Norse Quotes

Loki'd!

If you want to write a fantasy story with Norse gods, sentient robots, and telepathic dinosaurs, you can do just that. Want to throw in a vampire and a lesbian unicorn while you're at it? Go ahead. Nothing's off limits. But the endless possibility of the genre is a trap. It's easy to get distracted by the glittering props available to you and forget what you're supposed to be doing: telling a good story. Don't get me wrong, magic is cool. But a nervous mother singing to her child at night while something moves quietly through the dark outside her house? That's a story. Handled properly, it's more dramatic than any apocalypse or goblin army could ever be.

Because,” said Thor, “when something goes wrong, the first thing I always think is, it is Loki’s fault. It saves a lot of time.

He said nothing: seldom do those who are silent make mistakes.

The Norse myths are the myths of a chilly place, with long, long winter nights and endless summer days, myths of a people who did not entirely trust or even like their gods, although they respected and feared them.

Loki was not evil, although he was certainly not a force for good. Loki was . . . complicated.

Of course it was Loki. It's always Loki.

Sometimes, looking at the many books I have at home, I feel I shall die before I come to the end of them, yet I cannot resist the temptation of buying new books. Whenever I walk into a bookstore and find a book on one of my hobbies — for example, Old English or Old Norse poetry — I say to myself, “What a pity I can’t buy that book, for I already have a copy at home.

How did you learn all this?" Vic sighed. "See, while you spend all your time making out with Balthazar, and Raquel stays holed up with her art projects, and Ranulf's off studying his Norse myths again, i do something else. Something crazy. Something strange. I call it 'talking to other people.' Through this miraculous process, I am sometimes able to learn facts about two or three other human beings in a single day. Scientists plan to study my method." ~Vic

I’m not happy about any of this,” said Thor. “I’m going to kill somebody soon, just to relieve the tension. You’ll see.

There is no end. It is simply the end of the old times, Loki, and the beginning of the new times. Rebirth always follows death.

Fair enough,” said Thor. “What’s the price?” “Freya’s hand in marriage.” “He just wants her hand?” asked Thor hopefully. She had two hands, after all, and might be persuaded to give up one of them without too much of an argument. Tyr had, after all. “All of her,” said Loki. “He wants to marry her.” “Oh,” said Thor. “She won't like that.

That was the thing about Loki. You resented him even when you were at your most grateful, and you were grateful to him even when you hated him the most.

Rebirth always follows death.

There were things Thor did when something went wrong. The first thing he did was ask himself if what had happened was Loki’s fault. Thor pondered. He did not believe that even Loki would have dared to steal his hammer. So he did the next thing he did when something went wrong, and he went to ask Loki for advice.

Well, that's history for you, folks. Unfair, untrue and for the most part written by folk who weren't even there.

It is a long story, and it does no credit to anyone: there is murder in it, and trickery, lies and foolishness, seduction and pursuit. Listen.

I know there's no way I can convince you this is not one of their tricks, but I don't care, I am me. My name is Valerie, I don't think I'll live much longer and I wanted to tell someone about my life. This is the only autobiography ill ever write, and god, I'm writing it on toilet paper. I was born in Nottingham in 1985, I don't remember much of those early years, but I do remember the rain. My grandmother owned a farm in Tuttlebrook, and she use to tell me that god was in the rain. I passed my 11th lesson into girl's grammar; it was at school that I met my first girlfriend, her name was Sara. It was her wrists. They were beautiful. I thought we would love each other forever. I remember our teacher telling us that is was an adolescent phase people outgrew. Sara did, I didn't. In 2002 I fell in love with a girl named Christina. That year I came out to my parents. I couldn't have done it without Chris holding my hand. My father wouldn't look at me, he told me to go and never come back. My mother said nothing. But I had only told them the truth, was that so selfish? Our integrity sells for so little, but it is all we really have. It is the very last inch of us, but within that inch, we are free. I'd always known what I wanted to do with my life, and in 2015 I starred in my first film, "The Salt Flats". It was the most important role of my life, not because of my career, but because that was how I met Ruth. The first time we kissed, I knew I never wanted to kiss any other lips but hers again. We moved to a small flat in London together. She grew Scarlet Carsons for me in our window box, and our place always smelled of roses. Those were there best years of my life. But America's war grew worse, and worse. And eventually came to London. After that there were no roses anymore. Not for anyone. I remember how the meaning of words began to change. How unfamiliar words like collateral and rendition became frightening. While things like Norse Fire and The Articles of Allegiance became powerful, I remember how different became dangerous. I still don't understand it, why they hate us so much. They took Ruth while she was out buying food. I've never cried so hard in my life. It wasn't long till they came for me.It seems strange that my life should end in such a terrible place, but for three years, I had roses, and apologized to no one. I shall die here. Every inch of me shall perish. Every inch, but one. An Inch, it is small and it is fragile, but it is the only thing the world worth having. We must never lose it or give it away. We must never let them take it from us. I hope that whoever you are, you escape this place. I hope that the world turns and that things get better. But what I hope most of all is that you understand what I mean when I tell you that even though I do not know you, and even though I may never meet you, laugh with you, cry with you, or kiss you. I love you. With all my heart, I love you. -Valerie

On my life, Magnus, I swear this is the truth: your father is a Norse god. Now, hurry. We're in a twenty- minute parking spot.

But. My hammer," said Thor. "Shut up, Thor," said Loki

And the game begins anew.

Moderately wise each one should be, Not overwise, for a wise man's heart Is seldom glad (Norse Wisdom)

He is tolerated by the gods, perhaps because his stratagems and plans save them as often as they get them into trouble. Loki makes the world more interesting but less safe. He is the father of monsters, the author of woes, the sly god.

Loki's green eyes flashed with anger and with admiration, for he loved a good trick as much as he hated being fooled.

In their huge bedroom that night, Tyr said to Thor, "I hope you know what you are doing." "Of course I do," said Thor. But he didn't. He was just doing whatever he felt like doing. That was what Thor did best.

The fun comes in telling them yourself—something I warmly encourage you to do, you person reading this. Read the stories in this book, then make them your own,

When a real battle starts, you’ll always find that there is no bravest man.

Each insult is woven with just enough truth to make it wound.

And now, if you have anything more to ask, I can't think how you can manage it, for I've never heard anyone tell more of the story of the world. Make what use of it you can.

It’s a long and crooked walk to a bad friend, even if he lives nearby. But it’s an easy road to a good friend, no matter how long the journey.

Don't throw that good and evil stuff at me. That's not even a Norse concept. Are you 'good' because you kill your enemies, but your enemies are 'bad' because they kill you? What sort of logic is that?

Loki was trying to look serious, but even so, he was smiling at the corners of his mouth. It was not a reassuring smile.

A sword age, a wind age, a wolf age. No longer is there mercy among men.

Cease your weeping!" he said. "It is I, Loki, here to rescue you!" Idunn glared at him with red-rimmed eyes. "It is you who are the source of my troubles." she said. "Well, perhaps. But that was so long ago. That was yesterday's Loki. Today's Loki is here to save you and take you home.

Yo!” I caught the sleeve of his cashmere coat. “Rewind to the part about a Norse god being my pappy.

I tried to imagine myself a long time ago, in the lands where these stories were first told, during the long winter nights perhaps, under the glow of the northern lights,

That is how the worlds will end, in ash and flood, in darkness and in ice. That is the final destiny of the gods.

You know all your Norse mythology and chess references make you a nerd, right? Deep down under all that muscle, ink, and leather, you’re a huge nerd.

The fiery force is nothing more than the life force as we know it. It is the flame of desire and love, of sex and beauty, of pleasure and joy as we consume and are consumed, as we burn with pleasure and burn out in time.

Men brave and generous live the best lives, seldom will they sorrow; then there are fools, afraid of everything, who grumble instead of giving.

Loki makes the world more interesting but less safe.

We need our goats!” I yelled. I waded through the crowd until I reached our chariot. I grabbed Otis’s face and pressed my forehead against his. “Testing,” I whispered. “Is this goat on? Thor, can you hear me?” “You have beautiful eyes,” Otis told me.

On the day the Gjallerhorn is blown, it will wake the gods, no matter where they are, no matter how deeply they sleep. Heimdall will blow Gjallerhorn only once, at the end of all things, Ragnarok.

I can make some calls. There is a guy. Dagfinn Heyerdahl. He used to be with Norse Heritage Foundation." Norse Heritage Foundation wasn't so much about heritage as it was about viking, in the most cliché sense of the world. They drank huge quantities of beer, they brawled, and they wore horned helmets despite all historical evidence to the contrary. "Used to be?" Curran asked. "They kicked him out for being drunk and violent." Curran blinked. "The Norse Heritage?" "Mhm." "Don't you have to be drunk and violent just to get in?" he asked. "Just how disorderly did he get?

That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost. The word ‘lost’ comes from the old Norse ‘los’ meaning the disbanding of an army…I worry now that people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know. Advertising, alarmist news, technology, incessant busyness, and the design of public and private life conspire to make it so. A recent article about the return of wildlife to suburbia described snow-covered yards in which the footprints of animals are abundant and those of children are entirely absent. Children seldom roam, even in the safest places… I wonder what will come of placing this generation under house arrest.

Do you wonder where poetry come from? Where do we get the songs we sing and the tales we tell? Do you ever ask yourself how it is that some people can dream great, wise, beautiful dreams and pass those dreams on as poetry to the world, to be sung and retold as long as the moon will wax and wane? Have you ever wondered why some people make beautiful songs and poems and tales, and some of us do not? It is a long story, and it does no credit to anyone: there is murder in it, and trickery, lies and foolishness, seduction and pursuit. Listen.

Where is the graveyard of dead gods? What lingering mourner waters their mounds? There was a time when Jupiter was the king of the gods, and any man who doubted his puissance was ipso facto a barbarian and an ignoramus. But where in all the world is there a man who worships Jupiter today? And who of Huitzilopochtli? In one year - and it is no more than five hundred years ago - 50,000 youths and maidens were slain in sacrifice to him. Today, if he is remembered at all, it is only by some vagrant savage in the depths of the Mexican forest. Huitzilopochtli, like many other gods, had no human father; his mother was a virtuous widow; he was born of an apparently innocent flirtation that she carried out with the sun. When he frowned, his father, the sun, stood still. When he roared with rage, earthquakes engulfed whole cities. When he thirsted he was watered with 10,000 gallons of human blood. But today Huitzilopochtli is as magnificently forgotten as Allen G. Thurman. Once the peer of Allah, Buddha and Wotan, he is now the peer of Richmond P. Hobson, Alton B. Parker, Adelina Patti, General Weyler and Tom Sharkey. Speaking of Huitzilopochtli recalls his brother Tezcatlipoca. Tezcatlipoca was almost as powerful; he consumed 25,000 virgins a year. Lead me to his tomb: I would weep, and hang a couronne des perles. But who knows where it is? Or where the grave of Quetzalcoatl is? Or Xiuhtecuhtli? Or Centeotl, that sweet one? Or Tlazolteotl, the goddess of love? Of Mictlan? Or Xipe? Or all the host of Tzitzimitl? Where are their bones? Where is the willow on which they hung their harps? In what forlorn and unheard-of Hell do they await their resurrection morn? Who enjoys their residuary estates? Or that of Dis, whom Caesar found to be the chief god of the Celts? Of that of Tarves, the bull? Or that of Moccos, the pig? Or that of Epona, the mare? Or that of Mullo, the celestial jackass? There was a time when the Irish revered all these gods, but today even the drunkest Irishman laughs at them. But they have company in oblivion: the Hell of dead gods is as crowded as the Presbyterian Hell for babies. Damona is there, and Esus, and Drunemeton, and Silvana, and Dervones, and Adsullata, and Deva, and Bellisima, and Uxellimus, and Borvo, and Grannos, and Mogons. All mighty gods in their day, worshipped by millions, full of demands and impositions, able to bind and loose - all gods of the first class. Men labored for generations to build vast temples to them - temples with stones as large as hay-wagons. The business of interpreting their whims occupied thousands of priests, bishops, archbishops. To doubt them was to die, usually at the stake. Armies took to the field to defend them against infidels; villages were burned, women and children butchered, cattle were driven off. Yet in the end they all withered and died, and today there is none so poor to do them reverence. What has become of Sutekh, once the high god of the whole Nile Valley? What has become of: Resheph Anath Ashtoreth El Nergal Nebo Ninib Melek Ahijah Isis Ptah Anubis Baal Astarte Hadad Addu Shalem Dagon Sharaab Yau Amon-Re Osiris Sebek Molech? All there were gods of the highest eminence. Many of them are mentioned with fear and trembling in the Old Testament. They ranked, five or six thousand years ago, with Yahweh Himself; the worst of them stood far higher than Thor. Yet they have all gone down the chute, and with them the following: Bilé Ler Arianrhod Morrigu Govannon Gunfled Sokk-mimi Nemetona Dagda Robigus Pluto Ops Meditrina Vesta You may think I spoof. That I invent the names. I do not. Ask the rector to lend you any good treatise on comparative religion: You will find them all listed. They were gods of the highest standing and dignity-gods of civilized peoples-worshiped and believed in by millions. All were omnipotent, omniscient and immortal. And all are dead.

We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse; we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard. More than that, we speak volumes – our language is the language of everything we have read. Shakespeare and the Authorised Version surface in supermarkets, on buses, chatter on radio and television. I find this miraculous. I never cease to wonder at it. That words are more durable than anything, that they blow with the wind, hibernate and reawaken, shelter parasitic on the most unlikely hosts, survive and survive and survive.

Oh yes. I was telling you about my research into the old Norse sagas- the mythology of ancient Scandinavia. Have you read them?” “Uh no.” “You’d like them, Cassie.” He waved the hand with the chalk in it. “All sex and violence.” I frowned. “Why would you think that I’d-

I learned the Norse gods came with their own doomsday: Ragnarok, the twilight of the gods, the end of it all. The gods were going to battle the frost giants, and they were all going to die. Had Ragnarok happened yet? Was it still to happen? I did not know then. I am not certain now.

Here is the last thing, and a shameful admission it is. When the all-father in eagle form had almost reached the vats, with Suttung immediately behind him, Odin blew some of the mead out of his behind, a splatter wet fart of foul-smelling mead right in Suttung's face, blinding the giant and throwing him off Odin's trail. No one, then or now, wanted to drink the mead that came out of Odin's ass. But whenever you hear bad poets declaiming their bad poetry, filled with foolish similes and ugly rhymes, you will know which of the meads the have tasted.

The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the artist had intended.

But Loki's relations with Svadilfari were such that a while later he gave birth to a colt.

Tell your secret to one person, never to two— everyone knows, if three people know.

...I don't believe in Him, and if He does exist, I don't like Him. His type of gods aren't gods who echo how mortals behave. They're gods who are held up as example of perfection to be emulated. They're not gods of the people. They're remote and inaccessible, they demand blind, unthinking obedience from their followers. They're dictators. We Aesir and Vanir, by contrast, are mirrors. Other gods rule. We reflect and magnify. We are you, only more so. We share your flaws and foibles. We are as humanlike as we are divine, and I think we are all the better for that.

...to limit the meaning of Aslan simply to lion from Turkish is to miss its deep northern resonances and the song of the snowflakes whirling around it. Lewis admitted that, as a boy, he had been ‘crazed by northern–ness’ and there are many subtle references to Norse mythology in the story. In fact, if we treat Aslan as a word from Old Norse, it simply means god of the land. By combining that meaning with Turkish lion, it is essentially cognate which Welsh, Llew, lion, the very word from which the name Lewis is derived.

He was beautiful, that was always affirmed, but his beauty was hard to fix or to see, for he was always glimmering, flickering, melting, mixing, he was the shape of a shapeless flame, he was the eddying thread of needle-shapes in the shapeless mass of the waterfall. He was the invisible wind that hurried the clouds in billows and ribbons. You could see a bare tree on the skyline bent by the wind, holding up twisted branches and bent twigs, and suddenly its formless form would resolve itself into that of the trickster.

Magnus hesitated. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “We’ve been rushing around getting ready to leave, and I haven’t so much as googled the word Svefnthorn.” “I googled it,” Jace said, to Alec’s surprise. “While we were getting our stuff together.” “You,” said Alec, “googled it.” “Yeah,” said Jace. “It sounded Norse, so I went into the library and looked it up in the Saga Concordances. Like a normal person. That’s googling, right?” “More or less,” said Simon.

Mercury. Lead. Antimony. A cresent moon sits at the nape of her neck; and Egyptian ankh near her collarbone. There are other symbols as well: Norse runes, Chinese characters. "It is part of who I was, who I am, and who I will be.

You do know that as a small child, they actually carried me around on a pillow? I had a custom-made helmet that I had to wear until I was four. (Chris) That’s because you banged your head every time you got angry. I was afraid you were going to get brain damage from it. (Wulf) The brain is fine. It’s my ego and social life in the toilet. I shudder at what you’re going to do to the kid. (Chris dropped his voice and imitated Wulf’s lilting Norse accent.) Don’t move, you might get bruised. Oops, a sneeze, better call in specialists from Belgium. Headache? Odin forbid, it might be a tumor. Quick, rush him for a CAT scan. (Chris)

Guilt is a heavy thing, Mother Witch, she said. It's best left behind if you want to move forward.

One of the dwarfs walked in front of Thor to get a better view of the prye, and Thor kicked him irritably into the middle of the flames, which made Thor feel slightly better and made all the dwarfs feel much worse.

I had forgotten that, while Thor hurls his Hammer from storm-clouds, Odin prefers his strike to come out of a calm sky.

Fearlessness is better than a faint heart for any man who puts his nose out of doors. The length of my life and the day of my death were fated long ago.

Men become friends when they can share their minds with one another. Anything is better than being lied to: a real friend will disagree with you openly.

A lot of folks in the Norse cosmos had warned me that names had power. You weren't supposed to utter them unless you had to. Me, I preferred to wear names out like hand-me-down clothes. That seemed the best way to drain the power out of them.

When we kill our desires we stink like any corpse.

Globalization makes it impossible for modern societies to collapse in isolation, as did Easter Island and the Greenland Norse in the past. Any society in turmoil today, no matter how remote ... can cause trouble for prosperous societies on other continents and is also subject to their influence (whether helpful or destabilizing). For the first time in history, we face the risk of a global decline. But we also are the first to enjoy the opportunity of learning quickly from developments in societies anywhere else in the world today, and from what has unfolded in societies at any time in the past. That's why I wrote this book.

Many of our problems are broadly similar to those that undermined ... Norse Greenland, and that many other past societies also struggled to solve. Some of those past societies failed (like the Greenland Norse) and others succeeded ... The past offers us a rich database from which we can learn in order that we may keep on succeeding.

This will be the age of cruel winds, the age of people who become as wolves, who prey upon each other, who are no better than wild beasts. Twilight will come to the world, and the places where the humans live will fall into ruins, flaming briefly, then crashing down and crumbling into ash and devastation.

A squirrel, Ratatosk, lives in the branches of the world-tree. It takes gossip and messages from Nidhogg, the dread corpse-eater, to the eagle and back again. The squirrel tells lies to both of them, and takes joy in provoking anger.

Sam and Alex scurried out of the kitchen. I hoped they were going to formulate a cunning plan to get us all out of Aegir's hall alive. If Sam was really just going to pray .. well, I wondered if she'd ever tried to say a Muslim prayer in the home of a Norse god (sorry, jotun diety) before. I was afraid the entire place might collapse from religious paradox.

Because,' said Thor, 'when something goes wrong, the first thing I always think is, it is Loki’s fault. It saves a lot of time.

Wind moaned through the canyons like a chorus of zombies. I mentioned this to Blitzen, but he set me straight. 'No, kid,' he said. 'Norse zombies are called draugr. They move silently. You'd never hear them coming.' 'Thanks,' I said. 'That's a huge relief.

Don't insert your hand inside a wolf's mouth - or a lion's, bear's, alligator's or crocodile's mouth, or in a lawn mower, garbage disposal, snowblower or blender - because, if you do, you're not going to have that hand for much longer! Don't believe me? Ask my good friend Captain Hook how he got his name! - Tyr

They all laughed, except Tyr; he lost his hand.

Also, I kept thinking about Alex Fierro. You know, maybe just a little. Alex was a force of nature, like the snow thunder. She struck when she felt like it, depending on temperature differentials and storm patterns I couldn't possibly predict. She shook my foundations in a way that was powerful but also weirdly soft and constrained, veiled in blizzard. I couldn't assign any motives to her. She just did what she wanted. At least, that's how it felt to me.

The black thing in her brain and the dark water on the page were the same thing, a form of knowledge. This is how myths work. They are things, creatures, stories, inhabiting the mind. They cannot be explained and do not explain; they are neither creeds nor allegories. The black was now in the thin child’s head and was part of the way she took in every new thing she encountered.

They spell-caught the sounds of cat paws, the breath of fish, the spittle of birds, the hairs of a woman's beard, and the roots of a mountain, and spun them around the sinews of a bear. That made a bond that looked as fine as a ribbon of silk, but, since it was made of things not in this world, it was so strong nothing in the world could break it.

Is there anything more beautiful than gold?” - Freya's question. Plain-thoughted Thor spoke. “A farm at first light Is more beautiful than gold, or A ship's sails in the mist. Many ordinary things are far more beautiful.

But if you write a version of Ragnarok in the twenty-first century, it is haunted by the imagining of a different end of things. We are a species of animal which is bringing about the end of the world we were born into. Not out of evil or malice, or not mainly, but because of a lopsided mixture of extraordinary cleverness, extraordinary greed, extraordinary proliferation of our own kind, and a biologically built-in short-sightedness.

I hate this plan," I said. "Let’s do it.

And so Nat stood up and joined the group, and followed, and watched, and awaited his chance as the light of Chaos lit the plain and gods and demons marched to war.

It has a name because it's important, and all important things have names.

If you survive in battle, it is with Odin's grace, and if you fall, it is because he has betrayed you.

Well, that's history for you, folks. Unfair, untrue and for the most part written by folk who weren't even there.

Those movies... ridiculously inaccurate. The real gods of Asgard — Thor, Loki, Odin, and the rest — are much more powerful, much more terrifying than anything Hollywood could concoct.

Wow," said Samirah as we approached the dock. "You're right, Alex. That ship is really yellow." I sighed. "Not you, too." Alex grinned. "I vote we name it the Big Banana. All in favour?" "Don't you dare," I said. "I love it," Mallory said, throwing Alex a mooring line. Keen and Gunderson had emerged from belowdecks in an apparent truce, though both sported fresh black eyes. "It's decided, then!" bellowed Halfborn. "The good ship Mikillgulr!" T.J. scratched his head. "There's an Old Norse term for big banana?" "Well, not exactly," Halfborn admitted. "The Vikings never sailed far enough south to discover bananas. But Mikillgulr means big yellow. That's close enough!" I looked skyward with a silent prayer: Frey, god of summer, Dad, thanks for the boat. But could I suggest that forest green is also a great summery colour, and please stop embarrassing me in front of my friends? Amen.

There must be something in here that can drill through eight miles of solid rock.” He considered a hand drill, a tape measure, a corkscrew, and the iron staff we’d almost died retrieving from Geirrod’s fortress. He threw them all to the floor. “Nothing!” he said in disgust. “Useless junk!” Perhaps you could use your head, Hearthstone signed. That is very hard. “Oh, don’t try to console me, Mr. Elf,” said Thor.

Be your friend’s true friend. Return gift for gift. Repay laughter with laughter again but betrayal with treachery.

By Odin's Hairy Arse!

They heard a distant rumbling, like thunder on the peaks, or mountains crumbling, or huge waves crashing to shore, and the earth shook with each rumble. “My husband is coming home,” said the giantess. “I hear his gentle footsteps in the distance.

All medieval and classic cultures of the ancient world, including those on which Tolkien modeled his elves, routinely exposed their young and marriageable women to the fortunes of war, because bearing and raising the next generation of warriors is not needed for equality-loving elves. Equality-loving elves. Who are monarchists. With a class system. Of ranks. Battles are more fun when attractive young women are dismembered and desecrated by goblins! I believe that this is one point where C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and all Christian fantasy writers from before World War Two were completely agreed upon, and it is a point necessary in order correctly to capture the mood and tone and nuance of the medieval romances or Norse sagas such writers were straining their every artistic nerve and sinew to create. So, wait, we have an ancient and ageless society of elves where the virgin maidens go off to war, but these same virgin maidens must abide by the decision of their father or liege lord for permission to marry? -- The Desolation of Tolkien

(...) Some fairy lore makes a clear division between good and wicked types of fairies — between those who are friendly to mankind, and those who seek to cause us harm. In Scottish tales, good fairies make up the Seelie Court, which means the Blessed Court, while bad fairies congregate in the Unseelie Court, ruled by the dark queen Nicnivin. In old Norse myth, the Liosálfar (Light Elves) are regal, compassionate creatures who live in the sky in the realm of Alfheim, while the Döckálfar (the Dark Elves) live underground and are greatly feared. Yet in other traditions, a fairy can be good or bad, depending on the circumstance or on the fairy's whim. They are often portrayed as amoral beings, rather than as immoral ones, who simply have little comprehension of human notions of right and wrong. The great English folklorist Katherine Briggs tended to avoid the "good" and "bad" division, preferring the categorizations of Solitary and Trooping Fairies instead. (...)

Who has ever wandered through such forests, in a length of many miles, in a boundless expanse, without a path, without a goal, amid their monstrous shadows, their sacred gloom, without being filled with deep reverence for the sublime greatness of Nature above all human agency, without feeling the grandeur of the idea which forms the basis of Vidar’s essence?

Ever since I was a child my only thought or insight into apocalypse, disaster or war has been that I myself have no “survival instinct,” nor any strong desire to survive, especially if what lies on the other side of survival is just me. A book like The Road is as incomprehensible to me as a Norse myth cycle in the original language. Suicide would hold out its quiet hand to me on the first day—the first hour. And not the courageous suicide of self-slaughter, but simply the passive death that occurs if you stay under the bed as they march up the stairs, or lie down in the cornfield as the plane fitted with machine guns heads your way.

The old witch bears many giants for sons, and all in the shape of wolves; and from this source are those wolves sprung. The saying runs thus: from this race shall come one that shall be mightiest of all; he that is named Moon-Hound; he shall be filled with the flesh of all those men that die, and he shall swallow the moon, and sprinkle with blood the heavens and all the air; thereof shall the sun lose her shining, and the winds in that day shall be unquiet and roar on every side.

It always has been and always will be the same. The old folk of our grandfathers' young days sang a song bearing exactly the same burden; and the young folk of to-day will drone out precisely similar nonsense for the aggravation of the next generation. "Oh, give me back the good old days of fifty years ago," has been the cry ever since Adam's fifty-first birthday. Take up the literature of 1835, and you will find the poets and novelists asking for the same impossible gift as did the German Minnesingers long before them and the old Norse Saga writers long before that. And for the same thing sighed the early prophets and the philosophers of ancient Greece. From all accounts, the world has been getting worse and worse ever since it was created. All I can say is that it must have been a remarkably delightful place when it was first opened to the public, for it is very pleasant even now if you only keep as much as possible in the sunshine and take the rain good-temperedly.

From the hood of his car, he hefted a large green insulated pack - the kind Fadlan's Falafel used for deliveries. "This is for you, Magnus. I hope you enjoy." The scent of fresh falafel wafted out. True, I'd eaten falafel just a few hours ago, but my stomach growled because ... well, more falafel. "Man, you're the best. I can't believe - Wait. You're in the middle of a fast and you brought me food? That seems wrong." "Just because I'm fasting doesn't mean you can't enjoy." He clapped me on my shoulder. "You'll be in my prayers. All of you." I knew he was sincere. Me, I was an atheist. I only prayed sarcastically to my own father for a better colour of boat. Learning about the existence of Norse deities and the Nine Worlds had just made me more convinced that there was no grand divine plan. What kind of God would allow Zeus and Odin to run around the same cosmos, both claiming to be the king of creation, smiting mortals with lightning bolts and giving motivational seminars? Bur Amir was a man of faith. He and Samirah believed in something bigger, a cosmic force that actually cared about humans. I suppose it was kind of comforting to know Amir had my back in the prayer department, even if I doubted there was anybody at the end of that line. "Thanks, man." I shook his hand one last time.

He had murdered any illlusion of Alex Remington. The golden pendant had been replaced by a spiked dog collar, and he was wearing a black T-shirt that hugged his form and showed off the many designs on his arms: Fenris on the right wrist, and Echidna, the greek mother of monsters, high on his left arm. The norse world serpent was wrapped around his left wrist, and a new design had recently been added: Cerberus, the three-headed dog who guarded the gates of Hades. The world serpent was partially obscurred by a black leather knife sheath, which held a silver knife Aubrey had taken from a vampire hunter a few thousand years earlier. His hair was slightly touseled, as if he'd been running, and a few strands fell across his face. Looking at him now, Jessica couldn't imagine how she had ever mistaken him for a human. But illusion was Aubrey's art. And it was simple to fool people who expected nothing else. For the moment, Aubrey appeared to be exactly what he was: stunning, michievous, and completely deadly all at once