, a Northumbrian monk known as the Venerable Bede mentioned pagan Anglo-Saxon Easter celebrations in his De Temporum Ratione (“On the Reckoning of Time”). The month of April was known as Eosturmonath (“Easter-month”) and was named for the goddess Eostre. Christian leaders overwrote springtime celebrations in her honor with ritual celebrating Christ’s resurrection. “Now they designate that Paschal season by her name,” Bede writes, “calling the joys of the new rite by the time-honored name of the old observance.” Written records dating to the early 9th century show that continental Germans referred to April as Ôstarmânoth, naming it for Ostarâ, the German version of the fertility goddess. Nearly 1,500 years ago, Easter was a multicultural, interfaith celebration.

Of course, the president was speaking of the spiritual meaning of the holiday, not the etymology of its name. He said, “We are awed by the grace He showed even to those who would have killed Him. We are thankful for the sacrifice He gave for the sins of humanity. And we glory in the promise of redemption in the resurrection.” These concepts are not unique to Christianity; Norse mythology also features a god’s son who is associated with grace, sacrifice and resurrection. His name is Balder, one of the major Norse gods, and he was appropriated by Christian missionaries at the end of the Viking Age to ease the transition for converts from paganism to Christianity.

Similar to the way in which Christian celebrations of the Resurrection were written over pagan springtime rites honoring Eostre, the worship of Christ subsumed that of Balder. Like Eostre, Balder was associated with brightness; his dwelling is called Breiðablik (“broad-gleam”) and his name may also be etymologically connected to the verb to shine and to the nouns light and day. In Norse mythology, he is linked to the president’s three Christian concepts: grace, sacrifice, and resurrection.

Balder is associated with grace in the Edda (1220); Icelandic scholar Snorri Sturluson writes that Balder “is the wisest of the [gods], and the fairest-spoken and most gracious.” Balder’s home “is in heaven” and “nothing impure is allowed” within it. Like Christ showing grace “even to those who would have killed him,” Balder makes no hostile action when dream-visions foretell his own murder and, according to the 12th-century poem Baldrs draumar (“Balder’s dreams”), it is discovered that his own brother will be the killer.

Like Christ, Balder is a god-son sacrificed so that humanity may someday live in a just, verdant and peaceful world. Balder’s father is Odin, the leader of the Norse gods. After Balder dreams of his own death, Odin journeys to the realm of Hel (daughter of the Norse god Loki, not the Christian afterlife) and questions a mystically-reanimated seeress about his son’s future. Despite Odin’s foreknowledge and the best efforts of the united gods to protect Balder, the god of light is fatally shot with an arrow of mistletoe. After his death, Loki, the traitorous god responsible for instigating Balder’s brother to murder, is bound with unbreakable bonds as punishment.

Balder’s Christ-like resurrection occurs after Ragnarök (“Doom of the Powers”), the End Times of Norse mythology in which the world of gods and men is destroyed and a new world rises to take its place. The post-Ragnarök era of bliss is free from evil and led by Balder, who has returned from the dead to rule in peace. Without his earlier death, he would have been destroyed along with his fellow gods in the Final Battle. His sacrifice, like that of Christ, makes it possible for him to return and usher in a New Age.

In tales of Balder and Christ, two faith traditions in earthly conflict found a common spiritual touchstone. Tales of Christ could easily have been connected with the story of Balder during the conversion of northern Europe. Both figures are associated with grace, spoken wisdom, kindness, and a pure vision of heaven. A foreboding of personal sacrifice is central to both of their stories, and both are fatally betrayed by a confidant who is bound/hung for his betrayal. Perhaps most importantly, both will be resurrected and return at an unspecified End Time to rule over a new era of peace.

Making these connections was especially important in England, where the newly-converted were particularly obstinate in giving up pagan traditions. In 601, Pope Gregory sent his English missionaries instructions for dealing with these troublesome new Christians. Giving up on the possibility of completely stamping out pagan ritual, he decided to convert pagan temples to Christian churches rather than raze them. He reconsecrated pagan holidays as holy days dedicated to Christian martyrs and recontextualized pagan animal sacrifice as “religious feasting.” The ritual killing of cattle was now a form of “returning thanks to the Giver of all things for their sustenance,” a concept predating the American national holiday of Thanksgiving by over 1,200 years. Rather than attempting to completely eliminate pagan practices, Gregory decided on a very political solution: “whilst some outward gratifications are permitted them, they may more easily consent to the inward consolations of the grace of God.” This lines up with Bede’s statements regarding the Christianization of Easter.

The Gosforth Cross

Pope Gregory’s historic compromise is reflected in the 10th-century Anglo-Saxon cross in Gosforth, England, which makes the connections between Balder and Christ explicit. This Christian crucifix is covered with detailed carvings of scenes from the life of Balder, and several images point out direct parallels with Christian myth. Balder is portrayed in a Christlike pose with blood pouring from a spear-wound inflicted in his side. A woman stands at his feet like the Virgin Mary, but she is represented in the traditional guise of a valkyrie welcoming a departed soul into the pagan afterlife – a familiar image from other artifacts of the period. Loki is shown bound about the neck in an echo of the self-hanging of the traitor Judas. The cross also portrays the slaying of the wolf Fenrir by the god Vidar, an act which signals the end of Ragnarök and the promised Second Coming of Balder.

Interfaith understanding was not limited to the English. Nearly 1,000 years later, the connections between Balder and Christ were restated by Bishop Esaias Tegnér of Sweden in Fridthjof’s Saga (1825). Set in the 8th century, the epic poem features the following lines spoken by “Balder’s priest supreme.”

In lands far south, ‘tis said,
Is some new Balder worshiped, -
He, the pure virgin’s son from heav’n who sped,
Sent by the Allfather’s self to explain the dim
And yet unfathom’d runes which crowd the rim
Bord’ring the shield of darkness, that dread shield
Worn by the norns. And never would this Balder wield
Our earth’s dark blood-stain’d arms. No! Still in his glad field
Was peace his battle cry, his bright sword, love,
And o’er his silver helmet sat the dove
Of brooding innocence. His pious days
In sweet instruction pass’d, or pray’r or praise;
And when he died, his dying voice forgave, -
And now, ‘neath far-off palms, still stands his shining grave.

Notably, Tegnér portrays Christ as a son of Odin, whose many names include Alföðr (“Allfather”). Christ is seen as a new incarnation of Balder, much as he was on the Gosforth cross. Although Tegnér’s poem is a Romantic work of the 19th century, it offers a psychological portrait of how pagans in the Viking Age may have viewed the new mythology of Christianity by fitting it into their own longstanding spiritual worldview. Talk of runes, shields, norns and swords would have been much easier for a Norseman to relate to than Biblical tales of events occurring “’neath far-off palms.” Once again, spiritual commonalities overcame cultural differences.

Pendant from Fossi, Iceland

Bishop Tegnér’s poem leads us back to President Obama. For a millennium, it was possible for religious leaders and writers to acknowledge that Christ’s message was not something totally new to the pagan North. The idea of new birth in Christ was compatible with pagan springtime ritual, and concepts of grace, sacrifice, and resurrection were consistent with Norse mythology. According to the sagas, some Icelanders were blandinn í trú (“mixed in faith”), as demonstrated by a silver pendant from Fossi, Iceland, that exhibits elements of both Thor’s hammer and Christ’s crucifix. For them, the celebration of Easter could have multiple meanings.

President Obama, however, expresses little interest in Easter’s different meanings. At the prayer breakfast, he was unequivocal about his own beliefs, stating that, “as Christians, we believe that redemption can be delivered - by faith in Jesus Christ.” He also referred to Christ’s final words as “spoken by our Lord and Savior.” Several months later, a woman at a town-hall style event in the yard of an Albuquerque home asked the president about his religious beliefs. According to the official White House transcript, he answered,

I think my public service is part of that effort to express my Christian faith. And it’s – but the one thing I want to emphasize, having spoken about something that obviously relates to me very personally, as President of the United States, I’m also somebody who deeply believes that the – part of the bedrock strength of this company is that it embraces people of many faiths and of no faith – that this is a country that is still predominantly Christian.

It is nothing new for American presidents to make public declarations of their religious faith. Indeed, it is a prerequisite for the job. In a 2007 USA Today poll leading up to the political conventions of the last presidential election, 53% of respondents said, “No, they would not vote for a generally well-qualified person for president who happened to be atheist.” Atheism was, by far, the attribute that most disqualified a candidate from consideration. Homosexuality, that bane of the religious right, was a distant second at 43%. Only 5% wouldn’t elect a Black candidate based on his race. With these numbers, how can we expect the president to publicly offer a nuanced view of religious belief? To preserve his status with the electorate, he must act like a true believer.

In England, where Christians had such a hard time giving up pagan ritual, a 2006 Guardian poll had very different results. Religion was seen by 82% of respondents as “a cause of division/tension between people.” Only 17% considered Britain “a Christian country.” These attitudes lead to very different behavior from elected leaders. Former Prime Minister Tony Blair only revealed his deeply-held Christian beliefs after leaving public office. In a 2007 BBC interview, he said,

Well, it's difficult if you talk about religious faith in our political system. I mean, if you are in the American political system or others, then you can talk about religious faith, and people say, “Yes, that's fair enough,” and it is something they respond to quite naturally.

You talk about it in our system, and frankly people do think you're a nutter. I mean they sort of, you know, you maybe go off and sit in the corner and, you know, commune with - with the man upstairs and then come back and say, “Right, I've been told the answer and that's it.”

President Obama clearly does not share Mr. Blair’s reticence in talking about faith, but he does limit which faiths he will include in the discussion. The White House has hosted religious events for Judaism, Islam and Christianity – the three major, Creator-driven, monotheistic religions. At the Easter breakfast, the president said, “We held a Seder here to mark the first Passover. We held an Iftar here with Muslim Americans to break the daily fast during Ramadan. And today, I'm particularly blessed to welcome you, my brothers and sisters in Christ, for this Easter breakfast.” While visiting India in November, President Obama spoke of “the common truth of all the world’s great religions, that we are all children of God.” The logical conclusion from this is that the president does not consider polytheistic faiths such as Hinduism to be “great religions,” since they do not subscribe to the notion of a single, patriarchal god shared by the Big Three.

This is no surprise, really; we expect that politicians will cater to the electorate’s dominant faiths (and voting blocs). However, from a president who ran an election campaign steeped in multiculturalism and diversity, can’t we expect a little more change and a little less politics as usual? In a nation where public religious display such as prayer in school is an ongoing and unsettled matter (despite repeated rulings by the Supreme Court), it seems a little odd that the head of the Executive Branch would even host prayer breakfasts. There is, of course, no law against such events, but they do raise questions of privilege and access.

The First Amendment to the Constitution states that

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The first clause legally prevents the government from creating a state religion; in effect, it declares that America is a secular nation. Do President Obama’s prayer breakfasts and statements of belief imply government endorsement of a particular religion? If the president wants to prove that his attempt at inclusiveness is honest (and not politically-motivated), he would have to include all faiths – not only the ones with wealth, power and votes. The White House would need to hold prayer breakfasts for each religion, not just those with politically-powerful constituencies. Somehow, I can’t imagine the president presiding over a pasta dinner for the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster or hosting a jazz jam session for the St. John Coltrane African Orthodox Church.

The president’s privileging of certain religious groups became an issue in February of this year, when the White House released the names of twelve religious leaders appointed by President Obama to his advisory council on faith-based programs. Reverend Welton Gaddy, president of the Interfaith Alliance, remarked on the lack of diversity of the group, which was almost exclusively Christian and Jewish: “I would think that it would have been a priority to have had a Muslim leader on there and at least one representative from the non-Abrahamic traditions.” In the end, will the president speak for the voiceless or cater to those who raise their voices with power?

Maybe President Obama can learn from the history of Easter and apply its meaning to the remainder of his term. Whether from a Norse or Christian perspective, this is a celebration of rebirth and renewal, of dawn and light, of hope and change. Easter is a fundamentally multicultural combination of pagan and Christian elements. This combination is possible because of themes and values that are common to both belief systems. These values are shared by various faiths throughout the world, not just the Big Three. This commonality suggests that they are human values, not solely religious ones.

Perhaps the president can find a way to talk about these themes without the divisiveness of religious rhetoric. To do so, he would have to realize that the spirit of the First Amendment suggests that the president shouldn’t preach and testify at prayer breakfasts. He would also have to “express [his] Christian faith” through action rather than public prayer and religious speech. This would lead to confronting the wealthy and the powerful, to siding with the disaffected of the world against America-friendly dictators, to privileging diplomacy over military action, and to a host of other things that would guarantee his impeachment. That would be, perhaps, too difficult a cross for him to bear.

PREVIEW: SOCIETY FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCANDINAVIAN STUDY CONFERENCE

2011-04-01T14:55:00.004-05:00

Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study

The 101st Annual Meeting of the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study will be held in Chicago on April 28-30. Produced and planned by North Park University and the Center for Scandinavian Studies, the conference will take place downtown at the Holiday Inn Chicago Mart Plaza. Registration for the event is open to the public. More information is available at the event website.

The Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study (SASS) was founded in 1911 as an association of individuals interested in cultural study of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. SASS objectives include promoting Scandinavian studies in the United States; encouraging original research on Scandinavian language, literature, history, culture and society by American scholars; and fostering relations between Americans interested in Scandinavian studies and their counterparts in the rest of the world. The journal Scandinavian Studies is published quarterly by the SASS.

Dr. Charles Peterson, Executive Director of the Center for Scandinavian Studies, was kind enough to provide me with an advance copy of the conference program. The three-day event features presentations on an impressively wide array of topics, ranging from “German & Scandinavian Connections” to “Language Pedagogy.”

Of the approximately 200 papers being presented, many are on subjects relevant to those with an interest in Norse myth. What follows is a list of scheduled papers on topics that may appeal to readers of the Norse Mythology Blog. If you are not able to attend the conference, never fear – the Norse Mythology Blog will be posting a series of reports on the event.

Nationalism, Science and the Search for Prehistoric Origins in Northern Europe
Laurence Hare, University of Arkansas

The Sword and Prestige Economy in Viking Age Ireland
Mathew R. Holland, University of Wisconsin

The Family Sagas and Medieval Scandinavian Colonialism in the British Isles
Marcus Cederström, University of Wisconsin

Juxtaposing Cogadh Gáedel re Gallaib with Orkneyinga Saga
Thomas A. DuBois, University of Wisconsin

“The Die is Cast”: Insight into the Production of Migration Period Gold Bracteates
Nancy L. Wicker, University of Mississippi

A Comparison of Carved Panels Found in Flatatunga and Bjarnastaðahlið
Erik Schjeide, University of California at Berkeley

Two Millennia Worth of Contact between Sámi and Others
John Weinstock, University of Texas at Austin

The Siida as Cultural Sieve: A Study of Traditional Mechanisms for Cultural and Religious Change Among the Saami
Céline Leduc, University of Ottawa

A Putative Sámi Charm on an Icelandic Spade: Runic Reception, Magic and Contacts
Kendra Willson, University of California, Los Angeles

Mary and the Skalds
Molly Jacobs, University of California at Berkeley

The Arrival and Implications of Literacy in Medieval Finland – Creating New Ties, Building a New Identity
Tuomas Heikkilä, University of Helsinki

Haustlöng as Harvest Poem
Carl Olsen, University of California at Berkeley

Cultural Memory in the Mythology
John Lindow, University of California at Berkeley

Jötnar and Dvergar in the Real World
Merrill Kaplan, Ohio State University

Trolls, Monster Masts, and National Neurosis: André Øvrelid’s The Troll Hunter (2010)
Ellen Rees, University of Oslo

“To Bind This to the Thigh of a Woman in Childbirth . . .” Reading Oddrúnargrátr in the Context of Healing and Magic
Verena Höfig, University of California at Berkeley

“…Everyone Remarked How Stately She Still Was”: Images of Old/er Women in the Icelandic Family Sagas
Rose-Marie Oster, University of Maryland

Probably Morphology: Automated Morphological Mapping and Probability Bases Tagging in Old Icelandic
Kryztof Urban, University of California at Los Angeles

Network Analysis of Collocates: Giants and their Friends
Zoe Borovsky, University of California at Los Angeles

Facebook for Vikings: Social Network Analysis and Egils Saga
Timothy Tangherlini, University of California at Los Angeles

Folk Costume 2.0 – National Symbols and Politics of Identity
Anna Blomster, University of California at Los Angeles

Computational Approaches to Nordic Literature and Culture
Peter Leonard, University of California at Los Angeles

Dangerous Liaisons: Faceted Browsing and the Danish Folklore Archive
Peter Broadwell, University of California at Los Angeles

Putting Virtual Flesh on Extant Cultural Bones: Computational and Visualization Tools for Placing Medieval Cultural Expressions in Context
Carrie Roy, University of Wisconsin

The Hand Loom as Medium for Modern Design – Scandinavian Weaving in the United States, the Case of Cranbrook
Leena Svinhufvud, Helsinki University / Design Museum Helsinki

The Evolution of Scandinavian Folk Art Education within the Contemporary Context
Mary Etta Litsheim, University of Minnesota, College of Education and Human Development (CHED)

Rocking Folk Music: Gåte’s Reinterpretation of Norwegian Folk Music
Heather Short, University of Washington

A Change of Face: Yet Another in the Unending Explorations of Possible Syncretistic Shape-Shifting Imagery in and Around the Volsunga Saga, this Time with Feathers
M.A. (Shelly) Nordtorp-Madson, University of St. Thomas

Image, Identity and Ownership: Representations of Norse Gods in Popular Culture and Social Media
Helga Hlaðgerður Lúthers, University of Colorado

Misinterpretatio Romana and Interpretatio Germanica Planetaria
Jim Ogier, Roanoke College

Marginalia and Female Readership of AM 235 fol.
Natalie Van Deusen, University of Wisconsin at Madison

From Grandmas to Moms to Sons: The Maternal Way to Compile a Manuscript in Seventeenth-Century Iceland
Susanne M. Fahn, University of Wisconsin at Madison

The Waiting Game: Plotting Vengeance in the Íslendingasögur
Nichole Sterling, University of Michigan Law School

A Family Affair: An Introduction to the Study of Sweden’s Medieval Ballads
James Massengale, University of California at Los Angeles

CHAMPION OF THOR, Part Three

2011-03-21T00:05:00.000-05:00

In a subsequent adventure, Haldan is challenged by Sivald, a high-ranking man with seven sons “skilled in the practice of sorcery.” Saxo describes their wild behavior.

Often, impelled by sudden strong fits of madness they would bellow wildly, bite at their shields, swallow hot coals and walk through any bonfire; nothing else could appease their frenzied bouts but rigorous chains or the slaughter of human beings.

Their skill in magic ties them to Odin, as does the fact that they are clearly berserks, members of the fierce warrior-clan associated with the cult of Odin in literary and artistic sources. Snorri’s description of the berserk lines up very closely with Saxo’s, and the Icelander makes the connection to Odin explicit.

Odin could make his enemies battle-blind, or deaf, or panic-struck, and their weapons so blunt that they could cut no better than a willow-wand; but his own men dashed forward without armor, and became as frenzied as dogs or wolves. They chewed their shield-rims, and became as strong as bears or bulls, and slaughtered people at a single stroke, but neither fire nor iron could touch them.

Once again, Haldan is in conflict with representatives of Odin. Sivald demands that Haldan face him and his seven sons all at once, taunting him with disparaging comments as Odin himself taunts Thor in Hárbarðsljóð. Haldan again turns to Thor’s oak for help: “As it happened, he was walking through a tract of shady woodland when he tore up by its roots an oak which blocked his path, and by simply stripping off its branches shaped it into a hefty cudgel.” This giant armament is elsewhere described by Saxo as a club, truncheon and giant hammer, combining the various forms of Thor’s mystic weapon.

Haldan also displays the Bunyanesque stature of Thor, who stands on the bottom of the ocean while fishing from its surface and wears the giant Hymir’s ale-kettle (which is “a league deep”) on his head. The Danish hero shows again that he is divinely “rock-strong” as he uproots an oak and uses it as a club. He vanquishes his challengers with the wooden weapon, suggesting that they, like Hakon and Snorri’s berserks, have the Odinic power of blunting swords. In the end, however, “their vigorous ardor was useless against the extraordinary mass of his truncheon.” Thor-given strength again overcomes Odin-inspired magic.

Haldan’s next opponent is another Odinic berserk, albeit one who also exhibits characteristics of Thor’s traditional enemies, the giants. Harthben is described by Saxo in the same terms as the earlier berserks (shield-chewing, coal-swallowing, fire-running, prone to murderous fits). What makes Harthben different is the fact that he stands almost sixteen feet tall (!) and spends his time kidnapping and violating high-ranking aristocratic princesses.

The giants of Norse myth are frequently found abducting (or plotting to abduct) the loveliest of the goddesses. Idun and Freya are, in contemporary terms, far out of the giants’ league. Thor is usually the one who takes on the job of protecting the godly women’s honor and avenging the wrongs done to them, and his champion plays a similar role. Haldan defeats the beserk giant in one of the quickest battles in Saxo: “[Harthben] then went for Haldan, who smashed him down with the giant hammer and deprived him of life and victory.” This abbreviated ending is reminiscent of Thor’s own giant-battles, in which the god invariably makes quick work of his outsized foes.

Haldan’s last three adventures likewise present adversaries with a mixture of Odinic and giantlike qualities. First, Haldan overthrows a pirate named Eggther who shares his name with the guardian of the Ironwood giantess in Völuspá ("Prophecy of the Seeress"). Second, Haldan disguises himself before challenging a warrior named Grimmi who has been demanding the daughter of a prince under threat of violence. Grimmi has the Odinic power of blunting a sword with his gaze, but Haldan has cleverly brought along a backup sword and emerges victorious. Haldan’s fury at Grimmi’s demands on the young woman again echoes Thor’s righteous anger as he defends the goddesses.

In Haldan’s final outing, he confronts Ebbi, “a pirate of peasant stock” who attempts to force a marriage with the daughter of the king of Götaland. As Thor is deeply angered by giants looking for brides above their station, Haldan seems strongly motivated by a desire to enforce class boundaries, providing a fine rant that demands “in tones of utmost rage what raving madness had brought [Ebbi] to such a pitch of insolence, presuming to mingle his own vile, contemptible species with outstanding nobility, daring to lay serf’s hands on a royal personage.” In fact, this emphasis on class may come from Saxo himself; he repeatedly demonstrates a strong belief in the inviolability of class structure throughout his History. Cambridge’s Hilda Ellis Davidson writes that “the idea that union between a person of noble birth and another from a lower social class is disgraceful and unforgiveable receives considerable prominence in Saxo.” The historian is neither the first nor last to write his own sociopolitical views onto mythical or legendary figures.

Haldan attends the wedding, destroying “all appearance of his kingly grandeur by assuming a hideous disguise and, coming upon the wedding at night, spread fear when all who met him were thunderstruck at the arrival of this man of superhuman size.” Thunderstruck, indeed – Haldan’s disguised appearance at the wedding is reminiscent of the poem Þrymskviða (“Thrym’s Poem”), in which Thor disguises himself a the goddess Freya in a bridal gown and pretends to marry a giant in order to win back his stolen hammer. As the human wedding guests are amazed by Haldan’s appearance (he seems to have disguised himself as a giant), the giant guests are amazed that Freya/Thor has such a huge appetite and such a fierce gaze.

In the end, Saxo’s portrayal of Haldan sits on the third stage of the descent of religion. What begins as (1) religion devolves into (2) myth, (3) legend, (4) tale, and (5) superstition. I suppose we can now add (6) comics and (7) movies! Historically, Thor begins as a sky-god feared and worshiped by his followers before becoming a character in myth – and what is myth but religion that is no longer believed? Haldan exists in the next stage, the world of legend. He embodies cultic aspects of Thor’s religious worship (calling on Thor for help in dangerous times, ritual use of the oak tree); we can also sense the faded echoes of conflict between the cults of Thor and Odin. Haldan’s adventures allude to or retell myths of Thor in the legendary, human (or superhuman) realm. Like other heroes of legend (Beowulf, Siegfried), he brings mystic tales of myth down to the earthly level. By extrapolating backwards from these legends, we make a small step towards reverse-engineering and understanding a pan-Germanic religion and mythology that only exists in tantalizing fragments.

CHAMPION OF THOR, Part Two

2011-03-14T00:14:00.000-05:00

The way in which Frothi’s death is described also hints at a disparaging view of Odin. After reaching adulthood, Haldan and his brother attack their uncle’s palace and set it on fire. Frothi meets a demeaning demise while fleeing the flames; he is “forced to crawl into a narrow grotto, which had been hewn out in the past, and up its dark warren of tunnels.” Trapped in this narrow crawlspace, his death is brought about by smoke and heat. As related in the Icelandic Eddas, Odin drills a hole in a mountain wall with an auger and transforms himself into a snake so that he can crawl through the tiny tunnel and steal the Mead of Poetry. The manner in which Frothi crawls on his stomach through the narrow space, fleeing from his nephews in a cowardly manner rather than bravely facing them in battle, reads like a parody of Odinic magic, which is again associated with unmanly behavior.

This contrast between the followers of Thor (rough, ready, dependable) and those of Odin (sneaky, tricky, untrustworthy) is obliquely reflected in Hárbarðsljóð (“The Song of Harbard”). This Eddic poem portrays a flyting between Thor and a disguised Odin, who stands across an inlet from the thunder god in the guise of a ferryman; a flyting is a ritualized verbal contest between two opponents in which each tries to out-insult the other. Throughout the poem, Thor is portrayed as having clear physical superiority; he describes how he has repeatedly saved humanity from the threatening giants. Odin, however, gets the better of him through clever verbal trickery and innuendo, enumerating his many acts of magic and seduction. In the end, Thor can only gnash his teeth in frustration while Odin mercilessly ridicules him. Oxford’s Carolyne Larrington has suggested that the poem establishes differences between the cults of Thor and Odin. As in the tale of Haldan, a clear contrast is drawn between a warrior’s bravery and a sorcerer’s trickery.

After the death of his uncle, Haldan becomes king and pursues the life of a Viking. He quickly comes into conflict with the champion of Frothi’s son Erik, a man named Hakon who has “the knack of blunting swords by witchcraft.” This is another power associated with Odin, who says in Hávamál that, through magic, “the edges of my foes I can blunt.” Again, Haldan turns to the oak tree of Thor for help.

He therefore fitted iron studs to a gigantic club and made it into a battering instrument, as though its wooden strength would prevail against the power of sorcery. Then, overtopping the rest in the striking quality of his courage, he veiled his head with his helmet and, right in the midst of the enemy’s fiercest onrush, without any screen for himself, poised and then swung his oak cudgel with both hands against the opposing rampart of shields. However robust the object, it was smashed to smithereens at the impact of his massive bludgeon.

Hakon is completely demolished by the wooden weapon. Although Thor’s mystic hammer is described in Icelandic sources as a dwarf-forged hammer of metal, Saxo describes it in Book III as a club. This agrees with the assertion by the Roman Tacitus in his Germania (98 CE) that the ancient Germans worshiped Hercules – a statement that is usually taken to refer to a veneration of Thor. Tacitus associates the German and Greek characters, it is assumed, because of the wooden club that both use as a weapon. Haldan’s use of an oaken club may be a remnant, therefore, of a more ancient conception of Thor.

After Haldan recovers from the battle, he summons “a champion of remarkable talents” named Thori. This is, of course, the thunder god portrayed as a powerful human hero by Saxo. As Haldan called upon Thor’s help as a child (in the incident with the hollow oak), he now calls upon the thunder god’s help as an adult warrior. Here, as in other parts of his History, Saxo downplays the mystic nature of the gods while reporting their worship. Writing in a Christian era, Saxo patriotically records the past glories of his native Denmark, but is clearly uncomfortable depicting living pagan gods. He usually paints them, instead, as larger-than-life human characters.

During the ensuing battle with Erik and his forces, Haldan and Thori climb up a cliff and throw boulders down to crush their enemies. After emerging victorious, Haldan is given the name Biargramm (“rock-strong”). In myths that apparently reflect older strains of belief, Thor uses rocks as weapons, rather than a hammer or club. In Thor’s Eddic confrontation with Gjálp, for example, he vanquishes the giantess by throwing a “great stone” at her. Jacob Grimm chronicles German legends of “thunder-stones” – flinty wedges thrown down from the heavens by the thunder god. Thor/Thori shows this battle-technique to Haldan, sharing with him not only his godly means of attack, but imparting him with divine strength that enables him to “prise up these boulders.” Thor, in effect, makes Haldan “rock-strong.”

This boulder-throwing feat was clearly impressive to Haldan’s contemporaries. In addition to being given the Biargramm epithet, Saxo reports that Haldan “began to be held in such great esteem by the Swedes that he was believed to be the son of Great Thor, accorded divine honors by the people and judged worthy of public libations.” This underscores the association that Tacitus made between Thor and Hercules. In this instance, it is Haldan who is closer to the Greek hero; as Hercules was held to be a semi-divine son of Zeus, Haldan is seen as the demigod son of Thor.

To an audience intimately acquainted with Norse mythology, even the smallest details of Haldan’s story would have awakened associations with Thor. After the vanquished Erik attacks Haldan’s home of Denmark and kills the hero’s brother, Haldan must leave Sweden and journey westward to free his people and avenge his brother’s death. Likewise, legends of Thor often tell of him returning home to defend the gods in Asgard after smiting giants “in the east.” Does myth reflect historical conflict between tribes, or is the reportage of historical conflict colored by myth?

CHAMPION OF THOR, Part One

2011-03-06T23:55:00.000-06:00

Bas-Relief of Odin & Thor in Reykjavík - July 4, 2010

Written in the early 13^th century, the first nine books of Saxo Grammaticus’ History of the Danes are a rich source of material on Norse mythology. The gods Balder, Frey, Hod, Odin and Thor all make appearances in the text, albeit in forms very different from those in the Icelander Snorri Sturluson’s contemporaneous Edda. These differences underscore the difficulty of painting a clear picture of Norse mythology as it existed in religious practice throughout the Germanic world in the pre-Christian era. Stories, characters and relationships are radically divergent in the various surviving records of mythology and religious practice of the period. In large part, this reflects differences in belief and ritual over a very wide geographical and temporal space. The difficulty is compounded by the fact that most surviving written sources are from the post-conversion period and contain editorial alterations by Christian writers.

One legendary figure who epitomizes this complicated tangle of myth is Haldan, a Danish king whose exploits are related in Book VII of Saxo. He is roughly equivalent to Helgi in the Icelandic Hrólfs Saga Kraka and Helgo in the Skjöldunga Saga. There are aspects of Haldan’s adventures similar to those of Amleth, whose story is told by Saxo in Book III and whose tale formed the basis for Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Saxo’s Haldan is important for the study of Norse mythology because of his special relationship to the god Thor – a relationship with some elements that are clearly stated and others that are only obliquely suggested in Book VII.

In Saxo’s telling, Haldan is portrayed as a champion of Thor – as a warrior who is particularly dedicated to the cult of the thunder god and who is in opposition to the cult of Odin. In Book VII, Haldan exhibits attributes of Thor, calls on his patron god for help, is venerated by the Swedes as Thor’s son, and comes into conflict with characters associated with Odin. A close reading of Haldan’s tale can uncover long-buried forms of Thor-worship and differences between those who followed Thor and those who followed Odin.

Throughout Haldan’s adventures, he is associated with the oak, a tree that was particularly sacred to Thor among the continental Germanic tribes. The Anglo-Saxon monk known as Saint Boniface famously cut down the massive “Thor’s Oak” in Hesse as a dramatic move in his conversion of the local pagans. The oak is not associated with Thor in Icelandic sources, as the tree is a rare species on that far northern island; he is linked, instead, to the smaller and wirier rowan. It seems understandable that Denmark, with its closer proximity to the ancient German forests described by Julius Caesar and Tacitus, would preserve the oak’s association with the god.

Young Haldan’s guardians hide him inside a hollow oak to save him from the wrath of his murderous uncle Frothi, who had previously murdered Harald (father of Haldan, brother of Frothi). In light of the later importance of oak trees in the text and the adult Haldan’s appeal to Thor for help, this act may represent a ritualized call for divine protection or a sanctifying of the child to the thunder god. One explanation for the sacredness of the oak to Thor was that, as one of the largest trees of the ancient forest, it was often hit by lightning – a sign that it was a favorite target of the thunder god. Perhaps the Haldan’s hollow oak was one of these lightning-hallowed trees.

In an attempt to discover the hidden child, Frothi enlists the aid of a sorceress with powers of divination. She is able to “summon to her hands something in the distance, visible to her alone, even when it was tied up tightly with knots.” This is the first adversary encountered by Haldan who is associated with Odin, even if her connection is not stated explicitly.

In poetry and saga, Odin is connected to the form of magic known as seiðr. According to Snorri, seiðr enabled the god to know “the fate of men and future pitfalls.” The divining power of Frothi’s sorceress thus forms the first of her links to the god. For somewhat obscure reasons, seiðr was considered an unmanly art; Snorri writes that “men believed that they could not practice it without dishonor, and so they taught this art to the priestesses.” The sorceress appears to be one of these priestesses. She is tied yet more strongly to Odin by her ability to summon an object “tied up tightly with knots.” In the Eddic poem Hávamál (“Sayings of the High One”), Odin relates his mystic ability to unbind chains and fetters, and the sorceress evinces a similar Odinic power.

Haldan feels that he and his likewise hidden brother are “being drawn out of their recess by the weird potency of the enchantress’s spells and pulled under her very gaze.” Odin is known to sit on high-seat Hliðskjálf and watch over the events of the world with his one eye; the pagan seeresses known as völva similarly sit on raised chairs when they offer prophecies. All of this ties Frothi’s sorceress to the cult of Odin and sets up an opposition between Haldan and Odinic forces. Haldan and his brother ultimately prevent the nameless enchantress from revealing them by giving her a small bribe, an incident which negatively portrays the followers of Odin as devious and dishonorable.