My Mythic Past

Lughnasa                                                                           Honey Moon

Most of the day among the eddas of Snorri Sturluson and various books on German and Scandinavian mythology.  This is the material that lies beneath the Tailte trilogy, this one at least, and it has fascinated me for a long time.  Since over half of my ancestry is Germanic, this is the song of my people, the stories and tales which knit the world together for ancient northern Europeans.

(Snorri)

In my writing, mostly, I have focused on Celtic and northern European lore because they are my heritage, a vein I can mine without approbation of cultural encroachment.  I don’t believe that’s necessary, but it makes my psychic life easier.

I’m still trying to understand the elusive Loki, often called a trickster, but in the end an enemy of the Aesir, leading the giants and the unworthy dead against them.  The einherjar, the worthy dead, those who died in battle and were chosen by the Valkyries to feast in Valhalla until Ragnarok and the Aesir, the pantheon of Nordic gods fight to keep the world whole.  Loki is a character central to Loki’s Children and the book after that, The Unmaking, but he’s tough to define and will be a challenge to create.  That’s what makes him interesting, of course.

(Loki, the Trickster — artwork by Arthur Rackham, 1910)

A lot of the best scholarship on the eddas and other poems of the northern European tradition are in German and Scandinavian languages so it is sometimes a struggle to find decent material.  I’m lucky in one regard in that years ago, on a whim, I picked up a multi-volume work called the Norroena:  the history and romance of northern Europe.  It contains translations into English of the major works, up to date as of 1905.  I have read all the works in the Edda volume, a fascinating collection of stories put together by an Icelandic scholar, politician and Skald, Snorri Sturluson.