Norse Mythology ~ Neil Gaiman

The theme for February is faith and religion and I thought it would be the perfect excuse to finally get around to reading Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology. It’s been sat on my shelf for months, slowly gathering dust. It’s not been a priority read because I thought I knew enough about Norse mythology that it would be a fun, easy read told with a new voice. Turns out; I am not as familiar with Norse mythology as I thought I was.

In this book, Neil Gaiman retells several stories from Norse mythology in a series of short stories. Most of the characters, or ‘players’ as Gaiman calls them in his introductory story, were characters I knew a little about. Although I am a fan of Marvel, I knew their version of Thor and Loki etc. were not entirely accurate. I somehow managed to not constantly compare these stories to the ones I already knew and thus, enjoyed the retellings a lot more.

I love Gaiman’s writing and how he tells stories, but these short stories took me a while to wrap my head around the style. In this book, Gaiman writes the stories as if they have been transcribed. Whereas, if they were written rather than spoken, there may have been more embellishments when setting the scene or describing the characters. After the first couple of stories, I began to really enjoy this way of telling a story as it’s so different from what I usually read.

The stories themselves are surprisingly stupid. This has nothing to do with Gaiman’s retelling, just the stories themselves. All these stories, like with Greek mythology, seem to only happen because one of the gods did something stupid because of their hubris or because they wanted to mess with the other gods. It is amusing how many situations Thor especially gets himself into because he believes himself better than others or Loki tries to con his way out of a situation and makes everything worse. It’s hard to believe that these characters were feared and revered by the Vikings, who in my head are big, tough and no-nonsense.

I wasn’t expecting these stories to be as lighthearted as they were and I verily enjoyed reading them. I think I’ll be keeping an eye out for more mythological retellings. Overall, I give Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman four stars.

C🌙