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Summary
Summary
"
Remarkable.... Gaiman has provided an enchanting contemporary interpretation of the Viking ethos.--Lisa L. Hannett, Atlantic
Neil Gaiman, long inspired by ancient mythology in creating the fantastical realms of his fiction, presents a bravura rendition of the Norse gods and their world from their origin though their upheaval in Ragnarok.
In Norse Mythology, Gaiman stays true to the myths in envisioning the major Norse pantheon: Odin, the highest of the high, wise, daring, and cunning; Thor, Odin's son, incredibly strong yet not the wisest of gods; and Loki―son of a giant―blood brother to Odin and a trickster and unsurpassable manipulator.
Gaiman fashions these primeval stories into a novelistic arc that begins with the genesis of the legendary nine worlds and delves into the exploits of deities, dwarfs, and giants. Through Gaiman's deft and witty prose, these gods emerge with their fiercely competitive natures, their susceptibility to being duped and to duping others, and their tendency to let passion ignite their actions, making these long-ago myths breathe pungent life again.
"Author Notes
Neil Gaiman was born in Portchester, England on November 10, 1960. He worked as a journalist and freelance writer for a time, before deciding to try his hand at comic books. Some of his work has appeared in publications such as Time Out, The Sunday Times, Punch, and The Observer. His first comic endeavor was the graphic novel series The Sandman. The series has won every major industry award including nine Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards, three Harvey Awards, and the 1991 World Fantasy Award for best short story, making it the first comic ever to win a literary award.
He writes both children and adult books. His adult books include The Ocean at the End of the Lane, which won a British National Book Awards, and the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel for 2014; Stardust, which won the Mythopoeic Award as best novel for adults in 1999; American Gods, which won the Hugo, Nebula, Bram Stoker, SFX, and Locus awards; Anansi Boys; Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances; and The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction, which is a New York Times Bestseller. His children's books include The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish; Coraline, which won the Elizabeth Burr/Worzalla, the BSFA, the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Bram Stoker awards; The Wolves in the Walls; Odd and the Frost Giants; The Graveyard Book, which won the Newbery Award in 2009 and The Sandman: Overture which won the 2016 Hugo Awards Best Graphic Story.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Gaiman is a talented storyteller, as both writer and a narrator. In his latest audiobook, he turns both talents to an imaginative retelling of old Norse folklore. The figures in these myths are well-known to most people: Odin, the highest and oldest of the gods; his son Thor the Thunderer; and Loki, his conniving and treacherous blood brother. They, along with the other gods who inhabit Asgard, live in a universe of giants, elves, dwarves, and men. Gaiman chronicles the history of these gods and their varied adventures from the beginning of their creation to their ending at the final battle of Ragnarok, and on to their eventual renewal. Gaiman's affection for these myths is evident throughout the audiobook. His gods bellow and rage and whine and battle and plot, but his reading is never over the top. His mellow British-accented voice keeps the pace consistent, hits all the right dramatic notes, and brings new life, for a new generation to discover, to these ancient stories. A Norton hardcover. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
With its chatty gods and gentle giants, Gaiman's good-natured version of the mythos lacks brutal tragedy at its heart Any retelling of a tale from times long past must be an interpretation, a translation into language and concepts that the present audience understands. The original myth may have been told as uninterpreted fact, but later re-tellers are and must be conscious of who their audience is and the purpose of the telling. To what extent does this consciousness shape the choice of what's told and the language that it's told in? Interpretation may clarify, betray, reveal, deform. For the Norse myths, we really have no original, only interpretations. Most of the material was first written down by a single monk a century or more after Christianity had outlawed and supplanted the "heathen" religion of northern Europe. Later came scholarly attempts to translate and present the stories so as to glimpse what the lost original versions may have been. Then came use of elements of the mythos in drama and opera, free adaptations for modern readers, and the appearance of increasingly familiar tropes in books for young children, cartoons, graphic presentations, animated films, and so on. A luxuriant growth indeed from the few, fragile stems of medieval manuscripts, one of which lay hidden for several centuries in a barn in Iceland. Their survival is remarkable, for the Norse tales are about as un-Christian as you can get: no all-powerful creator deity, no human virtue rewarded but courage in battle, and on the Last Day, no salvation for anybody. Their fascination for us may be this near-nihilism: a world created essentially by nobody out of nothing, an existence of endless warfare and the rivalry of brutal, dishonest powers, ending in defeat for all. In contrast, the classical myths retold to us through centuries of splendid verbal and visual art can seem pallid. The stark cruelty and essential hopelessness of the Norse stories suits the artistic taste of the last century, our hunger for darkness. Neil Gaiman tells us that he first met the Norse tales in the graphic narratives that we go on calling comics or comic books, a stupid name considering the breadth of their subject matter. It is a medium well suited to the material: vivid, sparing of words, long on action, short on reflection though given to pithy wisdom. Heroes, shape-changers, battles, superpowers and superweapons -- a half-blind wizard, an eight-legged horse, the battlements of Asgard, the Rainbow Bridge -- all are perfectly at home in the world of comics. Gaiman's characteristically limpid, quick-running prose keeps the dramatic impetus of the medieval texts, if not their rough-hewn quality. His telling of the tales is for children and adults alike, and this is both right and wise, it being the property of genuine myth to be accessible on many levels. The language of books loved in childhood retains an authority it is useless to question even when impossible to justify. I grew up with Padraic Colum's Children of Odin, published in 1920, and the stories exist for me in the fine cadences of his prose. Gaiman's version is certainly a worthy shelf-partner to Colum's, and perhaps a better choice for a contemporary child reader, used to a familiar tone and a "friendly" approach. Gaiman plays down the extreme strangeness of some of the material and defuses its bleakness by a degree of self-satire. There is a good deal of humour in the stories, the kind most children like -- seeing a braggart take a pratfall, watching the cunning little fellow outwit the big dumb bully. Gaiman handles this splendidly. Yet I wonder if he tries too hard to tame something intractably feral, to domesticate a troll. It all comes back to the matter of interpretation. In her 2011 book Ragnarok, AS Byatt used the Norse mythos to express her own childhood experience of world war and as a parable of the irrational human behaviours that result in mass ruin and destruction. Such interpretations are perfectly valid in themselves but don't serve well as a retelling of the myths. They are more of the order of meditations on a religious text, sermons on the meaning of biblical stories. Gaiman does not use the Norse material this way; he simply tells us the story, and tells it well. What finally left me feeling dissatisfied is, paradoxically, the pleasant, ingratiating way in which he tells it. These gods are not only mortal, they're a bit banal. They talk a great deal, in a conversational tone that descends sometimes to smart-ass repartee. This chattiness will be familiar to an audience accustomed to animated film and graphic narrative, which have grown heavy with dialogue, and in which disrespect is generally treated as a virtue. But it trivialises, and I felt sometimes that this vigorous, robust, good-natured version of the mythos gives us everything but the very essence of it, the heart. The Norse myths were narrative expressions of a religion deeply strange to us. Judaism, Christianity and Islam are divine comedies: there may be punishment for the wicked, but the promise of salvation holds. What we have from the Norse is a fragment of a divine tragedy. Vague promises of a better world after the Fimbulwinter and the final apocalypse are unconvincing; that's not where this story goes. It goes inexorably from nothingness into night. You just can't make pals of these brutal giants and self-destructive gods. They are tragic to the bone. - Ursula K Le Guin.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Gaiman yields to no one else writing modern-day-set dark fantasy in his use of classic mythologies, not just European but even West African Caribbean in the waggish, wonderful Anansi Boys (2005). His favorite body of myths is and those who've read enough of him don't need him to tell them so the Norse batch, the matter of Odin and Thor and Loki, of Valhalla and Midgard and Hel, of giants and (J. R. R. Tolkien's favorites) elves and dwarfs. It's fairly unsurprising, then, that he'd want to tell northwestern Europe's grandest old stories in his own idiom. Nor, really, is it surprising that he does a bang-up job of it. His simple, Anglo-Saxon-canted diction, which in his original fiction sometimes gets a little pinched and dry-throated, couldn't sound better to modern ears used to the clipped, the droll, the laconic that a century of hard-boiled literary patter has made normal. All common English speakers should easily hear this prose in their own voices (though they should also hear it in Gaiman's reading of the audiobook). From nothing, the counter-biblical original condition of Norse cosmology, to the total destruction of Ragnarok and a glimpse beyond it, Gaiman's retelling of these ever-striking and strange stories should be every reader's first book of Norse mythology. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Gaiman's immense audience and all lovers of myths and the classic fantasy novels they inspire will be seeking this key volume.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
ADMIT IT: Wouldn't you love to have Neil Gaiman come to your home and read stories to you? Yeah, you would. Or I would anyway. Ideally in one of those glass-ceilinged igloos in some Scandinavian country. Specifically, I'd like him to read from the material that has so deeply informed the otherworlds of his phenomenal fiction: the Norse myths, those ancient and weird tales. Guess what. You can. In "Norse Mythology," Gaiman brings voice to the old myths so viscerally that listening to the audiobook every night for a week, I thought my bedroom might explode into Valhalla. Here are hammer- handed Thor and one-eyed Odin, tricky Loki, and the mighty goddesses Freya and Idunn. In fact the entire Norse pantheon, including dwarves and giants and demons, plays out as vividly as a novel or film. Honestly I may have to order a breastplate of some sort. As Gaiman puts it in the introduction, the stories feel like a journey from the ice and fire that created the world to the fire and ice that end it. There is a difference between reading a book and listening to stories, a difference amplified to epic proportions in the case of "Norse Mythology." I knew it immediately when all of the hairs on my arm shot up during the retelling of how Odin lost his eye when he traded it for a sip from the well of wisdom. My theory was confirmed when my 16-year-old son passed by my bedroom door one night and could not stop himself from coming in to listen - for an entire hour. Hearing a story aloud, you are seduced by the wonder of an ancient oral tradition. From the opening origin myths - about Yggdrasil, a life tree with three roots in three worlds, and the driftwood logs that give rise to the first humans, Ask (named from the ash tree) and Embla (named from the elm) - I was struck by the differences between the stories I'd learned as a child raised Catholic (it didn't take) and a creation story in which humans spring from trees. Hearing again that we might imagine ourselves born of the natural world, an idea shared by many pre-Christian indigenous cultures, made me feel briefly less hopeless. The prime character tales begin with Loki stealing Thor's wife's hair. Waking up one morning to find his wife, Sif, bald to the scalp, Thor goes straight to that conniving troublemaker, the shape-shifting crafty misanthrope who lives among the gods, and threatens to break every bone in his body. Thor being Thor, he extends the threat to include every single day for the rest of Loki's life, should he fail to return Sif's gorgeous golden locks. Thus begins the story "The Treasures of the Gods," which goes on to reveal the origins of some of the most important magical objects in all of the myths: Odin's spear and arm cuff, Thor's hammer. In "The Master Builder," a newcomer arrives in Asgard right about the time that the gods are discussing the need for a wall to protect their kingdom. He is "a big man, dressed as a smith, and behind him trudged a horse - a stallion, huge and gray, with a broad back." The smith offers to build the gods a wall in a seemingly impossible amount of time. Loki talks the gods into promising the smith the sun, the moon and the goddess Freya's hand in marriage should he complete the wall in time, an effort he persuades everyone will fail. Only Freya seems to suspect that Loki is terribly wrong. "I hate you so much," she tells him, a line that made me laugh out loud to no one because that's just what I'd say in her position, and Gaiman's deadpan voice correctly conveys a flat yet homicidal tone. I do wish there were more women- centered stories in the collection. Gaiman concedes this omission in his introduction, explaining that he would have liked to retell the tales of Eir, the doctor of the gods; or Lofn, the comforter; or Sjofn, the goddess of love; and Vor, the goddess of wisdom, but he didn't have enough to go on. Still, he does an admirable job weaving the women in, including Freya. And really, the listening is the thing. Sure, I was stirred when I curled up with the book and read about the death of Odin's second son, Balder, how his wife "saw her husband's body carried past, . . . her heart gave out in her breast, and she fell dead onto the shore. They carried her to the funeral pyre, and they placed her body beside Balder's." But when I listened to it, nestled in my bed in the dark with no light but my blue wave projector (what?) casting rhythmic cerulean images on my ceiling and walls, I bawled. Hearing the great myths spoken in a language from my present with a trace of ancient history physically broke me open, Gaiman's voice bringing the characters to life. In the introduction, Gaiman emphasizes how the passing on of oral traditions is a vital art. He dedicates the book to his grandson. His hope is that readers will feel compelled to retell these stories. He doesn't mention something else, but I can hear it in his voice, something we could all use a little more of just now, in the dark: delight. LIDIA YUKNAVITCH is the author, most recently, of the novel "The Book of Joan."
Library Journal Review
In his fiction, Gaiman (American Gods; Sandman) frequently explores the themes and tropes of mythology from around the world. Here, he operates within narrower confines, retelling the classic stories of Norse mythology but with no less humor, sense of adventure, and imagination than when he's playing in worlds of his own making. Here the adventures and misadventures of the Norse gods and goddesses function as short stories that, together, build an arc that leads the reader onward to Ragnarök, the twilight of the gods. Giants, ogres, dwarves, fantastical beasts, and the occasional human freely mingle with Thor, Odin, Loki, Freya, and other, less well-known gods and goddesses, all of whom are passionate, flawed, weird, and divinely entertaining. VERDICT A spectacularly entertaining and elucidating collection of stories with wide crossover appeal. Essential for all collections.-Stephanie Klose, Library Journal © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.