(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

[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.