Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman

(Book Review)

Started: August 14, 2020
Finished: September 5, 2020

Why I Read This Book
I was obsessed with Greek Mythology when I was in 6th and 7th grade (1).
I never got in to other Norse Mythology though.  I'm not exactly sure why.  But I think it was because my personality is predisposed to read deeper instead of wider--that is, when I'm interested in a something, I tend to want to stay with that one thing rather than exploring different things (2). (3)
I did once try reading up on Norse Mythology.  I got a book on Norse Mythology from the school library, but I didn't like it.  Who were these strange new gods: Loki, Freya and Odin?  Where were the gods I was used to: Zeus, Athena and Apollo?
That, plus my memory of that book is that it was a series of strange events but it gave me very little reason to care about the characters in it.  Greek Mythology, although it may be filled with amoral characters, at least spends a lot of time making you care about the motivations of each character (usually in order to wring out maximum tragedy from their eventually downfall).  This book on Norse Mythology, however, read like just a series of events concerning characters I didn't care about. (4)

As the years have gone by, however, I've become more and more curious about Norse Mythology, for a number of reasons.  

Partly this is because I've become more aware that Anglo-Saxon culture seems to owe more to Norse Mythology than to Greek Mythology.  Even the days of the week--Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, are named after Norse Gods (5). Also the modern fantasy genre, as it's currently developed in mass-publishing today, comes not from Greek Mythology, but from Norse Mythology.  You are far more likely to find elves, dwarfs, and trolls in an epic fantasy book nowadays--all creatures from Norse Mythology--than you are to find centaurs, satyrs, harpies or cyclops. (6) , (7) , (8)

That, and like everyone else, the past 10 years I've been being introduced to the Asgard gods through the Marvel movies--Thor, Thor 2, Thor Ragnarok (and to a lesser extent the Marvel Crossover Movies) in which the gods of Norse Mythology, and their mythical antagonists, are portrayed on the big screen.  (9)   And, like everyone else, I've become increasingly fascinated by it.  As I wrote in my review of Thor 2:

The coolest thing about these Thor movies is how they blend Norse mythology with comic books.  The 9 Realms.  The Rainbow Bridge.  Vanaheimr.  The Dark Elves.  When I'm watching these Thor movies, I keep thinking: "What kind of whacked out comic book writing is this?" Only to go to Wikipedia, and discover that most of this comes directly from the original Norse Mythology. 

 And as I wrote in my review of Thor Ragnarok:

I'm ashamed to say I didn't actually know what Ragnarok was before this movie.  It wasn't until the trailers for this movie first came out (about 6 months ago) that I bothered to Google it.

Once I realized the real mythology behind Ragnarok, I found it quite fascinating.  In fact, I was going to make it one of my Interesting Random Facts, But then I changed my mind because I figured everyone would be going to Google this for themselves once this movie came out.

But if by chance you are one of those people who never got around to reading about Ragnarok, check out the Wikipedia page.  Wow, did our ancient Germanic ancestors believe some crazy things!

Much as I hate to admit I get my education from comic book movies... well, we all have to start somewhere, right? (10)

So, now that my interest in Norse Mythology was officially kindled, I just needed to find an introduction.  Enter, Neil Gaiman's: Norse Mythology (11) , (12) , (13) , (14).

The Review

I absolutely loved this book.  So much fun.  So much imagination in these stories.  

And, I feel like I learned a lot.

So, this one definitely gets the full recommendation from me.  If you see this in bookstores, snatch it up!

My only major complaint is that it was too short.
Ordinarily, I like a nice little book that is quick and easy to get through (and this definitely was), but this was one of those books where I was enjoying it enough that when I got to the ending, I wanted more. (15)

The initial creation stories, when Gaiman is recounting how the world was formed and where the gods came from, are a bit strange and difficult to get into.  It's mostly just creatures with strange names being born and then killing each other.  No recognizable personalities or character arcs to get invested in.  (But then, the same is true of the creation stories of Greek Mythology--and I think Babylonian Mythology, and probably quite a few others.) (16)  Even here, though, the Norse Cosmology is fascinatingly bizarre.  The whole idea of the nine realms strikes me as presaging the concept of the multiverse which pops up in so many modern science fiction stories.  Fascinating to think that the Norse were already telling these stories 1000 years ago.
And then we get into the tree that connects all the 9 realms, and the dragon at the bottom of the tree, and the rainbow bridge that the gods use to travel to the different 9 realms, and the whole world is fascinating.

And then, from page 30, we start getting into the actual stories, and here is where the book gets to be a lot of fun.

In contrast to Greek Mythology, in which the gods usually act as either guides or obstacles to the human heroes, the stories in this book are all about the adventures of the gods themselves--Loki and Thor travelling to the land of the giants, Loki and Thor battling the ogres, et cetera.
The tone of the stories is an interesting cross between epic adventure and fairy tales.  There are many journeys to far away lands, and many big battles, and yet the resolution of the stories typically involves simple tricks reminiscent of the resolution in many stories in the Brothers Grimm.

A few of these stories involve a convoluted plot in which the conflicts keep changing--this also reminded me of some of the Brothers Grimm--like The King of the Golden Mountain.
Several of the stories involve the gods travelling to the lands of the giants, and are very reminiscent of Jack and the Beanstalk. For example, from the story Hymir and Thor's Fishing Expedition:

They heard a distant rumbling, like thunder on the peaks, or mountains crumbling, or huge waves crashing to shore, and the earth shook with each rumble.
"My husband is coming home," said the giantess.  "I hear his gentle footsteps in the distance."
The rumbling became more distinct and seemed to be coming rapidly closer.
"My husband is often bad-tempered when he gets home, wrathful and grim of mind. He treats his guests badly," the giantess warned them. "Why don't you get under that kettle and stay there until he's cheerful enough for you to come out?"
She hid the beneath a kettle on the floor of the kitchen. It was dark under there.
(from page 195)

As with Greek Mythology, it's unclear to what extent ancient people seriously believed these stories, and to what extent they were meant simply as entertainment around the campfire. (17)  But I'm assuming that this was at least somewhat taken seriously as a belief system back in its day, which makes these stories all the more fascinating to think about.

The narration style of these stories is also good.  Neil Gaiman does a good job of telling these stories in modern English, while still keeping the flavor of a folk tale.
I'll illustrate this with a quotation from The Master Builder.  This won't make sense out of context, but hopefully the flavor will still come through:

"So," said Odin the all-father, "we are decided.  We say no."
There was a dry cough from a corner of the hall. It was the kind of cough intended to attract attention, and the gods turned to see who had coughed.  They found themselves looking at Loki, who stared back at them, and who smiled and held up a finger as if he had something important to divulge.
"It is worth my pointing out," he said, "that you are ignoring something huge."
"I do not think we have overlooked a single thing, troublemaker of the gods," said Freya tartly.
"You are all overlooking," he said, "that what this stranger is proposing to do is, make no bones about it, quite impossible.  There is no one alive who could build a wall so high and so thick as the one he described and have it finished in eighteen months. Not a giant or a god could do this, let alone a mortal man. I would stake my skin on it."
At this the gods all nodded and grunted and looked impressed. All of them except for Freya, and she looked angry.  "You are fools," she said.  "Especially you, Loki, because you think yourself clever."
(p.53-54)

As with Greek Mythology, the characters and their relationship to each other is somewhat inconsistent from story to story.  No doubt the by-product of having many different tales told by many different story tellers over many hundreds of years.  Sometimes Loki is the antagonist of the gods, sometimes he is their ally.  In The Children of Loki, the gods seem to be at peace with Jormungundr, the Midgard Serpent, and set him free into the sea, but then in Hymir and Thor's Fishing Expedition, Thor suddenly becomes the antagonist of the Serpent with no explanation.
Neil Gaiman admits this in the introduction: "Sometimes details in the stories contradict each other.  But I hope they paint a picture of a world and time."
...and yet (as with Greek Mythology) it's mostly little things.  There's no real jarring continuity errors between stories.  Thor, Loki, Odin and the rest are mostly the same characters from story to story, and there's no glaring contradictions that can't be smoothed over with a bit of imagination.
And put all together, the stories do form one long epic.  Each story is self-contained, and yet characters, plot points and antagonisms introduced in one story pay off in other stories (18)

And then the final chapter, Ragnarok, is every bit as epic and fascinating as I thought it would be.
The story Neil Gaiman tells is pretty much the same story that Crash Course Mythology tells in their version of Ragnarok.  The order of some of the duels are different, but other than that it's exactly the same match-ups, and exactly the same outcomes. (19)

Ragnarok: Crash Course World Mythology #24



But while Crash Course plays up the absurdity of the whole thing, Neil Gaiman plays the story seriously, and as you read, you can imagine the epic battle between the gods and monsters.

Odin makes straight for Fenrir, the wolf, now grown so huge as to be beyond imagining. The all-father grips Gungnir, his spear, in his fist.
Thor will see that Odin is heading for the great wolf, and Thor will smile, and whip his goats to greater speed, and he will head straight for the Midgard serpent, his hammer in his iron gauntlet (p.254)

On Authenticity
So as a complete newb in Norse Mythology, I'm not really in a position to judge how authentic this book is.  How faithful is Neil Gaiman in his retelling of these stories?  What is he leaving out?  What is he adding in?

The tone of some of these stories seems so modern that one suspects Neil Gaiman is doing a lot of re-imagining.  And yet, when I cross-referenced Wikipedia, or other Norse Mythology collections on Project Gutenberg, it seemed like most of the major tales from Norse Mythology are in this collection.  And the plot beats seem to be pretty much the way Neil Gaiman presents them.

There is a feeling that these stories are incomplete.  Surely there must be more stories about Loki, Odin and Thor and the giants and dwarfs.
But possibly this is explained by what Neil Gaiman says in his introduction--most of the Norse Myths were not actually preserved.  All we have is a handful of folktales that were not written down until after Christianity had already displaced the Norse Myths.
Looking at Wikipedia, I think there are a few stories Gaiman might be leaving out, but not very many.  He seems to have most of the major stories here. (Although again, I'm no expert here.  Someone let me know if I'm missing something). (20)

Well, I'm Hooked
Well, I'm hooked.
I left this book wanting more, more, more.
The next time I stumble across a book on Norse Mythology in the bookstore--any book at all--I'm going to grab it up.

Bonus Link
Since I always enjoy the New Yorker's review, here is their review of this book.

Footnotes (docs, pub)
(1) I mentioned my youthful interest in Greek Mythology before when reviewing The Golden Fleece by Robert Graves

(2) Besides which, when you're already familiar with the basics of one mythology, it's easier to keep reading in that vein because the entry barrier to each additional story is lower.  You don't have to spend time at the beginning of each story acquainting yourself with the pantheon of gods and goddesses, or figuring out what the metaphysical rules are.  You can just plunge into the story.

(3) I've also mentioned this predisposition before back when reviewing The Once and Future King, to explain why I never got into the King Arthur legends as a kid.

(4) Possibly this is, as Neil Gaiman implies in his introduction, because we don't have as much surviving literature about Norse Mythology as we do about Greek Mythology, and so it's a bit more difficult to create detailed stories.  And yet... Neil Gaiman manages to create very engaging stories in his book, so maybe it's just that the author I read wasn't up to the task. 

(5) As I noted in one of my previous interesting random fact posts, the days of the week in English are a strange hybrid of the Latin week with the Norse week.  Saturn day, Sun day and Moon day all come from the Latin week, whereas Tyr's day, Odin's day, Thor's day and Frige's day all come from the Norse gods.  

On a side note, I've always found it fascinating how little most people know about the origins of the days of the week.  We use those names all the time, and yet most people have no idea where they come from.  It's amazing how incurious people can be about the stuff that surrounds them every day--and I include myself in that, since I went for years without knowing this stuff myself.  

(6)...and arguably "giants" also come from Norse Mythology.  I know Greek Mythology had giants too, but the giants in Greek Mythology seemed to play less of a central role than the ones in Norse Mythology, so I suspect that the archetypal "giant" in modern folklore comes more from the Norse Mythology.  I'm just speculating though, I haven't researched this thoroughly.

(7)...speaking of things I haven't researched thoroughly, I'm a little bit unsure of the exact relationship between Norse Mythology, German folklore, and the modern epic fantasy genre.  I'm assuming that the elves and dwarfs and trolls in German fairy tales come to German folklore from the Norse Myths.  But am I wrong?  Did the German fairy tales develop these creatures independently?  

(8) My understanding is that this is all Tolkien's influence.  I once read somewhere (can't remember where now) that Tolkien and C.S. Lewis disagreed about how fantasy should be written.  Tolkien felt that a writer should only use one type of mythology when creating a world, so Tolkien only used creatures from Norse Myths.  C.S. Lewis, on the other hand, borrowed freely from both Greek and Norse mythology--so in The Chronicles of Narnia, there are centaurs and satyrs alongside dwarfs.  Tolkien strongly disapproved of this mixing and matching that his friend Lewis was doing.  Tolkien's view won out in terms of what is now normal in the genre, and that's why the modern fantasy genre uses Norse creatures and not Greek creatures

....is that right, or am I over-simplifying things?  Someone correct me if I'm getting this wrong.

(9) Comic book fans, of course, were already familiar with this long before from the Marvel comic books.  But I had been exclusively a DC comic book man during my comic collecting days, and so I missed out on all this fun.

Neil Gaiman also got his first introduction to Norse Mythology from the Marvel Thor comics written by Jack Kirby, as he writes in his introduction. 

(10) Oh, and also Wagner's epic Ring cycle is based on Norse Mythology as well.  So reading about Wagner recently also predisposed me to want to learn more about Norse Mythology.

(11) I actually first saw this book in an airport on a trip back home in April 2017.  I thought about picking it up at the time, but ended up leaving it on the shelves.  I've been regretting that decision ever since.  (To be fair to myself, this was before I had seen Thor: Dark World, or Thor: Ragnarok).  I've been keeping an eye out for this book since then.  I looked for it in bookstores when I was back home last Christmas, but didn't see it.  I've been looking for it in bookstores here in Vietnam, and haven't seen it for the past 3 years.  But then it finally started showing up in bookstores here in Vietnam a few months ago, and I grabbed it.

(12) I'd given American Gods by Neil Gaiman a mixed review, so that made me slightly cautious of Neil Gaiman. (Although I really liked Good Omens, but since that was a collaboration with Terry Pratchett, I'm unsure of how much to credit Gaiman.)  But I decided to give Neil Gaiman another chance, and I'm really glad I did.
On a side note: after reading this, I feel like I can now understand why Norse gods feature so prominently in American Gods.  

(13) Also, someone was kind enough to recommend this book in the comments of my Youtube review of Thor Ragnarok, further cementing my desire to check it out.

(14) Many years ago, my introduction to Greek Mythology was to start out with the readable modern retellings before working my way up to the original classics.  And that's generally my philosophy with breaking into any new subject.  I'm not sure if I'll ever work my way up to the original classics or not, but either way, this readable copy seems like the best way to start.

(15) It's very possible that the reason this book is so short is because there was no more to tell.  Neil Gaiman, in his introduction, laments that, unlike Greek Mythology, we have very few surviving stories from Norse Mythology.

(16)  There's also some sort of prehistoric war between the Aesir gods and the Vanir gods, which is alluded to several times in the book, but never described.  I got the impression this was similar to the prehistoric war between the Olympians and the Titans in Greek Mythology, which is also frequently alluded to but (I believe) never described in detail.

(17) Or at least, it's unclear to me.  Anyone out there know more about the belief systems of the Germanic people?

(18) For the most part, these stories form a chronology, and yet every once and a while, something appears to be out of order.  Kvasir appears in The Master Builder, several chapters  before his birth is described in The Mead of Poets.

(19) The whole concept of Ragnarok is a bit confusing, though.  The way it's written, the gods don't seem to realize all of this is predestined.  But then if the gods themselves don't know, then how do we humans know?  And once we humans know, and have written it down in our books, how come the gods can't just read our books and find out what is going to happen in Ragnarok?

(20)  In his endnotes to The Last Days of Loki, Neil Gaiman admits that he summarized into a single paragraph a long section where Loki insulted all the other gods one by one because he did not want to throw off the shape of the story.  Wikipedia, as of this writing, contains a much more detailed account of Loki's back and forth with all the other gods.  Besides being fascinating for its own sake (it contains allusions to many other legends and stories), it also makes clearer why the gods were determined to get their revenge on Loki after this encounter (a motivation that is not quite as clear in Gaiman's retelling).  Perhaps Gaiman should have left that long section in after all? 
Although, judging from what is written on Wikipedia, too faithfully reproducing that whole section may have interfered with the publishers plan to market this book to both children and adults.

Video Review (Playlist HERE)

Video Review HERE and embedded below:

...apologies for the abrupt ending.  My camera automatically shuts off after 30 minutes, so if I ramble for too long, I get cut off.

Link of the Day

Language Design - Noam Chomsky / Serious Science