From Goodreads
Norse Mythology
Neil Gaiman
Combining Gaiman and Norse Mythology into an incredibly digestible history is like combining chocolate and peanut butter. It's just enhanced by the other.
The Norse myths are fascinating and just different enough to grab your attention. Loki is the obvious choice of the most interesting god, but there are great characters everywhere. Utgarda-Loki, THiazi and his daughter, Baldur and the master builder are fascinating characters in their own right.
I don't want to see things in ancient tales that aren't there, but it's hard not to see similarities that seem so universal that point my head into directions that are probably erroneous and definitely heretical. Apples, why are there always apples? Mass catastrophe with only two survivors left to repopulate the world always seem to come up. Ragnarok is an odd eschatological view, but Baldur plays a bit of a Christlike role and comes back to life at the end of time. The death and the resurrection of a god brings about a rebirth that has a familiarity to it. My question at this juncture is whether Baldur takes on a Christlike flavor because of my personal vantage point, because there is something foundational about the god who dies and his resurrection causing renewal to the religious experience of humanity or because the later writers have woven, consciously or not, Christian motifs into Pagan mythology? The similarities between all of humanity's myths and their variations of each other have always fascinated me.
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