Gods are very serious business

[bloodygranuaile]

 Some days, you're tired and unproductive and don't want to do any of the things you're supposed to do that day, and so you pick up books based on criteria like "What is short and looks non-taxing" and that's when it turns out that it's good to have gently wacky things like Norse Mythology... According to Uncle Einar in your TBR pile. I'd borrowed it from Bobby even though he had substantial criticisms of it, which means it was a strong contender for just staying in the TBR pile forever while I worked my way through things people had only said good stuff about, but most of those are longer and don't tell stories I already know. 

 

Who is Uncle Einar? I have absolutely no idea. Presumably the author's uncle. I don't know if he's real or fictional. He is a framing device, retelling old Norse myths--most of which I remember from my own childhood, from D'Aulaires' Book of Norse Myths and Mary Pope Osborne's Favorite Norse Myths--in a breezy, spoken sort of way, full of second-person asides to the children and with every "um" and "heh" transcribed. The stories are modernized in the way that medieval retellings were "modernized" from their earlier versions, which rarely works as well when modern authors try to do the same thing, because for modern audiences, modernity is boring and not fantastical; we already live here. I have no idea why medieval audiences liked that stuff so much. Some of the results are humorous; some border on twee. Actually, scratch that. It's definitely twee. I ended up with the sense that, while this book was quick and easy and somewhat amusing to read, it must have been a blast to write, especially considering the author is a Ph.D. in Norse mythology and so presumably has spent a good deal of time being up to her eyeballs in the real old-timey stuff and might want to play around with mixing together her worlds and seeing what came up. And I will grant that the result is much more accessible to a modern lay reader than slogging through the Eddas, which is why I spent today reading this book and not my copy of The Sagas of Icelanders. 

 

While this book is framed as being told to children, our possibly fictional Uncle Einar seems willing to tell the children some stories that didn't quite make it into any of the myth anthologies that I was allowed to read in elementary school, although he is necessarily vague on the details. 

 

Even though this is a book that contains such notions as Heimdall working for the FBI, even though the FBI is a US-specific entity, I still ended up doing fact-checking on certain claims in order to determine what was based in myth and what was made up for this book. I was unable to corroborate the claim that Heimdall was the god of editors; as best I can tell, this is a joke. I was also thrown for a bit when Freya's cats were given the names Puff and Fluff; I had been under the impression they were named Bygul and Trjegul (Bee-gold and Tree-gold, i.e., Honey and Amber), but it turns out that these names were only bestowed upon said cats in 1955 by the author Diana Paxson. How did I ever survive being an insufferable nerd before Google?

 

I don't entirely know if I'd recommend it to someone unless they were making some pretty specific asks, like "I want to read a story in which Loki turns into a mare and gets knocked up, but also there are jokes about union regulations." 

Comments

[cupcake_goth]

The only Uncle Einar I'm familiar with is the wonderful winged man from Ray Bradbury stories. I am willing to bet this is not the same Uncle Einar. :D

[bloodygranuaile]

It may be a reference or an homage of some sort, but it does not appear to be the same person, or else the author has left out some very important stuff!