The Aviary

More Norse mythology! frenchroast rightly pointed out that I shouldn't hint at other stories without telling them, so that's what I'm going to do. In fact, you get two for the price of one today. 8)

I feel like I should point out a couple of things before this next story. First, it is not a happy story. There's no pleasant resolution at the end and some pretty upsetting things happen, including some involving violence towards children. Secondly, as is probably pretty damned obvious, I am a Lokean. Loki is my...I don't like the term "patron god", but that's probably the easiest way to put it. This means that I tell these stories from a certain perspective - one that is perhaps more sympathetic towards Loki and his family than others might be. If you heard someone else telling this story, they might tell it a little differently. Grain of salt, and all that.

This story can be found in the Prose Edda, as well as in the Poetic Edda as part of the Lokasenna. Here we go:

( The Binding of Loki )



And because that story is kind of a downer, I am going to tell you a second Loki story that also involves fish, but this one has a much happier ending. This is a retelling of a Faroese ballad, and thus is not contained in the Eddas.

( Loka Tattur )

Things:

- The roadsides of the roads I drive on to get to work every day are currently covered in fireweed. And foxglove, and daisies, and hawksbeard, and several other flowers I can't identify (yet), but it's the fireweed that makes me unreasonably happy every time I see it.

( - It's a UPG thing. Fireweed is a Loki flower for me. Also, it's very pretty.)

- I understand that there are a lot of people who disagree with me on this issue and think it's perfectly acceptable to blow their noses in public, but surely we can all agree that it's gross and unseemly when you do it two feet away from a person who's trying to check out your library books for you. Because ew.

- I made Mom watch the Thrilling Adventure Hour concert dvd with me. Which was so great, OMG. And she enjoyed it, so now I'm trying to convince her to listen to the podcast. Or at least the Sparks Nevada bits.

- Last night, I had a dream that I was walking through the woods looking at birds, and I was really excited, because they were all new birds and they stood really still so I could look at them, and I was going to get to add so many birds to my List of Birds I Have Seen. And then I woke up and I'm still unreasonably annoyed that none of them were real birds.

So, I am reading Summerland by Michael Chabon and enjoy it immensely. It has exciting fantasy worldbuilding, and baseball, and neat magical creatures, and Norse mythology, and Coyote*, and is set in Washington.

I am about a third of the way through and I have Discussion Questions to share with you:

1) Okay, this one isn't really a discussion question but it's something I'd like to know and can't quite find on the internet, so I thought I'd ask, in case any of you know. Did Coyote invent the net? Because I know that Loki did and I know that Trickster is often associated with fishing and I'm pretty sure that I once read that Coyote invented the fish weir, but I don't know enough about Coyote to know about the net. The book says that he did, but I'm not sure if that's not another place where we're conflating Coyote and Loki.

2) The baseball thing: is there any other sport that people write stories about the Magic Of? Because, off the top of my head, I can think of several stories about the Magic Of Baseball, but I can't think of any about, say, the Magic of Soccer or Basketball or Rugby or anything like that. Is it only baseball that people write those kinds of stories about? Is it only Americans who do that?

tricksters_queen, I think you'd probably really enjoy this one.




*It does do this all-Tricksters-are-the-same-Trickster thing, which is kinda weirding me out: Coyote is called Coyote and Changer, but looks like Loki when he's human and was married to a woman named Angry Betty (heh) and sometimes turns into a raven. Loki and Coyote and Raven all feel like very different people to me.

Things I enjoy:

The Better Myths blog. Because it is funny and who doesn't like comically retold myths. Also, dude tells stories pretty much the same way I tell stories, except with slightly more profanity. Also, he has yet to tell the fairytale with the woman made of cake, which is one of the two stories that apparently I always tell when asked to tell a story.

However! He has told the other one. Which is the Thor-in-a-dress story or, if we want to be fancy, the Þrymskviða. It is funny, so I am sharing it with you. (Also, it has a marvelously Lokean ending: "so the moral of the story is if at first you don't succeed, try crossdressing." I think we can all agree with that.)