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.
Ritual Texts for the Afterlife: Orpheus and the Bacchic Gold Tablets
Ritual Texts for the Afterlife: Orpheus and the Bacchic Gold Tablets (2013) by Fritz Graf and Sarah Iles Johnston provides a comprehensive analysis of a fascinating group of texts. If you’re interested in ancient religion, chances are you’ve come across a reference to the Orphic gold tablets, perhaps described as an enigmatic remnant of a mystery religion or even a lost precursor to Christian concepts of salvation. Graf and Johnston’s study removes the veil of mystery and considers these tablets in a serious, grounded manner, without the unwarranted grandiosity of claiming they are the key to ancient Greek religion or the origin point of Christianity…
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 Lost Beliefs of Northern Europe
The Lost Beliefs of Northern Europe by Hilda Ellis Davidson (1993) does contain a lot of interesting information, but it is not always packaged in an easy to follow way. Focusing largely on Scandinavian, Icelandic, and Celtic peoples, but also touching on the Germanic, Davidson surveys the archaeological, literary, and folkloric evidence…