random thoughts

[fannishliss]

***April Swap.  Thanks to mahmfic for the awesome postcards! and to verdande_mi for the terrific fanmix! I am developing good ideas for your fics in response, and hope that I will get them done soon.  I am sorry that April is kicking my butt. But I will get the fic done soon.  :)

*** Why is April kicking my butt?
a. My Tax return is about 128 pages long.  Criminey!
b.  I played at SEVEN services between Palm Sunday and Holy Week.  Wow!
c.  I have a big grant and a big report due on Wednesday.  Argh!

*** thus I have completely failed at writing all month due to hiding my head in the ground from fear of Easter, taxes, and numbercrunching.  Zounds!

*** but I have a really good outline and start for my Sammy Messiah story.  Yay!

*** LOKI.  I want to write my next novel about the mythological Loki and how he functions in the mythos.  I there is extremely rich ground to be explored there.  Loki is, I think, a pot stirrer.  He stirs the pot.  The stew is tastier that way.  He gives birth to monsters.  He speaks the truth actually; in the stories he is tricksy but usually he is telling the truth but slant.  Fic writers who admire the character in Marvelverse have cottoned brilliantly to the fact that he is womanish somehow.  He is a lovely figure of our willfulness.  I think he is a spirit of fire and air, a Prometheus, a bringer of tales and harbinger of turning the gyre.  LOKI!!!  Notice how lovely the word Loki is when you type it on a standard qwerty keyboard.  :) He is a god of stories, like my other faves, Hermes and Thoth and Raven and Coyote and Kokopelli.  I loved it in the recent comic (Loki Agent of Asgard) when the artist caught him in silhouette with his horns and the rough fur around his shoulders and he looked just like Kokopelli.  :D  It is a really excellent creative team.  I hope they can keep it going!

*** Bucky!  Not enough Bucky stories.  Especially not enough stories about Bucky/Steve, Winter Soldier comes in from the cold, and his comics-verse backstory with Natasha is carefully handled.    Does anyone see how the Winter Soldier looks like Lars Ulrich from Metallica back when he had a little more hair???

**** Can I just say how much I love these beautiful, sad-eyed Marvel villains? <3333333  Anybody remember Krycek??  His was the ship that pulled me into online fandom -- back in the mid90s when we had email listservs!  Oh, back in the day, how the lovely heart-broken Russian triple-agent assassins would kiss their ex-partners on the cheek and call them tovarisch....  :D

*** Husband spent the weekend in Staunton VA carousing with fellow Bard treaders...

*** I had a huge event on Sat. and another on Sun. so I was wiped all weekend.  whoosh.

**** Dean just keeps washing his sad sad face in everyone's LJ.    I really fear that this coming season finale will truly be a HORROR.

Back to crunching numbers in the morning!

Comments

[bleodswean.livejournal.com]

You're planning on studying Norse mythology? Or you mean the comics version of such?

I'm still astounded by this desire of so many today to romanticize him as some sort of a misunderstood anti-hero of the myths. The degenerate liar, the one who embodies ergi, the slanderer, the pervert. It's becoming fascinating to me, this appropriation of the mythology.

[fannishliss.livejournal.com]

Yes, I've been reading about some of the mythological sources. Most were recorded very late into history after the mythological meaning of Loki had begun to degrade, or at least that's how I read it.

I'm trying to work free of the Marvel universe stuff, though it's certainly very compelling. Branagh clearly read the character as a Shakespearean bastard, which are always my favorites anyway... my husband never got to play Edmund, but we're still hoping for Iago. :)

As for the stuff about ergi, that's certainly a big part of my fascination with the character.

I guess I'm a little surprised, since you are so poetically attuned to images of skulls and skeletons and death, that you are not more drawn to Loki, who fathered the beasts of Ragnarok. I guess I really see him through a Yeats kind of lens... a crucial part of the endless cycles of destruction that are necessary to that gyre theory of the universe.

[bleodswean.livejournal.com]

Loki is not a God of the underworld. As a matter of fact, he isn't a god, is he? He is destruction for destruction's sake. Again, with the projection backwards.

I am so wary, my Irish Catholic upbringing, of romanticizing personified Evil. It just feels...unlucky to me.

You sound as though you're creating your own interpretation of this mythological figure, combining Marvel, neo-paganism, and some of the mythology?

[fannishliss.livejournal.com]

It seems unclear whether he's Aesir, if that's what you mean.
He has both an Aesir wife and a Jotunn wife... and he is bloodbrother to Odin in the myths... so he seems to be regarded as Jotun and Aesir simultaneously. (more below)

But I think it's much more likely that Loki has been cast as a personification of evil by Christian-era scribes, than that he started out that way.

I mean, any time you deal with a mythology you have to view it through the lens of how and when and why it was copied down.

As father of Hel, he is at least related to the gods of the underworld, esp. considering Jormangandr and Fenrir are also his offspring.

I've always had a fascination with how gods seem to appear in waves. Like the oldest Greek gods, who gave birth to the Titans, and then the Olympians overthrew the Titans. It seems pretty clear in the scholarship that the Aesir were the most recent wave of Norse gods... having superceded the Vanir and also the Jotuns... Loki hangs around like a bad penny, reminding the Aesir that their ascendancy is not secure. That right there is pretty much the fable I'm after. :)

[fannishliss.livejournal.com]

I found a horrible page called the simple.wikipedia. OMG, what is this world coming to. D:


In the actual wikipedia, under folklore, is this interesting stuff, which truly rings a bell with me, and sounds more like the Loki I am thinking of. I guess with Blake and Shelley and Yeats (my heroes) I am of the devil's party.

Danish folklorist Axel Olrik cites numerous examples of natural phenomena explained by way of Lokke in popular folk tradition, including rising heat. An example from 1841 reads as follows:

The expressions: "Lokke (Lokki) sår havre i dag" (Lokke (Lokki) sows oats today), or: "Lokke driver i dag med sine geder" (Lokke herds his goats today), are used in several regions of Jutland, for example in Medelsom shire, the diocese of Viborg etc. ... and stand for the sight in the springtime, when the sunshine generates vapour from the ground, which can be seen as fluttering or shimmering air in the horizon of the flat landscape, similar to the hot steam over a kettle or a burning fire

And in Thy, from the same source: "... when you look at the horizon in clear weather and sunshine, and the air seems to move in shimmering waves, or like a sheet of water which seems to rise and sink in waves." Olrik further cites several different types of plants named after Loki. Olrik detects three major themes in folklore attestations; Lokke appeared as an "air phenomenon", connected with the "home fire", and as a "teasing creature of the night".[57]

Loka Táttur or Lokka Táttur (Faroese "tale—or þáttr—of Loki") is a Faroese ballad dating to the late Middle Ages that features the gods Loki, Odin, and Hœnir helping a farmer and a boy escape the wraith of a bet-winning jötunn. The tale notably features Loki as a benevolent god in this story, although his slyness is in evidence as usual.




PS, in separate news, have you gotten to see Only Lovers Left Alive yet? You might have to search far and wide, but it is really good. I do want to see it again on the big screen. It was lovely from start to finish. Jarmusch is truly great.

[verdande-mi.livejournal.com]

You’re welcome :)

Loki is a fascinating and interesting character, and an important one in the Norse Sagas and Scandinavian folklore. I don’t know him well outside of these, but of course I know he’s a big part of the Marvel-universe and popular culture in many ways. I do think he is made out to be more evil and demon-like than he really was. To have sources that pre-date Christianity in the Norse countries would be wonderful, but alas that is not so and the sources we have are tinted through the lens of a new religion and understanding of the world.

Good luck with your writing :)

[fannishliss.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the good luck wish!

I seem to take on writing projects that are crazily ambitious. It is going to be very hard to extract Loki from the Marvel verse, especially because Tom Hiddleston is so good at making him attractive and compelling :D. Well, it's a long time from now until next Novel Month, so I have some time to ponder it.

I hope I'll be able to find out more of what folklore has to say about Loki. My hunch is that the everyday folklore might preserve more of the older conception of his function in the mythology. I love the thing above where he is responsible for those heat mirages. :)