Review: Norse Mythology

Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have a sense of what drew the prolific and successful Gaiman to this project. He’s got the juice to do whatever he feels like at this point, but I imagine he wanted to compile a fresh telling of the Norse myths because there’s a muscularity to the stories. They grapple with the boundary between the world we know and the world we see as just out of our reach, and that’s his wheelhouse too. What’s The Sandman if not an elemental vision of how metaphors can help us see our universe more clearly? And what are the American Gods doing in our everyday if not to give us a glimpse of a potentially vaster world we can no longer really access?

So while Gaiman’s fingerprints are all over this version of the adventures of Thor, Odin, Loki, and their friends, the reverse is true as well. Gaiman tells us in his prologue what’s more or less evident: these stories shaped his imagination as a child. Here, in this volume, he’s trying to give us a version that brings the same fierce joy he discovered then, and he’s trying to do so in a way that reflects the changed sensibilities of 21st Century readers.

And this is a blast. As someone who grew up on Bulfinch’s Mythology – Gaiman seems to have had other mid-century translators for his childhood reading – I knew a lot of these already, but they’re a joy to encounter again. We get the story of Thor trying to drain an enchanted drinking horn; he doesn’t know it’s end is in the sea, and he manages to drink so much that he lowers the sea level. And we get the story of Frigg extracting a promise from all things never to harm her beloved son Baldur, all things but one.

Then there are the ones new to me. There’s the story of how Loki distracted the horse of the builder who otherwise would have stolen the sun, the moon, and the beautiful Freya; in this version, he transforms into a mare, inflames the builder’s horse with lust, and then allows himself to be mounted such that he gives birth to a remarkable foal some months later. And there’s the time Loki worked to make a woman laugh by tying a rope between his “private parts” and the beard of a billy goat, each tugging at the other to intense mutual discomfort. That’s probably too bawdy for Bulfinch, and I’m grateful to Gaiman for sharing it now.

As much fun as this is throughout, though, Gaiman can’t solve – or, better said, doesn’t want to use the narrative violence it would take to solve – the central narrative challenge of these myths. That is, these are not characters with psychological profiles. Instead, they’re elemental. They do what the stories need them to do, and that breeds inconsistency of detail and inconsistency of character. In one story, the gods need to eat of the golden apples to retain their youth and power. Outside that single account, though, the apples are never an issue.

Most distractingly, the characters change. Loki is a traditional trickster figure in many of them. He causes trouble, but it’s originally of the mischief variety. As the stories move forward, he becomes increasingly serious in his crimes, culminating in his effectively murdering Baldur. There’s no explanation why he turns from fun-loving troublemaker to general of the army bent on destroying the world. Gaiman might have given us one, but that would have made it more of a Gaiman novel and less a tribute to this strange and compelling collection.

So there are holes in this as a coherent story, holes it falls to us as readers to fill. That makes this less a novel to pick up and enjoy and more a reflection of the different narrative goals of the different generations of myth-makers responsible for the originals centuries ago.

I don’t know the source material well enough to know how well Gaiman’s stories represent them, so I can’t pass judgement on that quality. (Neither of us reads Old High German, or certainly not me.) Still, I think Gaiman outdoes himself in the way he recounts the final chapter, Ragnarok. As he explains in his introductions – both to the collection as a whole and to the final chapter – he sees all the other myths as having happened long ago. Ragnarok, though, is yet to happen, so he skillfully narrates it in the future tense. The effect is haunting and arresting. It feels dream-like (back to the Sandman, I guess), as if it’s information coming to us through a source outside our everyday senses.

Gaiman wraps all that up with a stunning final image. [SPOILER] In a gesture that reminds me of E.R. Eddings’s weird pre-Tolkien fantasy, The Worm Oroborous, we discover that Ragnarok is an ending that implies a beginning. With nearly all the gods having destroyed one another, the few who remain collect a set of chess pieces, arrange them on the board, and begin another cycle of conflict between these elemental figures.

I don’t love everything Gaiman does; I found Sandman more uneven than most people seem to, and this collection is also uneven given the nature of its rich source material. But I am grateful to him for this, a book I got to share with my son, and I recommend it. In fact, there’s a good chance I’ll re-read it myself once these stories start to lapse again into that space between memory and dream.


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