Mythology, Anyone?

Some of my personal favorite mythos are from Native American tribes. I'm especially fond of pretty much any story that has to do with Coyote, in all of his various interpretations.

I have written two stories inspired by Welsh mythology

I love Mythology. I listen to a lot of Joseph Campbell lectures. There's a lot more to his work than the Hero's Journey. That's basically just one of his lectures.

Native American, Indigenous American, and some lesser known European mythologies (Celtic, Welsh, etc.) are definitely a breath of fresh air for any mythology nut tired of the more widely covered pantheons.

I still have a soft spot for Greek myths however. My favorite is probably the 12 labours of Heracles, which I don't think has been covered nearly enough in any medium (maybe mostly in sculpture?). The 2014 Hercules movie barely dedicated it two minutes ? .

I wrote 1 story heavily based on celtic mythology. It has a sacred animals, cycles of 3, spirits, and all sorts of Celtic mythology fixtures. It was published in an anthology. People who like mythology like it a lot. Those not into mythology are like "meh." They don't get it.

Posted by: @pegeen

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I wrote 1 story heavily based on celtic mythology. It has a sacred animals, cycles of 3, spirits, and all sorts of Celtic mythology fixtures. It was published in an anthology. People who like mythology like it a lot. Those not into mythology are like "meh." They don't get it.

Nice.  I took greek and norse mythology as part of my classic civ classes back in college and loved it.  Always been that sword and sorcery kind of guy.  Not to mention I have a dragon tattoo, demon, angel, tree, harley, US/Canadian flag, and Didi (for you neil gaiman fans).  Maybe I have a tattoo obsession. Well, it has been a few years since I've gotten a new one.  Guess I should make an appointment.  haha

I'm working on a mythology piece now. A bit dry in the first draft, but it's coming along.

Coming in late on this thread, but I cannot encourage learning mythology enough for storytelling, especially non-Western myths. Most Western literature assumes you have some familiarity with European myth, mostly of the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian variety. Fantasy has also taken a lot from European folklore (fairies, anyone?), but there is a wide world that if brimming with stories you haven’t heard of. Studying another culture’s stories is a way to not only spark ideas, but give you an appreciation for the storytelling traditions of the world. 

Is there a short version? Or a movie? I feel I am incredibly lacking in this department, but I can't go reading the ancient texts, much as I'm sure I'd love what's in them.

@tj_knight honestly this material is so rich, and so old, there's literally no shortage of source material/re-works. if you want documentary style which is probably the most time efficient there are several on amazon prime, if you subscribe

Oh, I literally hadn't thought of that. At the very least a documentary or two would be good primers or overviews.  TV, who knew? 😊 

@tj_knight Movies and TV tend to favor Western stuff, like Greek and Roman myth, because that's what their target audiences are more familiar with. But CrashCourse on YouTube has a fun series that gives quick overviews of some world myths.

Youtube! I'll check Crashcourse out.

My current WIPs are based on a mix of mythology and paleocontact theory. I even use demons to mark my research pages... 😉 

Well, I’m way late to this party, but considering that mythology is timeless, let me just stroll on up in here like Loki in his lead up to roasting the entire Norse pantheon (see Lokasenna).

Looking into mythological source material completely wrecked any sort of approach or predispositions that I had beforehand. As such, I can’t recommend it enough. I just suggest that you pick a mythology that truly pulls at your curiosity. Because that’s the only way it will provoke you into asking the questions that no one else does.

For me, that Pandora’s box came in the form of Norse Mythology (yep, that was a Greek metaphor referring to a Norse experience), but I’ve since dabbled in other Slavic myths, and at present, I’m working Greek into one of my stories. I’ll tell you exactly why Norse wrecked my head space, but first you need to decide what purpose your mythological traipse will serve. Is it simply a personal interest? Or is it meant to be included in a story? If it’s meant to be included in a story, then it’s probably best to play on things that leverage the audience’s preexisting “knowledge.”

For example, your Loki will be a trickster god, the elves will have pointy ears, and the dwarves will be short, stocky, and speak with a Scottish accent.

Or… you could do something completely unhinged, throwing all of that out the window only to find yourself sitting right alongside me. Thanks, Papa Tolkien! I blame you! So, let me tell you how to arrive at my location. That way, should you want to arrive elsewhere, you will understand which direction not to take.

I sought to take Norse source material and construct it as a history that led up to the story that I was writing. This meant delving through the Codex Regius (King’s Book), the book containing the Poetic Eddas, the collection of Skaldic poetry where two poems encompass the entirety of the Norse creation myth—Voluspa & Vafthrudnismal.

Therein lies a problem that I don’t think people have asked after enough and was the first question that my curiosity had me bump up against. Now, both of these poems involve Odin. The first involves him resurrecting a volva, a seer, a witch. He then asks and learns about Ragnarok, but she first tells him about creation in order to establish her credibility.

After which, he departs as the only witness and presumably to report on what he’s learned. But why would he show up in a place, resurrect a dead person, and then ask her about something that he doesn’t yet have knowledge of? It’s a curious sort of motivation and logical sequencing, absent as it is.

The second is Odin in disguise. He visits a wise giant named Vafthrudnir. A riddle contest ensues. The stakes? Life and death. The conclusion? Odin cheats by posing a riddle that only he could know the answer to, which both tells the giant his identity while condemning his head to be befallen.

Now, with such dastardly deeds afoot, why should Loki have such a bad rap? He cut off Sif’s hair, sabotaged the work of dwarves who crafted Mjolnir, and kidnapped Idunn only to end up in the same book as Odin, his deeds less cruel but portrayed as less favorable?

But none of the aforementioned questions were the one I first bumped into. The one that tripped me up stems from this glossed over reputation that Odin seems to be carrying around. Should one look up his aliases, they’ll find over one hundred monikers, many of them translating into things like Murderer, Deceiver, Swift Tricker… It seems that Skaldic opinions were divided.

So the question that I keep returning to revolves around Odin’s POV. He resurrected a seer with questionable motives—he can’t ask someone a question about a topic that he’s not already aware of. Then, there’s Vafthrudnir, an exchange that could have conceivably taken place before the interview with the witch, but either way, the giant’s demise was intentional and was done through deceit. So, Odin departs the interview with the witch, its contents later recorded in the Codex Regius.

So, here’s my question:

What if Odin lied?

A lie seems like such a minor thing when one’s deeds ramp all the way up to premeditated murder. And what of Loki’s punishments? When, in all time, places, and cultures, have any form of humanoid punished a criminal by having said criminal run errands aimed at undoing their crime? There’s only one that I can think of. And that’s when a parent is correcting a child.

One might argue that that’s exactly what Odin is doing to Loki, his son, only, the Poetic Eddas suggest Loki is more of a brother, the two of them sharing a blood oath, where Thor always acts as an enforcer, who ensures Loki does what is expected of him.

As per Codex Regius, here’s what we know:

What the seer tells Odin is what gets recorded and portrayed as Ragnarok. He was the only one present, so there’s no one to dispute what he knows to be their world’s creation and its end. But we also know that Odin is prideful because in order to acquire runes, he hung himself from Yggdrasil (whose name means Odin’s horse), a sacrifice of himself to himself because he believed that there could be no greater sacrifice and no one more deserving of such a sacrifice.

Odin and Loki share an unspoken blood oath, but you’ll find no record of its details and will only encounter its reference akin to its emergence in Lokasenna—the poem where Loki crashes an Aesir-Vanir party and soon roasts everyone present. The only reason he’s allowed to stay is because he addresses Odin and references their oath where Odin apparently agreed that “no ale shall be poured lest it be brought to them both.”

So, Loki is ostracized among the other gods, who knowingly do some of the very same things that he does and then argue with him when Loki brings up those facts. Meanwhile, Odin sits back and sips on his wine—the mead of poetry, another thing acquired through his misdeeds.

Here’s my theory:

I think Odin resurrected the seer for an altogether different purpose. I also think that he wasn’t alone when he did so. At a minimum, I think Loki was there. And whatever they learned was cause enough for them to swear a blood oath, an effort to police one another in case one’s drunken tongue become a tad too loose.

What’s more, I think Loki’s a fall guy. Sure, he was running around undoing those misdeeds, but he was cast in two roles: the corrector and the perpetrator. And I’ve been led to believe all of this due to Odin’s POV. I think he’s the author. The one who penned the Codex Regius. The one who passed it on to Midgard. The one who portrayed Loki in his place so that humanity might fix the reputation which Skalds so heavily contrasting.

Here’s what broke my brain:

I was using the original source to craft the history for my story, but I was reading it with opposing viewpoints. On the one hand, I was assuming that the text was presented by an unreliable narrator. And on the other, I was reading from translators who were interpreting cultural metaphors (keenings) from a time that predated the source material by 400 years.

So, I had to read things while believing them enough to hold onto their details but not so much that I accepted any as fact and moved on. I had to contrast information, which ended up being the only reason I came to see Loki like the fall guy I believe him to be.

Here’s my problem:

Papa Tolkien so thoroughly installed an elf and dwarf blueprint that any opposing efforts are doomed to be diffused on a reader’s encounter with them. An elf shall have pointy ears and a dwarf will be short, stocky and Scottish. So, if one were to do something bizarre, say depict dwarves akin to vampires where their sun allergy turns them to stone rather than to ash, that effort would immediately be cast out. Because that’s not what everyone believes a dwarf to be despite it being exactly how they’re portrayed in the Eddas. Should you follow the formula, you’re derivative; should you contradict it, you’re simply bad at world building.

And so I’m happy to report that this is exactly where I sit—a terrible world builder. One who views Tolkien as a rival rather than a role model, a predecessor who’s charted for me an uphill course that will never truly know victory, one that is pathed by a traveler who will never truly accept defeat. Suddenly, I sympathize with Sisyphus, which is again a case where a metaphor is hanging around the wrong crowd.

All in all, I’m seated in a place where dwarves have a racial flaw that sees sunlight turn them to stone, where my elves aren’t a race but a label for something else entirely, where a Yggdrasil straddles the argument over which tree it is, being both an ash and a yew, and where Loki lies imprisoned simply because he was contradicting the narrative.

Now! Don’t you want to go pick apart some mythology of your own? When done thoroughly, it’s sure to leave you twisted this way and that! Then again, I’ve always been a bit of a masochists so perhaps I’m not the best one to offer advice.

I mean, who else would pick a fight with someone who’s shoulder they were riding upon? That seems doomed to fail… Then again, Zeus’s band triumphed over the titans.

Sigh.

I think I’m going to go poke at Greek for a while. It seems to desire my attention.