(no subject)

[rivka]

Anyone up on their Norse mythology and willing to answer some questions for Alex? We read a story about Loki and Baldur, and she has questions I don't know the answers to.

Here are her questions:
If Baldur was the god of light, was it dark all the time after he was killed?
Why did Loki want to kill Baldur?
Why was Loki so mean?

Edited to add: If you want to have a try at some more of her questions that are stumping me this morning, here you go:

Why did the Romans want to have more money and power than other people?

and

Did Mr. McCain disagree with Jesus?

I swear to God I did nothing to elicit that last comparison.

Comments

[marnanel.livejournal.com]

Wdid the Romans

Is that "Did the Romans..." or "Why did the Romans..."?

[zingerella.livejournal.com]

Wdid the Romans want to have more money and power than other people?

The simplest answer I can think of (and it's not a great one, in terms of accuracy) is that in Rome, if a person had a lot of land, they could live more comfortably. They had more food, and more money, and more time to spend having fun. So most Romans wanted land. But Rome is not very big, and the more people wanted land, the less land there was for each person. So they looked at other places, and saw land, and tried to set up farms in those places. But the people in those places were often using the land already, and didn't want the Romans to use it.

The didn't want money and power as much as they wanted land.

(okay, they also wanted to export the Pax Romana, and believed it was their destiny to do so, blah blah blah, I think my answer might work for a four-year-old, whereas the more complicated, accurate answer probably wouldn't)

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Thanks! This is great. I read it to Alex.

Alex: Why wasn't Rome very big?
Me: It was big, but a lot of people wanted to live there. More people than would fit.
Alex: Then why didn't they just build apartments?

Hee. That's my city child.

[zingerella.livejournal.com]

They DID build apartments. They didn't know how to build them much more than five floors, and if you have lots of apartments all over the land, you can't use the same land for farms. If you don't have farms, then you have no food! So, in order to grow food for the people who lived in apartments, some people needed to have farms. The more apartments you have in Rome, the more farms you need elsewhere.

Also, the Roman apartments had lots of problems, so people didn't want to live in them. The Romans knew how to get water to the apartment buildings, but not how to make it flow to the top floors. Sometimes the apartment buildings got too big, and just fell down, "WHOOSH CRASH!" We're much better at building apartments now.

[abbylee]

I like these kind of history lessons. :D

[timill]

Insulae. References here: http://www.historyforkids.org/learn/romans/architecture/insulae.htm

[namedphoenix.livejournal.com]

THAT is precious!

[columbina.livejournal.com]

This is an actual serious answer and I'm pretty sure your tongue was in cheek but here you go anyway. You decide how to extract this for Alex :)

Loki might not have actually been a god. His place in Norse mythology is more like a nature spirit and he may have been a jotun, which is usually considered to be a "giant" but is also sort of like an "elemental." Basically, Loki is there to show the capriciousness of nature. He's like Puck. Before the Balder episode, he was as much an assistant to the gods as an antagonist.

The Balder business was apparently him trying to puncture the hubris of the gods (another standard role in these stories) - remember, the idea was that nothing could hurt Balder, so Loki went out and found the one thing that could, just to make a point - but that went too far and the other gods never forgave him. From then on he's strictly Snidely Whiplash.

As for Balder, I'd say that being the god of light doesn't necessarily mean the sun stopped rising every morning after he died. Besides, you know how gods are. They never stay dead.

[columbina.livejournal.com]

Adding: But it's possible that Balder's death is a season-progression myth, so maybe when he dies it becomes winter and then when he is reborn and the whole thing starts over again it becomes spring.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

No, I did want real answers. I don't know how I'm going to translate this for her, but it helps me to understand. Thanks.

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

(Friendslist skimming; what arresting questions!)

A lot of Norse mythology can be interpreted as describing a cyclical event on some scale (but not only as that). Show the child information about how, the farther north one goes, the longer the summer days are and the shorter the summer nights. In winter, the nights are very long and the days are very short. In the places where the Norse myths developed, there is hardly any night for several months around midsummer; in the winter, the sun hardly rises and it is dark and cold. So Balder's death can be taken to describe the yearly cycle of light and dark, and it is reenacted every year. So yes, there is a place where it is dark all the time after Balder's death---and then he returns, and reigns for a while. It might be good to talk about this story in conjunction with Persephone's story.

Balder's death is said to be a harbinger of Ragnarok, and one way (again, there are many ways) of reading Norse mythology is to understand that Ragnarok has already happened and we live afterward. The god-stories we know are about a world that vanished with that apocalypse.

Loki is outside the hierarchy of the Norse gods and beyond their control. He's always acting as a check, representing the greater order, the laws of nature, and enforcing them on the gods. The gods are bound by rules and laws, but Loki flows around those and destabilizes things that are unnaturally stable. He isn't good or evil: he has different priorities. With his tricks undermining the structures that the gods have imposed on the world, Loki might be the force of natural order overwhelming those artificial boundaries and making possible the existence of the world we know.

[columbina.livejournal.com]

This is what I would have said if I could have said it that well.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much. This is really helpful. I know almost nothing about Norse culture or mythology - before Alex found these stories in her "Myths of Many Cultures" book, the only exposure I'd had was filtered down through other people's reinterpretations, in various fantasy novels. I knew I was seriously lacking in context.

What my post didn't convey, but is part of the context for the questions, is that Alex was literally sobbing about Baldur's death. Poor kid.

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

Norse mythology is hard-eyed. There are some cute stories (Thor, Thialfi, and Loki visiting Jotunheim is kid-friendly), but a lot of the underlying messages resolve to "The Rules Are The Rules"---society's rules, the fundamental rules binding the gods, the laws of nature---and you cannot escape their working (weird's way).

Balder's fate is similar to that of Achilles, whose mother also failed to completely protect him. We're fallible; we can't shelter those we love from every harm possible. Not even a goddess can think of everything!

Talking more about seasonal deities like Persephone, Osiris, et al., might be helpful. These stories are invented again and again because the sun always comes back, spring always comes, and winter (or the dry season) is necessary.

[kymmz.livejournal.com]

When she's a little older, she'll love Eight Days of Luke by Diana Wynne Jones! Be sure you get an edition with the Norse info at the end, not all versions have it.

[ailsaek.livejournal.com]

Yes, it's dark after Balder dies, right up until springtime (winter in the artic circle).

P.S. Loki is the king of Fiendishly Clever Plans, but he doesn't think them through very well. Give him a challenge, he'll solve it. That perhaps it shouldn't have been solved is someone else's problem.

[nolly.livejournal.com]

The McCain question is too big...I'd have to go with a "why do you ask"/"what do you think?" response to try to narrow the scope -- is there a particular saying/teaching she associates with jesus that McCain may have violated? Also, is she ready for the concept of "Sometimes people don't agree on what someone means by something they say"?

[rivka.livejournal.com]

To understand that question, you do need the backstory leading up to it. She's been fascinated with McCain lately for some obscure reason, and has had a lot of questions for us about what McCain thinks that we disagree with. One or two answers alone don't satisfy her. She wants to know what else, what else.

So this morning, she had a string of questions about Romans, Jesus, and the Crucifixion, building on some things we'd told her before. It culminated in this conversation:

Alex: Did some people who lived where Jesus did want him to be the kind of king who lives in a castle and rules people?
Me: Yes, I think some people did.
Alex: Did Jesus want that?
Me: No, Jesus was more interested in teaching people a better way of living.
Alex: Like what did he say?
Me: Like, he said that people should sell everything they have and give it to poor people. And he said that you should love everyone, and be kind and loving to people even if they're your enemies.
Alex: Does Mr. McCain disagree with Jesus?
Me: That's... a really complicated question.
Alex: I think he did.

So she was specifically referring to the "love your enemies" doctrine, and contrasting it in her mind with what we had told her about Mr. McCain and his propensity for war. Which... yeah, I can certainly see where she was coming from with that.

I wish she didn't connect the dots quite so clearly.

[journeywoman.livejournal.com]

That's pretty interesting. I wonder what Mr. McCain's response would be, when presented with that reasoning.

For the Romans question, I generally explain that some people like to have more money and more stuff. Like how the boy sometimes wants more toys than he can actively play with, just so others can't have them. I'm sure the Romans dressed it up with prettier reasoning (like wanting to help the poor ignorant savages slavering beyond Hadrian's Wall) but I wouldn't be surprised if that was the base impulse, human nature being what it is.

[piqueen.livejournal.com]

I suppose that she's too young for the crusades and jihad etc?

[curiousangel.livejournal.com]

We should probably work on giving her a little more nuance, while keeping in mind that she's only four. I'm not ready to discuss moneychangers in the Temple, or the notion of hell (especially given our recent escapades with Polly), but I don't want her to get a whitewashed vision of Christianity, either.

It's going to be complicated, and I don't really want to go too fast -- I want her to have fond memories of the Jesus of "The Friendly Beasts". Still, I want her to get a grip on why her father moved away from Christianity, and why so many of the people we go to church with also wouldn't identify as Christian. She'll make up her own mind soon enough, but I don't want to set her up for a falsely-easy choice.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

Me: Like, he said that people should sell everything they have and give it to poor people. And he said that you should love everyone, and be kind and loving to people even if they're your enemies.
Alex: Does Mr. McCain disagree with Jesus?
Me: That's... a really complicated question.
Alex: I think he did.

If you asked Mr. McCain if he agrees with Jesus, he would probably say yes. Some of what Jesus taught can be very hard to do, and it's especially hard to be kind to your enemies when you're feeling angry at them or scared of them. We don't know if Mr. McCain disagrees with Jesus, or if he agrees with Jesus and wants to fight a war anyhow because he's angry and scared.

That can lead you to "judge not, lest you be judged," or to considering other situations where a reason to break the rule doesn't imply the rule is generally wrong. (Maybe something more familiar than war, like speeding or stealing.)

[laurarey.livejournal.com]

I've always thought of Loki as a chaos generator. In the Judeo/Christian stories, chaos always precedes creation. So perhaps to a 4 year old, Loki is the "god" who dumps all the crayons out of the box thus giving us the chance to color and create new art....and then a chance to re-organize the box of crayons again.

[jazzfish]

Why did Loki want to kill Baldur?

Envy, of Baldr's beauty and of all the attention Baldr was getting from the other Aesir.

[beckyzoole.livejournal.com]

It's not so much that Loki is mean, as that he's Nature. Does she know the song "The Circle of Life", and know what it means? In a way, Loki is the personification of the circle of life. He is the tiny virus that kills the mighty warrior, he is the accident of birth that puts a sickly coward on the throne, he is the earthquake that wipes out whole villages in seconds.

Loki is not bad or mean, anymore than an earthquake is. It is just... one of those things. Something that happens. Something we can neither prevent nor precipitate by our own actions.

Loki represents the chaos that leads to the creativity of rebuilding, the presence of death that makes room for new life.

[timill]

The Romans wanted to live in safety and to control their own sources of food and water. Initially, they were one tribe among many with the same ambitions living in that part of Italy - see Lars Porsena and the Capitoline Geese for examples of others trying to invade Rome.

In the end, they were the successful ones. Most of the peoples they conquered had annoyed them by raiding into existing Roman territory, and conquering them was one way to make them stop. Conquest also propped up the treasury in general by providing a one-off injection of loot and new subjects for taxation.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Crying for Baldur the bright and beautiful is entirely appropriate.

I'll do her a Loki-POV story at the appropriate level if you like, but not this morning because I have to catch a train.

Meanwhile, if she wants more Norse stuff she might like my Ragnarok Song. You may know the tune as "Ants go marching". Good as Jordan River any day...

[rivka.livejournal.com]

I think that would be marvelous. Thank you. Alex is a little worried that it will be too scary, but she does want a Loki story, so I told her I would pass her concern along.

[clawfoot.livejournal.com]

If Baldur was the god of light, was it dark all the time after he died?
No. The Norse gods weren't embodiments of their elements like the Roman or Greek gods were (the seasons caused by Demeter mourning for her daughter, for example); they were just powerful beings who claimed stuff they wanted to be patrons of. Ull was the god of skiing, for crying out loud. He neither invented it nor embodied it (it wouldn't have disappeared if he'd died or were imprisoned). He just liked it a lot. Same with Sif (swords), Frey (harvest), Forseti (poetry and song) and the rest of them.
Why did Loki want to kill Baldur?
I'm not really sure. So far as I can tell, it's because everyone loved Baldur, deeply and genuinely, for no reason that Loki could see. Baldur was everyone's favourite, especially the humans'.
Why was Loki so mean?
Because Odin and the other gods were dicks. Take the story of the building of Asgard for example: Odin and the gods wanted a wall built around it bigger and better than any wall ever, but either didn't know how to build it themselves or couldn't be arsed to stoop to manual labour. So they hired a giant to do it. This giant promised to build the wall in some small time frame, like a week or something (I can't remember the actual details). The gods didn't believe him, and said that if he finished it, they'd pay him double what they'd promised. But if he failed, he wouldn't get paid anything. The giant accepted these terms. The giant also had a magnificent horse that did a lot of the work, and with this horse's help, it looked like he was going to finish in time. So Odin came to Loki and asked him to distract the horse. Loki took the form of a beautiful mare and "distracted" the horse long enough that the giant went overtime (and, incidentally, Loki later gave birth to Odin's 8-legged horse Slepnir). The giant accused the gods of cheating and demanded his orignial price for finishing the wall. Instead of paying him, Odin killed him. See? Dicks. This is why Loki is a dick, too -- but he does so in the classic trickster way, to expose hypocrisy and take the gods down a peg or to for their faults (hence why he cut of Sif's hair -- she was incredibly vain over it).

Hope it's not too late....

[txanne.livejournal.com]

My dad the history professor says, "Because it was there." His second thought was that before Rome become OMG ROME, they got beat up by all and sundry, and so in the way of bullied children, they grew up to become bullies. (They hit the other guy back first, IOW.) Also, empires are expensive. (He also says that Respighi's Pines of Rome is one of the best explanations of Roman history he's ever come across. It comes out of nowhere, gets really big, and then tails off into nothingness.)