Likes Vikings.

Transcript context

…What is the current novel you’re writing? Vikings. Viking metaphysics. This one is finally easy to describe. I really love Vikings. This is a Viking myth and history book, and it looks at a number of questions. But a big one that it looks at is, if the Viking gods are real and only the Viking gods are real — this is the cosmos that we’re in, the Viking cosmos, but history is real history — why did they decide to let the worship of them die out and be displaced by other religions? Why would that be allowed to occur in a world in which they are the actual governing power? The other thing that’s really fun with it is that there’s a lot of really great new, recent research on Viking myth. We’re getting to understand the metaphysics a lot better. We’re translating a lot of the older canon. We’re realizing that some of the works that were kicked out of the canon in the 19th century and believed to be spurious are not spurious, and that some of the ones we kept in are spurious that weren’t. So, while there’s tons of science fiction and fantasy that already draws on Viking myth, there’s very little of it that draws on the very latest in Viking myth. And I’m excited to dive into a lot of that material, which I have access to just because I’m a scholar. This is one of the big problems with paywalls, because all of this is in journals that are behind paywalls or the ridiculous Oxford annotated Poetic Edda. Three volumes, $300 a volume. No wonder nobody has this book. It’s great. It’s full of wonderful materials. I wish that I could give copies of it to every science fiction writer and fantasy writer that’s a friend of mine who likes this stuff so that they could use it in their things. But good grief, nobody can afford to spend a thousand dollars on the Oxford annotated Poetic Edda. I only have it because I did a bunch of favors for Oxford editors until they gave me store credit. I’m all for what you’re doing, and your podcaster would say that. But what do your colleagues think, if I may ask?…

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