NorsePlay.

  There's a certain misguided amount of people who read The Binding of Fenrir story and feel sorry for the wolf. What they don't realize in their anthropomorphizing the animal is that he's by literal & figurative scale a huge problem, a monster of unchangeable nature, and not even close to human or divine at all. To NorsePlay, Fenrir is hunger unbound, a force so large it's cosmically unfair to begin with. If the Gods had come at him on his own brutally honest terms, there's no one strong enough to outstrip this creature, and he'd have won. Just like Thor wrestling Old Age, no one can beat Hunger itself. And so the wolf must be tricked before he eats them, and he would've eventually eaten all the material of the Nine Worlds. Fenrir is a devourer . In focusing Fenrir's appetite on Odin alone, this diverts him and saves us. And so Odin wins the rest of this cycle to figure out how to save everything including himself. Unless another strategy is inv...

Flipping through Andrew Lang's The Crimson Fairy Book (1903 CE), I read  a pretty brilliant NorsePlay  remix in the story of  The Horse Gullfaxi and the Sword Gunnföder . This story is full of loans & borrowings from across the lore, the large ones being the hero named Sigurd (from The Saga of the Volsungs ), the horse Gullfaxi (from the race in  Skáldskaparmál ) which one is forbidden to ride (this rule from  Hrafnkels saga applied to his horse Freyfaxi), and a weather effecting magic item that summons hail (from The Story of Thorstein Mansion-Might ). There are a couple other lesser parallels to be divined, but the above are the most certain & definitely present. [story illustration by Henry Justice Ford.] Even without being well-versed enough in the Norse Lore to identify any of the above, the story in itself stands alone as a fun tale. Sourcewise, Lang adapts the story from an 1884 CE German translation by Viennese politician & Scandinav...

  I've successfully plotted 600 mappoints for my Map Of Midgard Project! This is the fifth update since  the initial blog post ,  the first update ,  the second update , the third update , and the fourth update . As of now, I've finished reading & researching the last of the included book sources,  The Sagas of Fridthjof the Bold .  Fridthjof proved far more time consuming in terms of mapping. While fornaldarsögur (legendary sagas) are our favourites, they then  require a lot of extrapolation & speculative assignment depending how inexact/exotic/otherworldly locational they get, but when dealing in the currency of legends and applying that to mythic cartography, it's sometimes all you have to go on short of actually confirming through fieldwork and digging up a magic sword . †  You're given pieces and then have to search past the boundaries of those pieces to find those mappoints. [runic map puzzle piece from Ultima: Shroud of the Av...

After acquiring a blue pocket 1930 CE hardback copy of In The Days Of Giants  by Abbie Farwell Brown, I ran across this brilliant interior illustration by Elmer Boyd Smith of  Iðunn : " He flapped away with her, magic apples and all " (originally 1902 CE) Look at that jerkface Loki , clown-haired and so pleased with himself. And even though she's being abducted,  Iðunn has this statuesque elegance about her, the dress falling just so to show off its floral pattern, her back with just enough romanticist swoon to indicate the not-rightness of the moment, her ornate cask of apples, and the nice detail of that runescript embroidered gown hem . We have to presume Heimdallr 's posted on the other side of Ásgarðr in the background, or eagle form jötunn Þjazi  would so not be getting away with this. The implied NorsePlay of the narrative's situation would be that only  Iðunn can tend, coax, & then pick the apples of youth, since  Þjazi has arranged to ta...