I have read the book this is from exactly one million three times.
This is a picture of Loki, the trickster god.
He is contemplating his children and probably regretting his decision to have children with as many ponies and giants as he did.
So when I'm stressed these days I like regress to childhood/adolescence and consume all the same things I did when I was younger. In this case, my shiny copy of D'Aulaire's Book of Norse Myths which has an introduction by Michael Chabon so I can pretend it's a super sophisticated thing to do.
(YES I'm supposed to be studying for a D and C test right now that is why blogging is so urgent.)
I was going to make a larger point about how I kind of like the Norse mythos more than the Greek one because the gods are in fact mortal, and they totally know how their lives are going to end--which is bloodily and terribly and mostly at the hands of each other, which you think would make things awkward but they all deal with it pretty well it seems.
And then I was going to relate it to myself and how I cannot even make decisions right now but then I realized THAT IS SO BORING THE MOST BORING.
Suffice to say--I'm almost afraid to write this because it might jinx it, but I heard back from that job I interviewed with today. The HR person said I did really well in my interviews and she's forwarded my info to the official recruiters of the various cities to see if there's demand for me.
I should hear back within the next week.
Of course that is all contingent on me passing this freaking test and so graduating, so I'm gonna get back to studying/weeping with boredom.
Mostly weeping.
Isn't the Norse pantheon based on the Greek one, though? I heard something about Thor being the northern version of Zeus; apparently, when one culture conquers another, the gods of their myths would conquer the other culture's gods too. Supposedly that's why Cronus and the Titans were thrown into the pits of Tartarus.
ReplyDeleteNo, the Scandinavians had their own thing going. There are very similar archetypes that tend to be anthropomorphized as gods, so there are similarities.
ReplyDeleteAlso, as far as I know, the Greeks never conquered Scandinavia.
What did happen was that the Scandinavians never really wrote their stuff down so mostly we rely on like one Christian monk's writings to know about the Norse stuff. So there's this decided and silly Christian moral overlay on the stories of a culture that did not share those morals.
YES I KNOW ALL OF THESE THINGS OFF THE TOP OF MY HEAD.
ReplyDeleteHeh, I know the Greeks never conquered the Norse, but I wonder if the Norse conquered a Greek colony or two. And it's pretty cool that you know all this stuff--it's a good thing to be geeky about.
ReplyDeletewell, most of d'Aulaire's books are on my kids' home school (hard core) literature lists, so other than the fact that they're mostly grade 1 or 2 level on the (hard core) lists, you're right to feel somewhat sophisticated reading them. I haven't!
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