In what is one of the more jarring authorial choices, Gaiman leaves out most of the goddess-centric tales (the tale of Freya's necklace, Brisingamen, for instance). He has selected the backbone of the Ragnarok story, and a few of the more well-known tales, such as "Freya's Unusual Wedding," which is of course about Thor and Loki and not Freya at all. Consider: Kevin Crossley-Holland's The Norse Myths (Pantheon, 1981)has thirty-two myths Gaiman's volume has fifteen. Does Gaiman's retelling follow the customary set of stories we find in the Eddas? Yes, with a few authorial liberties in the ordering of the tales, but also with some serious gaps. Our sources are medieval, and therefore Christian. There are no original Norse myths, written down when the religion lived and breathed. Gaiman's goal is to "retell these myths and stories as accurately.and as interestingly" as he can (14).īegin with accuracy. The actual reconstruction of Norse culture offered here is a less dramatic than that, but the romantic (in the older sense of romance's meaning) description is a clue to the reader: what follows is a collection of stories, focused on the doings of “tragic heroes, tragic villains” rather than a critical edition of Norse mythology (12). In his introduction to Norse Mythology, author Neil Gaiman writes, "History and religion and myth combine, and we wonder and we imagine and we guess, like detectives reconstructing the details of a long-forgotten crime" (13).
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