Norse mythology – She Reads Novels

I’ve read a lot of Greek mythology retellings but only one or two Norse ones, so I was curious about Sally Magnusson’s most recent novel, The Shapeshifter’s Daughter, described as a reimagining of the story of Hel of the Underworld. I’ve read all of Magnusson’s previous books and mostly enjoyed them; I hoped this would be another good one!

Hel is one of the three children of the Norse god Loki (the shapeshifter of the title) and Angrboda, a frost giant. She grows up in Utgard – a world on the peripheries of Asgard, home of the gods, and Mitgard, land of the humans – where she lives happily with her brother and sister, a wolf and a serpent, until Odin sends his gods to hunt them down and bring them to him. Hel finds herself sent by Odin to rule over the icy realm of Niflheim, where she welcomes the souls of the dead into the underworld – until one day she is drawn back to the surface by the memory of one of the dead she has guided.

Meanwhile, in the modern day, we meet Helen Firth, a woman in her fifties who has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Helen has led a lonely, troubled life since the death of her father when she was a teenager. Believing that nobody cares about her, she decides to return to Orkney, her childhood home, so she can die on her own terms. However, she hadn’t expected to be reacquainted with an old friend, Thorfinn Coffin, who reminds her that maybe she’s not completely alone in the world after all.

Not only do our two main characters have similar names, their stories also mirror each other in several other ways and eventually begin to intersect. I couldn’t help thinking, though, that Helen’s story on its own would have been enough to form a compelling novel. Her life has clearly been a sad and isolated one, so I found her relationship with Thorfinn very moving, as well as bittersweet coming when she knows she only has a short time left to live. Magnusson writes quite sensitively on the topics of loneliness, bereavement and healing and I was completely drawn into Helen’s sections of the novel.

The Norse myth parts of the book were much harder for me to connect with. Hel, Loki and the others didn’t seem ‘real’ and I felt that I just watching their story unfold from a distance. I had similar feelings about A.S. Byatt’s Ragnarok (based on the same myths) and I remember in her author’s note Byatt said that characters in myths don’t have personalities the way characters in novels do – they only have attributes. Maybe that’s what Magnusson was trying to show here as well, but if so it didn’t really work for me and I would have been happy just to read a whole book about Helen and Thorfinn!

I’ll be interested to see what Sally Magnusson writes next, as her books so far have covered such a range of different subjects – although always with a Scottish or Nordic connection. And if you can recommend any good Norse myth retellings, I’d love to hear about them!

In Ragnarok, A.S. Byatt looks at Norse mythology from the perspective of a little girl (referred to as simply ‘the thin child’) who has been evacuated to the countryside during World War II. When the thin child receives a book called Asgard and the Gods, she is fascinated by the myths it contains, including Ragnarok, the story of ‘the end of the gods’. She reads the book over and over again and the myths help to sustain her throughout the war.

In the first half of the book we are introduced to some of the important characters from Norse myth, including the gods Odin, Loki (the thin child’s favourite) and Baldur, Fenrir the wolf and Jörmungandr, the serpent who wraps herself around the world. Byatt uses wonderful, rich prose to bring all of these characters to life and there are some beautiful descriptions of nature and the environment too – I particularly loved reading about Yggdrasil, the World Tree, and Rándrasill, the Sea Tree. Later in the book, when the destruction of the world begins, there are some equally vivid and well written descriptions of how all of these things were destroyed, and it’s difficult to read Ragnarok without noticing some parallels with the world we live in today.

Throughout the book Byatt moves back and forth between the myths and the framing story of the thin child, showing us how various parts of the myths relate to the child’s own life in wartime Britain, how she makes comparisons between Norse myth and stories from the Bible, and how the myths help her to cope while her father is away fighting in the war. When the child is not reading Asgard and the Gods she’s busy discovering the beauty of the world around her, learning the names of the flowers and trees that surround her new home.

In her author’s note at the end of the book, Byatt tells us why she chose to write about Ragnarok, and it seems that the thin child’s story was very autobiographical, which I had already guessed. She also explains the differences between myths and fairy tales and this was interesting to me because I’m not sure I would have been able to define the differences myself! According to Byatt, characters in myth only have attributes and not personalities the way characters in fairy tales do. This means we don’t actually get to experience the emotions and feelings of the gods in Ragnarok; instead the myths are told in a straightforward, factual style.

I am definitely not an expert on mythology and before I started this book I only knew a few of the basic facts of Norse myth. Although this is just a short book, it contains a huge amount of information, most of which was completely new to me, and I did feel slightly overwhelmed but overall I would say it’s an excellent introduction to Norse mythology. I could really feel the enthusiasm of the thin child (and Byatt herself) for the myths she was reading and by the time I’d finished the book I felt some of that enthusiasm too.

This book was a fascinating read and I would recommend it as a good starting point for other people who are also new to Norse myth, but if you already have a good knowledge of the myths I’m sure you’ll enjoy discovering them again through the thin child’s eyes.

I received a copy of Ragnarok through Netgalley