Norse God Research Articles

Norse gods on Instagram - Developing critical literacy through multimodal text production

Norse gods on Instagram - Developing critical literacy through multimodal text production

Baldr, Ymir, and the Myth of the First Death in Old Norse Mythology (Part 1)

This study examines the myth of the death of the Norse god Baldr in a comparative framework. Scholars working in the fields of comparative mythology and religion have long argued that a myth concerning the sacrificial killing of the first man is represented in the ancient and medieval literatures of several languages in the Indo-European family. In the reconstruction of this myth, the first priest sacrifices his brother, whose corpse is integrated into the structure of the cosmos, and who rules the realm of the dead. It has long been argued that Ymir’s death and dismemberment and the use of his body to construct the world in Old Norse sources is a reflex of this myth; this study argues that the myth of the death of Baldr is also a cognate version of this myth. This article is the first part of a two-part study.

Óðinn’s Avatar: McCarthy’s Judge Holden in Blood Meridian

ABSTRACT In contrast to studies that establish superficial resemblances between Judge Holden of Blood Meridian and such monolithic forces of evil and destruction as the archons of Gnostic religious tradition, this article equates this larger-than-life figure with Odin, the Norse god of war. Affinities are established with this paramount god in such spheres as the patronage of battle rage and poetic inspiration; law and judgment; the absence of a moral dimension; the search for knowledge as a means to power; interrogation of the dead; shamanism and spirit travel; the hosting of a select company of fallen warriors in Valhalla; dandyism, joviality, and storytelling, but also in such darker areas as illusion, deceit, betrayal, whimsy and the gratuitous act. Preeminent is the vision of war as central to all life. Despite Holden’s claim that he cannot be fully known, the most plausible source for McCarthy’s adaptation of Odin is H. R. Ellis Davison’s Gods and Myths of Northern Europe, first published in 1964 and reissued as Gods and Myths of the Viking Age in 1981.

Siðr, Religion and Morality

The religious semantics of Old Norse siðr have been heavily scrutinized by scholars over the last fifteen years, yet its moral dimensions have almost not been considered at all. In this, research on siðr may reflect the lack of attention paid in general to the morality of worshippers of Old Norse gods, beyond considerations of honour and masculinity. With this article, I aim to fill this gap in scholarship and to assess whether siðr’s moral semantics developed with the Christianization of the North or pre-existed it. To begin, I survey the earliest surviving instances of siðr and distinguish a range of denotations from their uses, from “religious praxis” to “individual practice” to “moral”. The last of these senses first clearly appears in Harmsól in the twelfth century, although moral dimensions do arise earlier. Despite the dearth of earlier attestation, it is proposed on the basis of those moral dimensions in earlier usage and the term’s geographical spread (as well as its etymological derivation) that siðr “moral” was popular and relevant during the Viking Age. The article concludes by briefly considering the relationship between morality and religion in the context of siðr, chiefly through the prism of legal change. Christian siðr may be inflexible already in the late Viking Age; however, siðr associated with Old Norse gods may also be less accommodating than is sometimes assumed, given how deeply embedded Old Norse religion was in the lives of its adherents and its possible legal and administrative connections. Siðr may not have meant “moral” for any Old Norse speaker in the same way as moral does for a speaker of modern English, and the evidence is too provisional to promote its use as an emic term for a Viking Age code of conduct. Nevertheless, siðr is the extant word that most captures that concept.

Co skrywają ulice w centrum Reykjavíku? O gniazdach toponimicznych w stolicy Islandii

The aim of this article is to collect and describe certain toponymic nests in the city of Reykjavík. Icelandic hodonyms are not a topic that is eagerly taken up by onomasticians, hence the need to organize knowledge about them. The author explains etymologies of the street names belonging to three toponymic nests, i.e. names inspired by the names of Norse gods, names inspired by the names of the heroes from the Old Norse sagas, and finally names connected to the sea motive. The semantic analysis has shown that there is no coincidence in the naming pattern in the centre of Reykjavík.

Reviving Pagan Spirituality: A Manifesto

Numerous contemporary neopagan movements are attempts to revive or reconstruct ancient religious belief and practice. For instance, the worship of the ancient Norse gods has been restored to Iceland by the Asatru Fellowship. In this essay, I defend neopagan movements against the charge that ancient spirituality cannot be recovered in identifiable form. I note that today’s dominant religions, such as Christianity, also face questions of the continuity of identity and argue that if such problems are tractable for current religions, then, in principle, they are resolvable for neopagans. I further argue that there are three broad themes of spirituality that are identifiable in ancient pagan religion, and that these are permanent possibilities recoverable by modern people. I also defend the relevance and importance of these themes.

A Mythological Nudist Lost in Swedish Suburbia: A study of the Nix’s masculinity and media-loric function in the manga series Oblivion High

This article explores the visual representation and function of the folkloric Scandinavian nix in the manga series Oblivion High (2012–2014) published by the manga studio Ms Mandu. The aim of the research is to investigate how a well-known folkloric image develops and to consider the nix’s portrayal of masculinity. The article is a critical cultural study based on feminist and queer perspectives on visual culture and folklore studies. The article concludes that the nix in Oblivion High must update his desirability through spectacular clothing and change of musical instrument to meet the contemporary Western heteronormative masculinity ideals. His weakness to the metal iron ties into the nix’s association to fairies and the construction of the nix’s underwater realm is connected to Norse mythology with the appearance of Aino from the Finish national epos Kalevala, Nornorna and hints of the Norse god Odin. Furthermore, the androgynous art style of shōjo manga (a sub-genre aimed at female teenage readers) creates a heterosexual female gaze pattern, while the imagery of a bishōnen (beautiful boy) connects the character Nix to the literary trope of the ‘pretty boy,’ leaving hegemonic masculinity unchallenged.

From “dead saint” to “lyreless Orpheus”: post-traumatic narrativization of myths and fairy tales in John Banville’s The Sea and Anne Enright’s The Gathering

In The Sea (2005) and The Gathering (2007), John Banville and Anne Enright incorporate modernist and postmodernist intertextuality into accounts of bereavement. While the shattered existence of the protagonists is seemingly devoid of religious belief, they mobilize the palimpsestic immemorial past of mythological and fairy-tale intertexts to make sense of broken realities. The narrators’ self-portraits and invocations of lost people and places, oscillating between reminiscence and mythification, underscore postmodernism’s play with canonical stories. Both authors use mythological syncretism to express their characters’ quest for meaning: while Greek, Egyptian and Norse gods invade The Sea’s modern-day “Atlantis” (132), The Gathering is peopled with subverted Christian and Irish figures. However, rather than restoring coherence, myth and fairy-tale tropes are suffused with desperate irony, and the magic spell woven by mythological counterpoints turns out to be a post-traumatic, grimacing reflection of the characters’ troubled psyches, or an obfuscating screen. By interweaving and debunking seminal myths and tales, Banville and Enright give life to personal myths that bespeak the characters’ deep-seated sense of loss and disenchantment. The reader is thus left wondering if, by filling the gaps of post-traumatic memory with mythological rewritings, these defamiliarizing narratives of bereavement convey potential solace or reinforce their protagonists’ post-traumatic loss of landmarks.

Gods and Humans in Medieval Scandinavia. Retying the Bonds by Jonas Wellendorf

Reviewed by: Gods and Humans in Medieval Scandinavia. Retying the Bonds by Jonas Wellendorf Łukasz Hajdrych Medieval Scandinavia, Norse Paganism, old Norse religion, old Scandinavian religion, Christianization, demonology, mythology, the Eddas jonas wellendorf. Gods and Humans in Medieval Scandinavia. Retying the Bonds, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. x + 206. The study of the mythology and religious practice of pre-Christian Scandinavia poses many problems for contemporary scholars: incompatibility of terminology, lack of extended sources, and their contamination by later Christian tradition. Jonas Wellendorff's recent Gods and Humans deals with these issues in a highly interesting way. Over the five chapters of the monograph, Wellendorf discusses pagan Scandinavian religion and its transition towards Christianity through the perspective [End Page 120] of ancient and medieval Latin and Scandinavian texts. Wellendorff devotes Chapter 1 to the process of Christianization of Scandinavian lands and the attempts of missionaries to reduce the old Norse gods to the ranks of Christian demons. In Chapters 2 and 3, Wellendorf discusses the issue of anti-pagan texts in their relation to the old Scandinavian religion, showing the attempts by bards and other indigenous authors to preserve the memory of the old gods in a new way, acceptable to Christianity. However, by far the most interesting issues Wellendorf discusses are treated in the final two chapters, in which he analyses how Saxo Grammaticus and Snorri Sturluson deployed new methods of thinking about pre-Christian beliefs. Both thirteenth-century authors reinterpreted the old Norse gods as humans who had traveled to the Scandinavian lands from western Asia to found the various dynasties of these lands, and claimed that, because of their extensive knowledge and skills, they were eventually mistakenly worshipped as gods. Wellendorf shows that through this euhemerizing strategy, those authors secured the memory of the old gods among the Scandinavian peoples, protecting them from oblivion in the new Christian conditions. The great value of this work lies in its principles of interpretation and the perspective that Wellendorf uses to show us what kind of religion the pre-Christian Norse actually practiced. By using Augustine's and Varro's tripartite theological classification of religion into the mythological, the civil, and the natural, Wellendorf demonstrates that the Scandinavian cultus indeed involved very different forms of "religion" than what we are accustomed to denote by that term today. Although his analysis deploys categories from classical Latin works, in every moment of the study Wellendorf remains aware of more recent methodological problems, especially the issue of the definition of "religion." Indeed, Wellendorf devotes a considerable part of Chapter 1 to discussions of the problem of the modern creation of the category "religion" and the issues raised by applying this term to pre-Christian religions (or "beliefs," or "faiths," or "traditions," or whatever term we use to describe old Norse "religious" practices and mythology). But Wellendorf's book is more than just a brilliant study devoted to medieval Scandinavian culture. It is also an invaluable work for anyone interested in early modern Scandinavian historiography. In the final sections of the book (Chapter 5 and the Epilogue), Wellendorf describes an important transition from Scandinavian pagan mythology to the fully Christianized historiography of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. During the Christianization era, the old Norse gods were, as elsewhere, reduced to the rank of demons. However, there is a notable contrast to what happened for example in eastern Europe, where old beliefs were slowly but systematically eradicated and incorporated into Christian religion or eventually died out, in the process losing [End Page 121] almost every aspect of their former identity., In the Scandinavian culture, the memory of old gods survived into an era when they could be drawn upon without fear of being accused of practicing paganism or witchcraft: they were thus available to be incorporated anew into the culture. The discovery of the manuscript of the Poetic Edda in 1640 was one of the inspirations for early modern Scandinavian scholars to rewrite their old mythology, debunk it, and link it directly to the classical Greco-Roman mythology. Wellendorf shows the sincere will of the seventeenth-century scholars and bards to preserve ancient culture by proving that what had been rejected in recent centuries...

Reaktywacja nordyckich bogów

Reactivation of the Norse Gods. Neopaganism as a Form of Collective Memory
 The article addresses the issue of neopaganism reviving intensively in the Nordic countries at the beginning of the 21st century. By using examples from Denmark and Iceland the author analyses socio-cultural conditions and intercultural relations that enhance reactivation of the Norse gods. Neopaganism with its Nordic face seems to offer an attractive alternative for contemporary secularized societies which still express inclination to believe in power of the nature, power of the human mind or power of the markets.

Evolution: Two Domains of Life or Three?

That Bacteria, Archaea and Eukarya (eukaryotes) represent three separate domains of Life, no one having evolved from within any other, has been taken as fact for three decades. Recent work shows this to be untrue. Eukarya arose from well within Archaea and are specifically related to newly discovered archaeal species with eukaryote-like features.

The Liminality of Loki

ABSTRACT: This article, the 2018 winner of the AASSC Gurli Aagaard Woods Undergraduate Publication Award, compares Victor Turner’s concept of liminality with common characteristics of trickster figures to show how the Norse god Loki is not only a trickster figure, but also a liminal one. As this article demonstrates, both trickster and liminal figures comment on a society’s social norms by challenging those social norms in order to enact change. Therefore, by closely examining the boundary-breaking nature of trickster figures as it relates to liminality, this article provides a fuller understanding of Loki’s character and his motivations. This critical analysis then points to the significance of what the presence of these figures could have meant for Old Norse society, as well as society today.

Do Thor and Odin Have Bodies? Superperception and Divine Intervention among the Old Norse Gods

In Old Norse mythology, gods like Freyja, Odin, and Thor are usually characterized as human-like creatures: they walk and ride animals, eat, grow old, and even die. Was there more to conceptions of Old Norse gods than those anthropomorphic representations? This article presents evidence that the gods of early Scandinavia were sometimes thought of as superperceiving and able to act in ways that defied the limitations of a physical body. It engages with and challenges theological correctness, a prominent theory in the Cognitive Science of Religion, to elucidate the sources of Old Norse religion and the cognitive and contextual foundations of the representations of gods encountered there. Following an examination of the mechanisms through which Old Norse gods’ superperception and disembodied action were narrativized and rationalized, the article concludes with a discussion of the consequences of non-anthropomorphic representations of the gods for understanding Scandinavian worshippers’ everyday religious life.

Ransacker by Emmy Laybourne

Reviewed by: Ransacker by Emmy Laybourne Karen Coats Laybourne, Emmy Ransacker. Feiwel, 2019 [448p] Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-250-13414-1 $18.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-1-250-13415-8 $9.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 8-12 When a fire all but destroys their Montana ranch, the family splits up, with sister Hanne and her fiancé joining a cattle drive and sixteen-year-old Sissel moving to town. Once there, Sissel feels the awakening of her Nytte (a supernatural power gifted by the Norse gods), which enables her to find and pull metals to her, a valuable gift in her 1886 town where men are affected by gold fever. Soon there’s even more trouble from Sissel’s former beau, who isn’t who he seems to be, and the family finds themselves in danger from a group of Pinkerton detectives in the employ of the Norwegian baron who has designs on the entire family. Though this is a sequel to Berserker, necessary information about the Nyttes is given quickly and seamlessly, and the occasional references to the previous book will intrigue more than confuse readers who haven’t read the companion novel. Amidst a strikingly original premise, Sissel’s journey from feeling like a burden to embracing her strong but dangerous legacy, compromised as it is with credibly naïve mistakes, is set against a richly imagined historical setting and augmented by some surprising but satisfying character twists. There is certainly girl power here, but also family-and-friends power and plenty of action adventure, making for an absorbing read that will appeal to a broad range of tastes. Copyright © 2019 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Marvel Universe Live

Reviewed by: Marvel Universe Live Eero Laine MARVEL UNIVERSE LIVE. Feld Entertainment. NYCB LIVE, Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum, Uniondale, NY. March 23, 2018. The stage was an oblong area marked off by a low barricade in the basin of the stadium. After a first act populated by space aliens and featuring pyrotechnics, lasers, and a flying anthropomorphic racoon, it was time for intermission. Time to fill up on stadium food and peruse the souvenir tables. Returning from the poured concrete concourse, clutching Avengers-themed plastic cups, cotton candy, and tepid hot dogs, we saw a single performer in the middle of the playing space. Wearing dark slacks, a button-up shirt, and a vest, he was dressed as a stadium vendor and indeed there was no reason to believe he was not one. The man had Captain America–branded boomerangs, which he would throw and catch, each throw arcing outward and upward and returning to waiting hands. As the intermission wore on, he would launch more of the boomerangs into the air at once, attempting to catch them all as they returned in rapid succession. Two seemed like no problem, three took a bit of effort, four was difficult, and when he tossed additional boomerangs into the air he had to try a few times to catch them, eventfully getting to the point where adding even one more seemed impossible. Could he do it? The audience was held in rapt attention. And then the second half of the production started, and the gray stadium was transformed into Asgard, home of the Norse gods Thor and Loki, who are also Marvel comic book characters. The projected view of a palace and the multicolored stripes of the rainbow bridge set the stage for the heroes to continue their hunt for the Wand of Watoomb, an object capable of vast destruction and also a useful Mc-Guffin for characters to chase in their madcap dash across the galaxy and in and out of various Marvel comic book worlds. Most of the characters are well known, and part of the appeal of the show is to see them all together, a live-action crossover event that plays to the already pervasive, multimedia storytelling of contemporary comics. Spiderman, Black Panther, Iron Man, the Hulk, Thor, Black Widow, Dr. Strange, the Guardians of the Galaxy, and others all make appearances to shout their catch phrases and show off their super powers. The production reminds us that stadiums are built for spectators and spectacles, and I wish more theatre was like this. Marvel Universe Liveis one of the best examples of what I call "stadium theatre." The term describes those performances that are at home in the large open spaces of an arena: Cirque du Soleil, Blue Man Group, professional wrestling, and others. The company is granted a license for Disney properties (Disney owns Marvel) and was its de facto theatrical wing before Disney produced Beauty and the Beaston Broadway. The company notes on its website that it has performed for millions of audience members and toured to over seventy-five countries in every continent but Antarctica—a reach that few theatrical companies can match. The production is all rather spectacular. Iron Man flies as rocket flames shoot out of his feet, Spiderman, Black Panther, the Wasp, and Black Widow flip and leap and cartwheel across the stage and through the air, Groot, the talking walking tree, both talks and walks. In a fantastic sequence of motorbike jumps and stunts, Captain America and Spiderman combat multiple villains, revving motorcycle engines and flying off steep ramps just in front of us, live, with no editing. The performers take on the superhero costumes, but seem superhuman themselves. Green Goblin floats through the air, throwing fireballs that launch the other characters off their feet. The Hulk appears by breaking through a portion of the set. The sequence would be funny for its absurdity if it was not embedded in a gripping final battle that flexed its over-the-top theatricality. Indeed, it is a neat bit of theatre to see a character of the size of the Hulk (and he is quite large) move across a stadium floor...

Topos of Scythia in theMedieval Origogentis

The concept of ‘Scythia as an ancestral homeland’ played an important role in the Medieval Origogentis. The narratives about the origin of peoples aimed to contribute the construction of new identities in Europe after the Roman empire declined. Iordanes and Isidore of Seville considered Scythiaas either starting or passing point of the Gothic migrations. Bede the Venerable and anonymous authors of Lebor Gabála Érenn named Scythia as a homeland of the Picts and Scots, while in the IcelandicYnglinga sagait was considered as a native land of the Norse gods. It is widely accepted that the medieval intellectuals used the phonetic similarity of the ethnic and geographical terms Scythae/ Scythia, Gothi, Scotti, Svíþjoð (Sweden) and Scedenig (Scandinavia) to construct links between the new ethnic and political entities, Classical history and biblical genealogy of peoples. This supposition is undoubtedly correct, however, it tends to oversimplify the conditions of the Early Medieval historiography’s development. The aim of the article is to show that the reasons why Scythia became to be considered the ancestral homeland for the Medieval ethnic communities were much more complicated. The author uses methods of the intellectual historyto demonstrate that apart from the Bible, the authors of the Origogentis had to take into account at least two other important narratives. One of them was a still alive in the 8th century Anglo-Saxon Britain and 13th century Iceland epic tradition, which dealt with the presence of the Goths and other Germanic peoples in the North Pontic area. Greek and Roman geography was another narrative, which medieval authors had to regard. This hypothesis determines the scientific novelty of the paper. According to Pomponius Mela, Plinius the Elder and other Classical writers, the lands of Scythia, Scandinavia, mythical Hyperborea, Britain and Ireland made up a single region – northern periphery of the inhabited world. Visualization of Scandinavia as an island laying opposite to Scythia, coming from the Greek and Roman geography, explains why the description ofAsgard in the Ynglinga saga is to a large extent dependent on the Hyperborea’s depictions in the Classical cosmographies. Conclusions. To sum up, one should not consider the stories about the Scythian origin of some Northern and Western European peoples as a complete fiction for at least two reasons. Firstly, some of the Origogentis appealed to the folklore tradition, which, in its turn, preserved a reminiscence of the historically and archaeologically attested events (such as the Gothic migration from the Baltic littoral to the North Pontic area). Secondly, from the viewpoint of educated medieval Scandinavians, British and Irishmen, their own homelands were a part of a single region, neighboring Scythia and being closely connected with it.

Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman (review)

Reviewed by: Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman Peter Fields Neil Gaiman. Norse Mythology. New York & London: Norton, 2017. 299p. Neil Gaiman has been in the vanguard of what might be called—or dismissed as—young adult fantasy literature. Now read by all ages, this genre spans J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, C. S. Lewis’s Narnia Chronicles, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. With his Sandman graphic novel, Gaiman first caught the attention of a young audience and quickly moved to the forefront of what fantasy is doing in our time. Norse Mythology evidences his growth as a writer whose stories may be read aloud to children at bedtime, but whose resonance meets [End Page 324] the criteria of serious literature. He fully captures the outrageous and the awful, the hilarious and the poignant qualities of the Prose Edda and the Poetic Edda in a superbly paced style with telling detail and humorous dialogue. It is strikingly effective, both for young people whose minds are open to wonder or for college students alert to the Northern legacy that permeates the Early English tradition: Beowulf, the Exeter Book, the Vercelli Book, Caxton’s Mallory, or even (or especially) Milton’s Paradise Lost. This essential volume allows us to grasp—under one cover in a few sittings—the full power and range of what we sometimes call the “Northern” influence on English literature and popular culture. Indeed, what drew Gaiman’s interest to Norse mythology was the discrepancy between the latter day Norse heroes as depicted in Marvel comic books and their original forbears who were more complicated and idiosyncratic. One of the difficult things about the original stories is precisely their penchant for odd details, desultory adventures and journeys, and other disparate motifs that are handled with surprising grace. The author interprets as he retells the stories, highlighting the eccentric folklore details with a significance that feels true and authentic. The reader takes away an impression of a vast, tragic panorama of gods whose time in this world is cyclical. They will pass away: “In addition, I learned, the Norse gods came with their own doomsday: Ragnarok, the twilight of the gods, the end of it all. The gods were going to battle the frost giants, and they were all going to die” (12). Loki is especially galling—and compelling—as a character whose fraught relationship with fellow immortals appalls and fascinates in equal measures. His first act of mischief (apparently, for no particular reason) is to rob Thor’s wife of her beautiful brown-golden hair: “Her fingers reached up to her bare pink scalp and touched it, exploring it tentatively. She look at Thor, horrified” (51). Gaiman excels with visual cues and surgical detail, describing Loki’s comeuppance for destroying her hair. The dwarf who helped make Thor’s hammer does the deed with Odin’s permission: “Brokk grunted and produced an awl, a pointed spike used in leatherwork, and he jabbed it through the leather, punching holes through Loki’s lips. Then he took a strong thread and he sewed Loki’s lips together with it” (66). Importantly, the author takes his time culminating the history of the gods. We are reminded of impending destruction with increasing insistence, but we are treated along the way to a cumulative cornucopia of finely wrought moments of character and description. Neil Gaiman’s powerful prose is smooth and glassy, flowing gently from one sentence into another. Yet he knows just the right word to drive home the situation he is describing—like the awl that the dwarf jabs through Loki’s lips. We see, hear, and feel a completeness of sensorium—a flavor of [End Page 325] Northern tone and allusion—that we have experienced before in so many stories, but could not quite put our finger on. Norse Mythology restores the glory of the North, and we realize why these gods have never left our imagination. Peter Fields Midwestern State University Copyright © 2018 Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association

Disoriental by Négar Djavadi

Armand V, an ambassador in Norway’s foreign service: Oslo, Cairo, Jordan, Budapest, Madrid, and, finally, London—his career pinnacle. This diplomat had “a way with words” that allowed him to “master the game” for the “small country he served.” Supporting roles go to childhood friends, college classmates, other diplomats , two wives (N and her twin sister), a daughter (unnamed), a son (Are), and the son’s landlady. The ultimate focus, however, is on the father/son relationship between Armand and Are. Armand’s profession dictates that he publicly support his country’s involvement in foreign wars, yet privately he scorns combat, having lived through the Cold War, the Vietnam War, and the still-running War in Afghanistan (on which Solstad had based Armand V in 2006). Throughout , the ambassador frames the United States with disdain in an unrelenting barrage of deferential diplomacy: “the world’s mightiest superpower,” “the most powerful nation in the world,” “the world’s one and only Superpower,” “the superpower US.” No surprise then that Armand is shocked when Are enlists, ending up on a murky mission “serving with a superior Western military power in impoverished Asia.” Solstad hints at mythology, modernizing the ancient lore of conflict. Consider the Norse god Odin and his sons, Thor and Höd (half-brothers), reflected in Armand and his son, Are. Odin hungered for wisdom , trading one eye for it, while Armand yearns for esteem, exchanging his ethical standards for it. Armand’s son exhibits elements of both Thor (god of thunder and war, who traveled to the enemy realm of the giants) and Höd (the blind “warrior” god). Are journeys to a faraway land, fighting alongside the giants (“the world’s one and only superpower”), and loses his sight. Solstad evokes Thor when a lightning bolt nearly strikes Armand and Are as they hike. All the while, Solstad chats merrily away with himself. Readers eavesdrop as the author toys with his emerging “us vs. them” tale, departing at times from the storyline to mosey around on other topics . His intellectual maneuvering is often hilarious. Already renowned in Scandinavian literature, Solstad once again brilliantly defies categories, this time in English. Lanie Tankard Austin, Texas Négar Djavadi Disoriental Trans. Tina Kover. New York. Europa Editions. 2018. 320 pages. Disoriental is the first novel of Négar Djavadi , a screenwriter based in Paris. It travels to Djavadi’s birthplace, Iran, to tell the saga of the Sadr family and, through them, that of Iran. The narrator of the novel, Kimiâ, one of the three daughters of Sara Nota Bene Paul Colize Back Up Trans. Louise Rogers Lalaurie Oneworld / Point Blank Books A mystery thriller translated from the French, Belgian author Paul Colize’s novel follows a journalist’s investigation into the connection between deaths of a rock-and-roll band’s members and another death separated by forty years. The rock-and-roll aesthetic of the plot kerrangs through the swift and exciting prose. Gerty Dambury The Restless Trans. Judith G. Miller The Feminist Press at CUNY Acting as witness to police violence in French Guadeloupe in the 1960s, this debut novel from English writer Gerty Dambury recalls the racial and class hierarchies that caused the massacre. Nine-year-old Émilienne deals with the disappearance of her teacher, while narrators both alive and dead recount the history of the protest through prose that brings culture and characters together in a probing investigation. WORLDLIT.ORG 67 Tadjamol and Darius Sadr, starts her story in Paris, at a doctor’s office where she is to get the test results for an in vitro fertilization . While waiting, she takes us, nonchronogically , to many places and moments in her recent and distant past. Her stories go all the way to the northern province of Mazandaran, to her great-grandfather, and to the birth of her grandmother, Nour, who plays an important role in Kimiâ’s destiny, even though the two never really meet. Growing up with parents who are intellectuals and forces of opposition to both the Pahlavi regime and the Islamic Republic , Kimiâ, who adores her father, and her sisters go through a lot. Kimiâ becomes a complex character, struggling with history...

Old Norse gods in contemporary Norwegian novels

Old Norse mythology is one of the most prolific fields in modern times. From a scholarly renewed interest to a more popular based reception, the old myths and gods seem to have been revived. The following article deals with the representation and role of two of the Old Norse gods, Odin and Ty, in contemporary Norwegian literature. It discusses in a comparative way the image of the Old Norse gods as presented by the written sources about the Viking mythology, The Poetic Edda and The Prose Edda, and by the contemporary novels that have them as main characters. Contemporary problems that trouble the Norwegian society seem to find their expression in literature where the old gods are presented as driven by anger and a desire to take revenge, either because they have lost their power or because they are led by a sense of duty, integrity and doing what is right. In the so called age of globalization, the Norwegian writers that use Old Norse mythology as inspiration seem to be themselves driven by a feeling of nostalgia after a time when the society was more homogenous or by a desire to promote and live by the Viking values

Religious belief and cooperation: a view from Viking-Age Scandinavia

ABSTRACTThis study focuses on two hypotheses at the heart of a debate concerning cooperation, socio-political complexity, and religious belief. One of these contends that moralizing high gods (MHGs) were central to the development of complex societies. The key mechanism here is supernatural monitoring, which is the perception that gods observe humans and punish those who commit transgressions. The other hypothesis – the broad supernatural punishment (BSP) hypothesis – contends that it was fear of supernatural monitoring and punishment by non-MHG deities that fostered the development of socio-political complexity, and that MHGs followed rather than preceded the appearance of complex societies. To test between these hypotheses, we examined evidence for pre-Christian beliefs in Viking-Age Scandinavia (c. 750–1050 CE). We sought answers to two questions: (1) did the Vikings perceive themselves subject to supernatural monitoring and punishment? And (2) were the Norse gods MHGs? The evidence indicates that the Vikings believed themselves to be monitored by supernatural entities in some contexts, and that they could be punished for certain transgressions. However, the Norse gods do not meet all the criteria for recognition as MHGs. Taken together, these findings support the idea that socio-political complexity was fostered by non-MHG deities and not by MHGs.