Ragnarok Now

Ragnarok Now

 Seeing as this is the final Blog Post for the class, I figure and essay about Ragnarok (the death, and rebirth of the world) is fitting. Ragnarok is described in the first poem in the Poetic Edda, the Seeress's Prophecy. Yes, that confusing one that we first read and that was borderline impossible to decipher. But, it tells arguably the most famous and important tale of all of Norse Mythology. 

 The Beginning: 

 Ragnarok itself is said to start when Baldur, the beloved God of beauty and kindness, is killed by his brother Hod. Baldur's parents were Odin and Frigg, and Frigg had gotten all things to swear to never harm Baldur because of how much she loved him. Steel promised to never hurt him, along with stone, wood, and every other material or object in the nine worlds. Loki, his hatred of the Aesir growing, disguised himself as one of Frigg's handmaidens and asked if there was anything, anything at all that she didn't get to promise to not harm Baldur. She said that she decided that Mistletoe was too harmless to do anything and decided to leave it be. The Gods had a game where they would throw things at Baldur to watch them break apart without him being harmed. The only God who never played was Hod, the blind God of Winter and Baldur's brother. Loki went to him one day and handed him a bolt with mistletoe wrapped around its tip and shaft. He lined Hod up with Baldur and told him to throw it. He did. And for the first time, the object pierced Baldur's skin and killed him instantly. 

Hermod's Ride to Hel:

(Also the name of a Viking metal song if you're into that)

Hermod riding on Slepnir. 

With Baldur's death, the Aesir and Vanir fell into a state of melancholy. Frigg in particular was inconsolable and everybody wished that Baldur was still alive. Odin decided something must be done and held court amongst the Aesir and Vanir to decide on their course of action. Hermod, the young God of bravery, volunteered to ride to Helheim and negotiate with Hel, goddess of the dead, for Baldur's return. Odin gave him his personal steed, Slepnir the eight-legged horse, and sent him on his way. Hermod rode for days and nights on end before finally entering Helheim and meeting Hel. She heard his plea and decided that, if he was so loved, than if every being in all the Nine Worlds cried for Baldur than she would let him free. Hermod's journey continued for a long time after that, but in time every being, even the sworn enemies of the Gods. Everything seemed to be going well, until he found Toke, a female troll (who most agree was Loki in disguise). She refused to weep for Baldur, and so his soul would stay in Helheim. 

Fimbul Winter:

Winter: all day, everyday 

After Hermod's death, Fimbul Winter will begin on Midgard (Earth). It will begin one winter and will be three continuous years of intense and deep winter. The food and water supplies on Midgard will freeze up. Brother will slay brother and sister will slay sister. War without end will break out until every last person is dead. Oh, and to make matters even better, Fenrir the wolf will escape from his prison and his sons Skoll and Hati will eat the Sun and Moon. Jormungard the World Serpent will rise from the sea. Loki will escape from his prison (which he was placed in after Baldur's death) and will steer the Nagilfar, a ship made with the fingernails of the dead and manned by giants and the undead. Odin will consult Mimir, the wisest being there is, but what his council is remains unknown.

The Battle:

Surt and Frey fighting. 

B

The battle will take place on the field of Vigrid (which roughly means: the plain where battle surges). Heimdall will see the enemies of the Gods approaching and will blow the Gjallahorn, which can be heard in all Nine Worlds. The Aesir and Vanir will march to war alongside their servants, the Einherjar (warriors in Valhalla and Folkvangr) and the Valkyries. Tyr, the one-handed God of justice and courage will be killed by Garm the guardian of Helheim (who he in turn kills). Frey, the Vanir God of Nature will be slain by the fire giant Surt. Thor will kill his rival Jormungard but will succumb to the poison in his veins afterward. Odin will be consumed by Fenrir the wolf, who will then be killed by Vidar who will step in Fenrir's mouth with a giant shoe made of leather scraps that get thrown away (so you can help the Gods at Ragnarok by throwing away leather if you want) and then tear Fenrir's jaws asunder. Surt will use his flaming sword to cause the worlds to be set on fire while the oceans rise and fire and water will meet as the universe ends. 

Rebirth:

You thought redwoods were big

After the battle, the tides will recede and the flames will burn out. Lif and Lifthrasir, the last surviving man and woman, will emerge from their hiding place in Yggdrasil the world tree. Baldur will come back from the dead, and several gods who survived: Hod, Vali, Vidar, Modi, and Magni will form the core of the new Gods. A new sun will rise, and life begins anew.

Preston Spivey

11/3/18

Viking Sagas

Blog Post Three: Essie Tregowan, a warning to not stray from gender norms?

In Neil Gaiman’s American Gods a passage is presented about a beautiful and superstitious woman named Essie Tregowan who goes through her early life conforming to the gender roles of 18th to 19th American/British culture. Essie tumbles through her life having some tough breaks yet she always keeps in mind the piskies and hopes that her devotion will give her favor. Eventually Essie is made a widow on a farm and has to step up and run the farm on her own for her family and does very well. Essie strays from the gender norm of this time by being independent and doing the masculine duties of tending the crops and also making sure they are sold at a fair price. Is the story of Essie Tregowan a story of caution to not stray from the gender norms of the time?

Essie’s early life is happy until she strays from the norms of her time and commits adultery. In her early life Ellie is presented as a very superstitious and not particularly driven young woman, when a young squire approaches her she quickly falls for him becoming pregnant and marrying him. Any reflection on Essie herself in the story seems to reference her belief in the “piskies” that she assumes play a pivotal role in her fate. It as a hinted that Essie comes from a family of trouble makers because her father is a “wrecker”, a man who puts out a light for ships by rocks so that he can collect the cargo when they crash. Essie quickly finds trouble when she starts an affair with a man from a neighboring town out of spite for husbands family and is caught with him. Adultery at this time is a crime that can be taken to court and Essie is punished by being forced into transportation and made to go to America and work.

Essie’s independence that she shows by running her deceased husbands farm by farming and negotiating leads to her strange death by the old gods. The second time Essie strays from norms is after she is forced into transportation for a second time, this time a lifetime sentence and is widowed by her master and late husband. Upon her husbands death she takes up the farm work and leads the farm very well, “The farm prospered” (89). Essie is able to overcome the obstacles that are put in front of her as far as the punishment she faces and raises her children on this farm to the best of her ability and leads a very successful farm. Essie seems to be doing well for herself finally and to close out the story she meets her end at the hands of the creature that she has so devoutly served throughout her life. Is Essie’s success independently on the farm tied to the cause of her downfall?

Essie meets her fate after working on her farm by herself for a decade and through mysterious means. A man who’s description is very much like a leprechaun approaches her and is identified as a pisky, she takes his hand and is killed. After all of her devotion towards making sure there was creamy milk out for the piskies why would she be killed by one? Perhaps it is because throughout her life she was given the chance to be a normal housewife but instead chose to steal and commit adultery and be independent straying from the norms of the time period. 

American Gods Walk the Green Mile

Shadow Moon at first sight seems to be drifting in the wind following whatever crazy path people lead him down. Shadow easily gives in to what people want him to do. It seems to be that he will believe anything Laura says and often keeps his thoughts to himself. If he feels any anger Shadow’s nature is to hold it in. Mr. Wednesday on the other hand seems to push the limits of Shadows calm and quiet demeanor. When Mr. Wednesday has Shadow running all sorts of errands we see Shadows expression towards others is provoked and comes out a little more each time. 

This character Shadow portrays is not unlike John Coffey in The Green Mile. John Coffey is a man falsely accused of a crime and plays someone of a “Jesus” figure throughout the movie and is put on death row for his crimes. Shadow is accused of a crime which is justified in protecting his wife. In the same way, John Coffey also seems to drift in the wind doing what he is told without any complaints or remarks. John keeps to himself and is calm and quiet. 

Not only are these two characters similar in personality but they both connect in the fact that they each have a unique sense of special abilities. We begin to see the start of Shadow’s abilities when he shows his power by making it snow. John Coffey has his own unique set of abilities where he has the power to take away people’s illnesses or any physical problems. These abilities are both supernatural and obviously seen as coming from a higher power. Both John Coffey and Shadow Moon have good intentions with their powers but often times people around them are trying to manipulate them and threaten their lives for malevolent purposes. Each character has pasts that haunt them. 

Shadow is haunted by his dead wife Laura and John is haunted by the people he is not able to save. Because of this their enemies are able to use their tortured pasts against them to manipulate Shadow and John for their own good. Percy Wetmore, one of the prison guards in The Green Mile, is one of the cruelest officers on duty at the prison and consistently torments John Coffey along with the rest of the prisoners. Percy uses their crimes to cause further emotional damage and usually loses his temper and often hurts the prisoners. Percy has a malicious and evil side to him that cannot be fully contained.

 However, as with Shadow, the prison guard in charge is also nasty towards the prisoners always taunting racist slurs and profanities. On top of this, Shadow now has Mr. Wednesday as a leading figure in his life and often gets him into trouble. Mr. Wednesday pressures Shadow into thinking that this life is now the only one he has. In both cases, it seems to be that John Coffey and Shadow Moon are sealed to an inescapable fate. Eventually they will have to come to terms with what they have been accused of and things that have haunted them in their past because their punishment is coming whether or not it is justified.

Tusk and Spinal: Warrior and Viking

When the fighting game series Killer Instinct got rebooted in 2013, everything changed for the better. The character who was changed the most was Spinal, who went from a comically frail skeleton experiment gone wrong to a Swedish ghost pirate doomed to walk among the living via a curse cast by another fighter. Many people think that the Norse representative of the series is the heroic Tusk. In truth, Spinal is not only anther Norse representative, but one that specifically fills in the gaps left by Tusk. The reboot turned Tusk into an immortal guardian who purposefully styled himself after norse culture when he took a liking to their ways.

What has become to me as I’ve read various sagas is that “Viking” and “Nordic Warrior” are two different things. Warriors are men of honor and loyalty who fight for kings and such, while Vikings are raiders who live as outlaws to all but other vikings. Spinal is a Viking, and Tusk is a Nordic warrior. Tusk has the typical Aryan look of pale skin, blonde hair, and turquoise eyes (sometimes entirely blue, other times more so green). He wields a great-sword reminiscent of Icelandic crusaders and named blades such as Balmung. Tusk’s stage is Icehaven, which is a blatant expy of Icelandic shores with a frozen viking ship decorating the background. Spinal’s stage, in contrast, is Shipwreck Shore, a shipwreck in the Caribbean (probably to highlight the fact that despite in most aspects being Swedish, Spinal’s curse is Babylonian) that resembles a nightmarish rendition of Tusk’s stage.

Spinal on the surface seems unrelated to Tusk or vikings, but it takes little digging to unearth the connection. Spinal’s condition is very similar to the draugr of Norse myth rather than a generic undead skeleton. He possess supernatural strength and cursing abilities, he is a fully corporeal corpse (his flesh has simply rotted away due to having been animated since the time of ancient Babylon) as opposed to any sort of specter. The most obvious and decisive evidence, however, is Spinal’s theme in the reboot: “Warlord,” one of many excellent compositions by Mick Gordon. The lyrics to the song are Scandinavian chants that incorporate old Norse terminology into traditional Swedish. The translation portrays Spinal as a pagan war deity deserving of all titles including some exclusively used by old Norse culture.

Tusk and Spinal are explicitly stated to be enemies, which is more than a little fitting. Tusk is an immortal warrior who follows Norse traditions and follows their way of life. Spinal is an undead viking raider whose ship was wrecked and he was cursed to forever walk the earth. For all his malevolence, however, Spinal is not a being of pure evil. His malice is born out of his curse; he has plenty of personality that shows a sadistically jovial warrior who lives for battle much like a Berserk. Speaking of Berserks, Tusk’s rage mode is quite literally a berserker rage. Spinal is outright stated in his story bio to be nothing more than a mischief maker at heart and this is portrayed through how he seldom takes the side of the main villains of the series such as Fulgore and other Ultratech combatants.

Tusk is honor, loyalty, order, faith, and life. Spinal is chaos, bloodlust, pagan, undead, and maniacal. Both Tusk and Spinal represent the Nordic warrior; they each represent an extreme of the spectrum. Spinal is the pagan Viking raider, and Tusk is the crusading honor-bound warrior who serves a higher power to keep order and tradition. It’s entirely possible the yin-yang relationship between the two was unintentional. The game refers to Spinal as a pirate raider and Tusk as a Viking, but Spinal’s theme shows that at least some of those working on the game understand the connection. All of that being said, Spinal is easily my favorite character on the Killer Instinct roster. If not for reading the sagas of Njal, Egil, and Grettir, I never would’ve realized that he was more than a simple skeletal pirate, and much of Tusk’s nods to old Norse culture would’ve been lost on me.

Vikings Coming to America

Vikings Coming to America

Pages 61-64 in American Gods by Neil Gainman tell the tale of the vikings first landing in America. According to this interpretation, the vikings landed on American soil via navigating using the stars, but if it was a cloudy day they would rely on faith and the direction of the all-father (Odin). Upon arrival the vikings were exhausted, wounded, hungry, and feeling hopeless. After a motivational speech by the leader the vikings started constructing a hall out of trees and mud in honor of the God that created the land they are on. After the hall was built they celebrated by drinking, feasting, and singing songs that tell the story of Odin sacrificing himself for the men. Ironically, the next next the vikings find a scraeling whom the be-friend. After a night of feeding “him roasted meat to eat, and strong drink to quench his thirst” (63), the scraeling fell asleep upon which the vikings hung him, with rope around his neck, at the ash tree. According to the vikings they were sending their “sacrifice to the Heavens” (63). 

One cold winter afternoon the vikings noticed that the remains of the scraeling’s body had been removed from the tree. That night the scraeling people formed a war party that entered the viking camping grounds and killed “each of the thirty men, in thirty different ways” (64). This chapter ends by saying the vikings were eventually forgotten and it was one hundred years later before Leif the Fortunate rediscovered the land and called it Vineland. It is also noted that Odin and Thor were waiting for Leif when he arrived. 

I have decided to write my last blog post about this section of reading from American Gods because after reading it the for the first time myself, I did not understand it’s purpose in the novel. Although I am not completely sure it’s purpose for being in the novel, I do believe it is the first step in proving a framework, a base knowledge, of the viking history in America, and that this will have some importance later on in the story. Aside from that comment about this peculiar section, it is also important to note that since this could possibly be used as part of the base knowledge of the vikings discussed in the novel, the historical facts may not be completely accurate. Like it is mentioned at the end of the reading, “…the sailors were forgotten, by history and their people” and that “it was more than a hundred years before Leif the Fortunate, son of Erik the Red, rediscovered that land, which he would call Vineland” (64). With no survivor to pass on the history who is to say what is written is what actually occurred. Considering the scraeling people are natives of the land it can be assumed they do not speak the language of the vikings and therefore can not pass the story on to the vikings. What I am saying is not that all the information told in the section is false, but given the facts it may not be completely accurate and this is something to keep in mind when reading.