NorsePlay.

A  National Geographic article on the Brothers Grimm exploring the motives & origins of their fairy tale collection uses a photo of a field of barley at dawn covered in golden light catching dew to accent this lift quote from Rumpelstiltskin : If by to-morrow morning early you have not spun this straw into gold during the night, you must die. The article's photo caption poetically reads, " The alchemy of dawn turns barley into gold. " This evoked an insightful NorsePlay: Jacob Grimm in his  Teutonic Mythology linguistically associated Sif's hair with a golden moss plant, and later scholar Hilda Ellis Davidson agreed that her hair was the golden wheat. Such interpretations link the  Skáldskaparmál   story of the theft & replacement of Sif's Golden Hair as a fertility analog for the harvesting & annual re-growth of wheat, barley, and other crops, which makes Sif associated with grain. I n terms of cosmology, Thor's lightning strikes the field and...

We have followed the work of artist P Craig Russell from First Comics' Elric , that anti-hero a runesword slinging Alfar-type sorcerer, through his stirring adaptation of The Ring of Nibelung , an excellent deluxe one-shot of Doctor Strange , and now for his take on Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology . There's an iconic art nouveau core mixed with expressionism in Russell's unmistakable style that makes it a suggestive ly hedonistic Klimt -esque visual thrill to look at. Single issues are set to release July 1st, though we'll probably wait for Dark Horse to collect them for us in a graphic novel. #    #    # Guillermo Maytorena IV knew there was something special in  the Norse Lore when he picked up a copy of the d'Aulaires'  Norse Gods and Giants  at age seven. Since t hen he's been fascinated by the truthful potency of Norse Mythology, passionately read & studied, embraced Ásatrú, launched the  Map of Midgard  project, ...