NorsePlay.

Neil Gaiman faced the daunting task to adapt the narrative holy of the holies, the ur-book stories, the most ancient tales known to man from which all other tales have since flowed from: Norse Mythology . As we told a childhood friend of Neil's last month, Neil is a fearless writer, that before Neil there wasn't a great movement in the fantasy genre to use the Gods as actual intimate first & close third-person protagonists. [Neil Gaiman being fearless!] We look back at his record for this daring talent with reading pleasure:  The Sandman  (his breakout World Fantasy Award-winning graphic novel series expanding the being of Greek deity Morpheus),  American Gods  (heavily featuring Gods from various pantheons), and  Odd & the Frost Giants  (a  NorsePlay  story for children of all ages). And now, in a tribute to pay back what originally inspired him, Gaiman offers us his version of  Norse Mythology . In his introduction, ...

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...