Could the Norse gods have been real historical people?
This is just one of the questions I’ll be looking at in this series, since I decided this Easter to do something about an idea I’ve had for a long time, to write a completely new take on Norse Mythology, using all of the knowledge accumulated over a decade and bring it out into the light of day.
What are the meaning of runes?
Background
Perhaps it is the reading of such tales as the Lord Of The Rings (LOTR) that has sparked a fascination for wandering the lands of Scandinavia, looking for those remote locations where burial mounds and rune-stones dot the landscape. In the days when my two sons were young, often would be heard groans of complaint about having to drive to yet another remote place, just so Dad could take another handful of photos to add to his collection. How could anyone explain to the young the fascination in rediscovering a past we can only read about in the sagas?
As Tolkien, in addition to visiting, I’ve read, studied, immersed, absorbed, created, visited, photographed and imagined anything to do with the Norse culture of old to weave them into the present. From the Icelandic Sagas, to visiting places in Denmark, Sweden and Norway, this book is the result of all those years spent doing these many many things. I’ve also studied the languages – to the best of my ability – I write, read and speak Scandinavian languages, accessing many sources not available in the English language.
I have deliberately not re-served the myths we can pluck from wikipedia, but have been selective, touching on some unusual places and aspects that can’t normally be found in the interests of creating a completely new way at looking at the Norse and Nordic Mythology.
See the Viking Legends and Norse Mythology homepage
AIMS:
My aims are simple: Just like my fiction projects, I want to leave the reader with is the same feeling of seeing something familiar from a whole new perspective, that almost like a new universe, is so close to our own and yet being fiction, being uniquely esoteric.
The book follows on from all the work undertaken writing The Elements, what I’ve called ‘The Lord Of The Rings in the real world’. As LOTR was one big work of evolution based on years of research into the lost myths of old Europe, similarly, in the writing of The Elements I undertook many years of journeying far and wide driven by the idea of writing something similar in scope, capturing the allure of en epic, but embedded within the terra firma, not of Middle Earth, but of our own, rediscovering a lost Nordic past and bringing it up into the light of world as real, living and breathing as our own in fiction and now as a book of the field of study itself.
With all the work done, and so many threads in Nordic sagas discovered, it’s now time to bring these all out into the light of day.
I will be revealing new legends, beliefs about the afterlife, gods, legends and locations, bringing them alive with reference to a number of key selected texts to accompany my detective work. I’ll also be relating these to Tolkien and the work of pioneers like Thor Heyerdahl in uncovering the illusive truth concerning the Norse, the Nordic gods, and from whence the legends originated.
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