Book review: Norse Mythology, by Neil Gaiman
This book was entertaining, informative and had a firm Neil Gaiman influence on it.
The sagas I’m aware of from Norse mythology… (my saga: read something by Magnus Magnusson which began a brief journey of discovery but side-tracked into first Teutonic through Donald A. Mackenzie, then back to Icelandic Codex Regius which I didn’t finish and then back to Norse, but I got lost somewhere in the ice fields of Permia and called it a day)… aren’t normally as compact as these stories, which are more efficiently A to B, in self-fulfilling compartments and with very few kennings like the Eddas, apart from occasional images like the sky filled with a storm of weapons (the sagas gave us ‘arrow rain’). I think this is down to adjusting delivery format to suit the modern audience. Books speak to a solitary reader who can pick them up and take breaks between chapters. The original medieval stories were very long because the audience had to huddle together for three winter months in a dark long-house with nothing else to do but fill up the time with extended entertainment, mead and flatulence. That’s how verbal histories are passed, not by flatulence but where undistracted people pay attention to the same information multiple times and then find they can recite it back. It’s not just the Scandinavian cultures that passed long verbal stories because Virgil and Chaucer strung out tales to 5,000 verses too (and memorised them for performance).
This book? Well, it is expert storytelling and seamless reinvention, re-presentation, persuading me that the author is much better at his craft now than when he wrote Neverwhere, Good Omens, The Graveyard Book and the more recent American Gods. Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology reminds me of that quote by Quintilian which is perhaps the only half-remembered morsel I can quote from Quintilian: ‘Ars celare artem est’ — the art is to conceal the art. The point being that Gaiman has taken some overwhelming hotch-potch stories that exist in several contradictory versions and he’s made them friendly, easy-going and accessible for dropouts like me who didn’t complete the full-stretch literature. The one with the drinking horn with a glamour over it disguising from the drinker the reality that the other end is dipping in the ocean is a feat of Dark Ages imagination.
Character development is the next topic, which most novelists and screenplay writers insist must happen as the main characters are tested and change (usually mature) through their experiences in the story. Several characters are the same throughout (e.g. Thor is always strong in the arm and thick in the head), but consider the clever portrayal of Loki, the Trickster. Across the first few stories, I expect most readers would say that Loki is their favourite character because he’s clever, fun and stirs up the complacent gods to generate situations and the need for action and improvisation (essentially, he starts the stories by doing something unexpected). By the end of the collection, as Loki has become increasingly anti-social and disgusting, the reader comes to regard him as their least favourite character — and one who should indeed be caught and punished. Loki hasn’t changed very much but the reader’s opinion of him has, over the course of the book, moved to the polar opposite. That’s the craft of good storytelling because, like my preferred definition of art, it has made the audience feel different. It’s easy for a writer to make the character change but so much more skilled for a writer to make you, the reader, change your opinion without telling you to.
Yes, I think I like Neil Gaiman more having read this. I like the way he’s giving a nod to the past and inviting the reader to explore and sift for sparkle in the old literature of the world again without subjecting them to the full entirety of it, as not everything that came down to us still makes sense.
