NorsePlay.

The hard truth is that at the end of the post-conversion night, what we mostly have left of the Norse Gods are the  Edda s. And the fact is  you want more NorsePlay . We know from the  Edda s' passing references there were tons more stories. And from within an oral tradition, all these tales were surely told & retold in many differing versions with emphasis placed or displaced depending on the audiences' points of interest or the skald's creative leanings. So when Norse Lore believers/followers/fans get bent that so-and-so told it "wrong" or added/subtracted things, there's an ancient & liberal precedent being celebrated with these differences. In this vein of expansive storytelling license, there's obviously  Marvel's 1962 to now superhero take , but during that period Norse lore has been remixed by other daring authors, which we will survey here: Dennis Schmidt's  Twilight of the Gods  (1985-1987) trilogy as prequel/re-interpretive,...

After reading trendy Eggers' underwhelming recent essay on the D'Aulaires' childhood classic  Norse Gods & Giants  (which one already knows is  wondrous all-ages magic  without his stamp of uninsightful approval), running across celebrated A.S. Byatt doing her take on Norse lore was an offering Nine Worlds better. Known for one of the most refined epistolary novels, the Booker Prize winning  Possession  (1990), which will rip your heart out and make it pump tears of saddest sad sadness, one can only imagine the Wagnerian angst & pathos such a talent could lend to the verses of the Gods. Yet the tender  Possession  and the Icelandic skald Snorri Sturluson's mythopoeic collection are also worlds away from each other, and the gap shows at times. [Friedrich Wilhelm Heine's "Kampf der untergehenden Götter" (1882).] In  Ragnarok: The End of the Gods  (2011), Byatt brings her own modern insights into the built-in eschatology of...