What I’m Reading: My Nonfiction Odyssey
I’m currently reading The Norns in Old Norse Mythology (2011) by Karen Bek-Pederson.
While I’m also a fan of comics, sci-fi, and fantasy, I’m currently on a nonfiction streak. My favorites are books about religion and mythology, history, folklore, and anything a bit strange, but you’ll often find me prowling the stacks, searching for something new.
After noticing that a lot of the more obscure nonfiction books don’t have any good reviews on sites like Goodreads, I’ve started writing my own. Here on my blog, each book review is accompanied with a public domain or Creative Commons image that I felt complemented the book.
The Norns in Old Norse Mythology
In The Norns in Old Norse Mythology (2011), Karen Bek-Pederson explores the Norns, or nornir to use the Old Norse plural, who are fascinating but widely misunderstood female supernatural figures. Bek-Pederson reveals that the typical conception of the Norns as the Old Norse equivalent of the Graeco-Roman Fates, three sisters who spin and weave the threads of fate, has no real basis in Old Norse primary sources. By closely examining Old Norse texts, which she notes are “gloriously inconsistent,” Bek-Pederson reveals the reality of the Norns in all their murky complexity (199)…
The Sacred Paw: The Bear in Nature, Myth, and Literature
The Sacred Paw: The Bear in Nature, Myth, and Literature (1985) by Paul Shepard and Barry Sanders includes a lot of interesting details about bear ecology, folklore, and religion, but you have to slog through a nonsensical overarching argument in order to gather them. The central chapter of The Sacred Paw concerns ceremonies of the “slain bear,” a set of similar rituals enacted by hunting peoples across the northern circumpolar region…
The Goddess Anat in Ugaritic Myth
Neal H. Walls’s The Goddess Anat in Ugaritic Myth (1992) provides a thorough and thoughtful, if not easy to read, analysis of the mythological character of the Ugaritic goddess Anat. Anat was a goddess in the pantheon of Ugarit, a Bronze Age city in what is now northern Syria, from which a corpus of cuneiform texts was discovered in 1928. Anat is an independent and headstrong young warrior woman who hacks men to pieces and wears their hands and heads…
Religion and Its Monsters
In Religion and Its Monsters (2002), Timothy K. Beal explores the relationship between horror and Judeo-Christian religion. The opening chapters seem to promise a discussion of theological horror. Beal fulfills this promise in his chilling examination of theological horror in the Book of Job. But for me, the book too soon strays from its most interesting themes…
Dionysos Slain
Dionysos Slain (1979) by Marcel Detienne concerns the enigmatic Orphic myth in which Titans slaughter and consume the child god Dionysos. However, you have to power through the first half of the book before you actually get any discussion of this fascinating myth, although I found that the analysis of the myth and its role in a religious movement that challenged the Ancient Greek state system of sacrifice was worth the wait…
The Edge of Memory: Ancient Stories, Oral Tradition, and the Post-Glacial World
In The Edge of Memory (2018), Patrick Nunn argues that humans have preserved within their oral traditions memories of past events that occurred more than 7,000 years ago. Despite the seeming outlandishness of the claim—how could humans pass down specific information accurately for hundreds of generations when most of us barely know who are great-grandparents even are?—there is a narrow area of his evidence that seems convincing…