Norse Mythology - Review
Norse Mythology is a solid retelling of the Norse myths
and it’s a very quick, digestible read. It starts off funny and light-hearted but
it takes a dark and gruesome turn later on in the book, and it all
culminates into an epic battle and a poetic finale. I did have my issues
with some plot holes and the pacing of the earlier portion of the book,
but it’s a great introduction to anyone interested in learning about
the Norse gods. This will be a non-spoiler review and it will be covered
in 5 sections. Characters, Plot, Setting/World-Building, Pacing, and my
final thoughts along with a rating.
Image: Thor (the God of Thunder).
[Characters]:
The main characters of this story are Odin, Thor, and Loki. The secondary characters with key roles are Tyr, Freya, Frey, Kvasir, Balder, Frigg, and Heimdall. The only prior knowledge/context I had of these characters were from the Thor movies and the brief amount of Thor comics I read when I was younger. Odin, Thor, and the other gods are not all heroic and as good as I remembered from the comics/movies. The gods are arrogant, Odin is deceitful and Thor is more dim-witted and has more of a temper than I expected, but Loki is still the same mischievous and cunning person.
Odin is so much more fascinating in this book compared to his portrayal in the comics I grew up reading. Odin is the highest and oldest of all the gods. He hung himself on Yggdrasil (the World-Tree) for 9 nights in order to gain knowledge and he traded away one of his eyes to take a sip of water from Mimir’s Well (a well at the roots of Yggdrasil) to gain wisdom. He travels from place to place in his several forms and disguises to see the world. He has 2 ravens that fly back and forth across the world seeking news and they return to Odin, whispering things to him of events occurring far away. He has his own throne room and when he sits on his holy seat, he could see everything that’s happening across the nine worlds.
Thor is still Thor. He’s the strongest of all the gods, he’s a little slow in the intelligence department but he’s also good-natured. Loki is such a perplexing character because he’s a trickster who likes to play silly pranks on people but he’s also cunning and he has a darker side to him. He’s the savior and destroyer of the gods at the same time. He’s definitely the most fascinating character in this book and his character arc is wonderfully tragic.
This isn’t a traditional novel structure, it’s more of a collection of several short stories but they were told chronologically and all the stories felt like it had an interconnected narrative. Some of the earlier stories seemed like filler but after I finished the book, I realized that these earlier stories were actually foundational stories that showed the different character dynamics and introduced certain items and lore that became crucial later on in the story.
My favorite short stories were Before the Beginning, and After, The Children of Loki, Thor’s Journey to the Land of the Giants, The Story of Gerd and Frey, The Death of Balder, and Ragnarok: The Final Destiny of the Gods. The Children of Loki is probably the most crucial story because it sets up the inevitable battle at the end of the book. The children of Loki will bring forth Ragnarok: the death of the gods and an end to everything. Loki’s 3 monstrous children are a serpent, a wolf, and a girl whose right side of her body was normal flesh but the left side of her body was dark and ruined like a rotten corpse. After this story, there’s a slow build-up throughout the rest of the short stories, such as the sense of danger and tension as Thor is wondering where the Midgard Serpent is in one story, Odin is preparing his warriors in Valhalla for Ragnarok in another story, and Balder is having bad dreams of the sun and the moon being devoured by a wolf in another story, and so on.
My problem with this book is that there’s plot holes in certain stories and some stories just skip from A to B without a logical explanation. For example, Thor wakes up one morning and finds out that his hammer is gone. He goes to ask Loki advice on how to find it. Loki then randomly knows exactly where to go and he visits an Ogre, who says he’s buried the hammer deep beneath the earth. How does Loki know where to go? How did the Ogre get the hammer? In another story, a god who died early on in the book comes back alive much later without an explanation and that god plays a huge role in that later short story so it’s a pretty big plot hole. Another issue I had was that some of the earlier stories were boring and a little too goofy.
Ragnarok: The Final Destiny of the Gods, the last short story and the finale of the book, was told in a different format from the rest of the stories in the book. It was told through the narrator’s perspective and he’s explaining what happens in the future instead of the reader being in the moment of a dramatic and suspenseful scene in the present tense, so it felt a little jarring when I was first reading through it. The story was still spectacular, as it was evocatively described, beautifully written, and the final battle itself was epic. It also has great call-backs and it ties together all of the previous stories such as prophetic dreams from one story coming to fruition here, an item/object from another story being crucial here, and certain world-building details and lore from other stories playing a role now. I won’t give away any spoilers but it’s a very tragic yet poetic ending.
Image: Surtr (the Fire Giant).
[Setting/World-Building]:
There are 9 worlds unified as 1 in the Norse mythos but this book mainly featured 4, which are Asgard, Jotunheim, Nidavellir, and Hel. The short story Before the Beginning, and After showed the creation of the worlds and it was fascinating. The gods built the world out of a giant’s corpse, whom they killed. The gods made soil from the giant’s flesh, the giant’s bones were used to make mountains and cliffs, rocks were made from the giant’s teeth, the seas came from the giant’s blood and sweat, the sky was made from the giant’s skull, and they used the giant’s eyelashes to create a wall around the middle of the world.
Some of the neat world-building details that I enjoyed in this book are Yggdrasil, Valhalla, and Hel. Yggdrasil, the mighty world-tree, grows between the 9 worlds and holds them all together. The tree is so big that the roots of the tree are in 3 worlds, the tree is fed by 3 different wells and the tops of its branches are above the sky. Valhalla is where all the men who have died nobly in battle since the beginning of time go to live in the afterlife. Their souls are collected from the battlefields by Valkyries, the warrior-women charged by Odin with the task of bringing the souls of the battle-slain to their ultimate reward. Valhalla is an enormous hall with 450 doors and each door allowing 800 warriors to ride abreast. It seats more people than the mind could hold. I also love how eerily Hel is described. Hel is the realm of the dead located at the end of the world. As you approach deeper into the underworld, the atmosphere goes from gloomy, to twilight, to night, to a pitch-black starless dark. The only thing to be seen for miles is a golden light, which is the bridge across the Gjaller River, where all who have died must travel across in order to make the transition to the afterlife in Hel.
Image: Thor (the God of Thunder).
[Characters]:
The main characters of this story are Odin, Thor, and Loki. The secondary characters with key roles are Tyr, Freya, Frey, Kvasir, Balder, Frigg, and Heimdall. The only prior knowledge/context I had of these characters were from the Thor movies and the brief amount of Thor comics I read when I was younger. Odin, Thor, and the other gods are not all heroic and as good as I remembered from the comics/movies. The gods are arrogant, Odin is deceitful and Thor is more dim-witted and has more of a temper than I expected, but Loki is still the same mischievous and cunning person.
Odin is so much more fascinating in this book compared to his portrayal in the comics I grew up reading. Odin is the highest and oldest of all the gods. He hung himself on Yggdrasil (the World-Tree) for 9 nights in order to gain knowledge and he traded away one of his eyes to take a sip of water from Mimir’s Well (a well at the roots of Yggdrasil) to gain wisdom. He travels from place to place in his several forms and disguises to see the world. He has 2 ravens that fly back and forth across the world seeking news and they return to Odin, whispering things to him of events occurring far away. He has his own throne room and when he sits on his holy seat, he could see everything that’s happening across the nine worlds.
Thor is still Thor. He’s the strongest of all the gods, he’s a little slow in the intelligence department but he’s also good-natured. Loki is such a perplexing character because he’s a trickster who likes to play silly pranks on people but he’s also cunning and he has a darker side to him. He’s the savior and destroyer of the gods at the same time. He’s definitely the most fascinating character in this book and his character arc is wonderfully tragic.
Favorite Characters – Thor, Tyr, & Heimdall.
Image: Bifrost (the Rainbow Bridge).
[Plot]:
Image: Bifrost (the Rainbow Bridge).
[Plot]:
This isn’t a traditional novel structure, it’s more of a collection of several short stories but they were told chronologically and all the stories felt like it had an interconnected narrative. Some of the earlier stories seemed like filler but after I finished the book, I realized that these earlier stories were actually foundational stories that showed the different character dynamics and introduced certain items and lore that became crucial later on in the story.
My favorite short stories were Before the Beginning, and After, The Children of Loki, Thor’s Journey to the Land of the Giants, The Story of Gerd and Frey, The Death of Balder, and Ragnarok: The Final Destiny of the Gods. The Children of Loki is probably the most crucial story because it sets up the inevitable battle at the end of the book. The children of Loki will bring forth Ragnarok: the death of the gods and an end to everything. Loki’s 3 monstrous children are a serpent, a wolf, and a girl whose right side of her body was normal flesh but the left side of her body was dark and ruined like a rotten corpse. After this story, there’s a slow build-up throughout the rest of the short stories, such as the sense of danger and tension as Thor is wondering where the Midgard Serpent is in one story, Odin is preparing his warriors in Valhalla for Ragnarok in another story, and Balder is having bad dreams of the sun and the moon being devoured by a wolf in another story, and so on.
My problem with this book is that there’s plot holes in certain stories and some stories just skip from A to B without a logical explanation. For example, Thor wakes up one morning and finds out that his hammer is gone. He goes to ask Loki advice on how to find it. Loki then randomly knows exactly where to go and he visits an Ogre, who says he’s buried the hammer deep beneath the earth. How does Loki know where to go? How did the Ogre get the hammer? In another story, a god who died early on in the book comes back alive much later without an explanation and that god plays a huge role in that later short story so it’s a pretty big plot hole. Another issue I had was that some of the earlier stories were boring and a little too goofy.
Ragnarok: The Final Destiny of the Gods, the last short story and the finale of the book, was told in a different format from the rest of the stories in the book. It was told through the narrator’s perspective and he’s explaining what happens in the future instead of the reader being in the moment of a dramatic and suspenseful scene in the present tense, so it felt a little jarring when I was first reading through it. The story was still spectacular, as it was evocatively described, beautifully written, and the final battle itself was epic. It also has great call-backs and it ties together all of the previous stories such as prophetic dreams from one story coming to fruition here, an item/object from another story being crucial here, and certain world-building details and lore from other stories playing a role now. I won’t give away any spoilers but it’s a very tragic yet poetic ending.
Image: Surtr (the Fire Giant).
[Setting/World-Building]:
There are 9 worlds unified as 1 in the Norse mythos but this book mainly featured 4, which are Asgard, Jotunheim, Nidavellir, and Hel. The short story Before the Beginning, and After showed the creation of the worlds and it was fascinating. The gods built the world out of a giant’s corpse, whom they killed. The gods made soil from the giant’s flesh, the giant’s bones were used to make mountains and cliffs, rocks were made from the giant’s teeth, the seas came from the giant’s blood and sweat, the sky was made from the giant’s skull, and they used the giant’s eyelashes to create a wall around the middle of the world.
Some of the neat world-building details that I enjoyed in this book are Yggdrasil, Valhalla, and Hel. Yggdrasil, the mighty world-tree, grows between the 9 worlds and holds them all together. The tree is so big that the roots of the tree are in 3 worlds, the tree is fed by 3 different wells and the tops of its branches are above the sky. Valhalla is where all the men who have died nobly in battle since the beginning of time go to live in the afterlife. Their souls are collected from the battlefields by Valkyries, the warrior-women charged by Odin with the task of bringing the souls of the battle-slain to their ultimate reward. Valhalla is an enormous hall with 450 doors and each door allowing 800 warriors to ride abreast. It seats more people than the mind could hold. I also love how eerily Hel is described. Hel is the realm of the dead located at the end of the world. As you approach deeper into the underworld, the atmosphere goes from gloomy, to twilight, to night, to a pitch-black starless dark. The only thing to be seen for miles is a golden light, which is the bridge across the Gjaller River, where all who have died must travel across in order to make the transition to the afterlife in Hel.
[Pacing]:
This book had uneven pacing as some of the earlier stories
were pretty boring and there was a point in the book where I was thinking about
quitting because it just wasn’t interesting to me, but the stories were
such a quick read, that I decided to give a few more stories a shot and
push through it. It started gaining momentum around 150 pages into the
book with the short story Thor’s Journey to the Land of the Giants, and it was pretty good from there on out.
Image: Valhalla.
[Final Thoughts & Rating]:
Norse Mythology is an unbalanced, but decent book overall. It doesn’t have a consistent tone as the book starts off as a fun and light-hearted story, almost like a children’s book but then it takes a dark turn and it gets very brutal near the end. The Last Days of Loki had one of the darkest scenes I’ve ever read in a book. It also had uneven pacing as the earlier stories were pretty boring until halfway through the book. It was still a solid read and it ended in a pretty magnificent way. It’s a nice introduction to people wanting to read about mythologies, as it’s a very simple and digestible read and Neil Gaiman does a good job covering all the bases of the Norse myths.
My Book Rankings: https://jaytargaryen.blogspot.com/p/b...
*My Rating System*
5 Stars (9-10): Amazing
4 Stars (7-9): Really Good to Great
3 Stars (5-7): Average to Good
2 Stars (3-5): Bad to Mediocre
1 Star (1-3): Terrible
Image: Valhalla.
[Final Thoughts & Rating]:
Norse Mythology is an unbalanced, but decent book overall. It doesn’t have a consistent tone as the book starts off as a fun and light-hearted story, almost like a children’s book but then it takes a dark turn and it gets very brutal near the end. The Last Days of Loki had one of the darkest scenes I’ve ever read in a book. It also had uneven pacing as the earlier stories were pretty boring until halfway through the book. It was still a solid read and it ended in a pretty magnificent way. It’s a nice introduction to people wanting to read about mythologies, as it’s a very simple and digestible read and Neil Gaiman does a good job covering all the bases of the Norse myths.
Rating: 5/10
My Book Rankings: https://jaytargaryen.blogspot.com/p/b...
*My Rating System*
5 Stars (9-10): Amazing
4 Stars (7-9): Really Good to Great
3 Stars (5-7): Average to Good
2 Stars (3-5): Bad to Mediocre
1 Star (1-3): Terrible
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