The Norseland is the home of the Vikings and the Asgardian deities. Though never specified, it likely covers all of modern-day Scandinavia including Denmark, Norway, Finland and Sweden. It probably is the region from where all the various myths and legends of Europe arose. Thor Heyerdahl (October 6, 1914 – April 18, 2002), the Norwegian adventurer and ethnographer with a background in zoology, botany, and geography, made the name Thor familiar to the world. His Kon-Tiki expedition in 1947, in which he sailed 8,000 km (5,000 mi) across the Pacific Ocean in a hand-built raft from South America to the Tuamotu Islands, made the word Vikings and their image of sea-faring giants popular.
Soon after came the Asterix or The Adventures of Asterix (French: Astérix or Astérix le Gaulois), a series of French-Belgian comics that first appeared in 1959. They not only made the Vikings, Getafix to Obelix, lovable characters, they also made some Viking-Roman history known to non-European readers.
It is still surprising why Bloomsbury would bring Gaiman’s Norse Mythology to India, a land submerged in myths of all kinds. Nevertheless, if Devdutt Pattanaik can retell Greek Myths, finding a new book on Norse mythology is not really surprising. India is where myth sells, though our expert on myths, Pattanaik equates myth with mytha, the untruth, the fable, the imagined, the fantasised. However, since Indian school children are the biggest buyers of Harry Potter books, and Rick Riordan (the American writer of the Olympus series and the Magnus Chase and the Gods of the Asgard series), it does no harm to have here a book on the original Norse tales.
The cover design and illustrations are beautiful, intended to be a designed book, even though the velvet paper black jacket runs colour on to your hands. Gaiman is a best-seller and his retelling is supposed to be ‘dazzling’. The Times, in praise, says, ‘One of the joys of reading Gaiman is how he subverts our expectations of magic, horror, fantasy and the mundane’.
He doesn’t seem to have subverted anything really...his retelling of the Norse myths are much better reading than any of the modern Indian writers retelling Indian myths and epics; with the exception of Pattanaik and RK Narayan. Very like India’s epics, the Norse myths are tales of jealousies and cunningness; wars between the Aesirs and the Vanirs are very like those between the Asuras and the Devas; Odin, Apollo and Indra are all seated on the same plane and this book is a collectors’ item for anyone interested in world myths and histories of the beginning and end-of-world stories. From the Aztecs to the Norse to the Puranas to the Chinese creation myths (Chinese Hundun and Hawaiian Kumulipo), all tell the essential truths, there was a beginning and there will be an end. Gaiman retells the stories beautifully.