While finishing the TV show Ragnarok recently I remembered I had a book about Odin, Thor, and the rest of the Norse pantheon in my backlog: “Norse Mythology” by Neil Gaiman in which he retells some of the stories about the nordic gods. The 15 stories in this book span from the time before the gods and how they came to be all the way to the end: Ragnarok. I was a bit surprised by how … simple the Aesir (the warrior gods) and Thor and Odin in particular were. Thor, for one, had primarily an alcohol and aggression problem and in not a single of these stories he did something for the benefit of someone other than himself or another god.
That being said, despite most of the actors in the stories being pricks I really enjoyed Neil Gaiman’s retelling. All the stories are written in a way so that they can be read on their own but since I didn’t know any of them I went through the book one story after another and I now feel like I at least know the basics of the Aesir and some of the Vanir, which is exactly what I wanted to get out of it 🙂
Over the years I've written quite a few reviews 🙂 You can find them at /reviews/.
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