Sat, 06 Aug 2011

Ragnarök: the doom of the gods

Interesting analysis - not heathen, to be sure, but certainly illustrative of the power of the Northern mythos that still resonates today.

Myth comes from muthos in Greek, something said, as opposed to something done. We think of myths as stories, although, as Heather O'Donoghue says in her book From Asgard to Valhalla, there are myths that are not essentially narratives at all. We think of them loosely as tales that explain, or embody, the origins of our world. Karen Armstrong writes in A Short History of Myths that myths are ways of making things comprehensible and meaningful in human terms (the sun as a chariot driven by a woman through the firmament) and that they are almost all "rooted in death and the fear of extinction".

(link) [The Guardian]

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