Noodling through Norse Myths; Folklorist's Notebook

Some of the books I've been moving to and from various end tables, usually not as neat as this.

It has been a week of Norse myth study for me as I try to understand the differences between the 19th Century Swedish writer Victor Rydberg's versions of the stories and most other common versions. I am working on a full-blown article on Rydberg's process from the outside and will at some point get to reading what Rydberg had to say for himself. I'm not doing a full-scale review of the books shown, though I will point out some things I've enjoyed about various takes on Norse myths.

My favorite of the week has to be Kevin Crossley-Holland's text, though I have not read it in its entirety. Crossley-Holland's text opens with a lovely retelling of Snorri Sturluson's 13th Century Gylfaginning from the opening of his Prose Edda. If you know nothing else about the extant sources of Norse mythology, Snorri and Edda are the biggest and oldest names in the business. I don't think I've seen another general Norse myths book (readable by young people, but very enjoyable for all ages) that opens with this specific a nod to the real source material for all Norse myths. It is a very promising sign.

I have been thinking particularly about versions of myth, the canons of myth, if you will. I was lucky enough to read D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths as a kid. I read it cover to cover many times and became very protective over the versions of the stories it contained. I don't think I was willing to accept more facts about the Greek gods until I took a course in undergrad and read Hesiod's Theogony. It made me think about what the "real" Greek myths were and I don't think I really made headway on the general concept of the "real" versions of myths until the last couple of weeks as I've read Rydberg, a thoughtful scholar who nevertheless departs from traditional versions of Norse myths, but does so using textual support from accepted sources. It's a tricky needle he has threaded and I can't really understand what he's done without checking every detail and even then, it's dizzying.

In case you are wondering about the other texts in the picture, I can't say too much about Gaiman because I just haven't had the gumption to read him through because (I feel scandalous admitting this because I think the man is a genius) I'm not impressed. I will have to read him through entirely, but I haven't seen anything in his version that stands out to me as adding anything to the subject. Having only read parts of each book, I have to say that I much prefer Crossley-Holland. Not only does he give the nod to the sources, but his prose is just more colorful.

As much as the D'Aulaires delighted me as a child, it was partly reading their Norse myths that sort of disappointed me about Norse myths, which I hadn't really studied before reading their Norse Mythology. I found it to be lacking when compared to my first love, the myths of the Greeks. I think the D'Aulaires' do a great job with the material and I am in love with their style of illustration, even if it seems to suit the bright world of the Greeks better. I don't really think it is their fault that I liked Greek myths more. I think that my initial disappointment in their Norse myths, rather, is due to the the fact that the Greek myths are just lusher and fuller than the Norse myths. And that is what has driven me to research the matter further and to search for a scholar like Rydberg, who squeezes more juice out of the fragmentary and sometimes confused source materials.

Johan Egerkran's Norse Gods has become one of my favorite bedtime reading books because I love his illustrations and I like the prose, which is peppered with quotations from the Edda. But the illustrations are bold and dark and spooky, which just strikes me as appropriate for the rougher, colder world of the north. It is a lovely clothbound text that I just like to reread when I'm drowsing off to sleep.

I reserve judgement on National Geographic's Treasury of Norse Mythology, because I have read only snippets. I have no complaints about the parts I've read, but I do not like the illustrations, which present bulbous, stylized, and to my eyes, ugly versions of the gods.

Upcoming

My next scheduled post (Thursday, November 12) is on a translation of Gilgamesh I am in love with and hope you will try out. Once I finish reading Rydberg and writing my article about his Norse myths, I will return to Abenaki and Northeast Native people's myths and legends and try to publish something before American Thanksgiving.

I am also working on adapting the Scandinavian Christmas folk song "Haugebonden," which I still hope to be able to record before Christmas. I discovered partial chords to play a version of it this week, but the version differed from the first one I studied and the words to most of my verses no longer scan to the rhythms of the song. I will have to revise the verses I've adapted and finish the rest of them.

Newenglandbard.com News

A mixed media three dimensional project: the Catoblepas.

My Catoblepas sculpture is almost ready to paint. Check him out in the Sculpture section of Newenglandbard.com. The pictures have gotten a bit hard to scroll through lately given the number, and I hope to be able to be able to curate a bit better as I start the last stages of the sculpture. I am also trying to make headway in completing the other sections of the website, which have remained "under construction" since we launched last summer. I don't have specific news to share, but I have made a list of chores to start working on.

Dracula Revisited: On my long-ago journey to Romania

My original article, published in the Eagle Tribune about my search for the historical Dracula, and the author, twenty years ago this month, at Castle Dracula in Romania. (Author's photos.)

“Dracula is out there. I have seen him.”

Thus began a rare personal column I wrote for a local newspaper about a trip I made to Romania twenty years ago. I was proud of those lines and fought with an editor to keep them even though I was a very new reporter and was used to having my leads rewritten. They were a bit symbolic given that I ended up leaving out the anecdote that inspired them because I didn’t know, at the time, how to describe it. I will try to do that here.

I backpacked in Eastern Europe for three months twenty years ago and found myself in Romania in October of that year. My general method of travel was to go where I seemed to be brought, but I had one particular plan to visit the castle of Vlad Ţepeş, the historic Dracula, a medieval ruler of Wallachia (bordering Transylvania) who was perched precariously at the edge of the Ottoman Empire during a period of expansion and war with Holy Roman Empire. Those Eastern lands were then what they would become for the Soviet Union: a protective barrier between competing civilizations. The pressure may have inspired the brutality of the warfare. Ţepeş was not a last name. It was a nickname describing a practice of execution and a way to spread terror. Vlad Ţepeş was Vlad “the impaler.” We get the more popular name from his father’s nickname, Dracul, “the dragon.” Vlad was Dracula, the son of “the dragon.” Bram Stoker used Vlad as a foundation for his undead antagonist, even giving Dracula a speech hearkening to his time battling the dreaded Turk. The rest of the novel is Stoker’s brilliant invention.

Vlad Ţepeş, Dracula

Bust of Vlad Ţepeş, Dracula in his birthplace, Sighişoara, Romania. (Author's photo.)

I picked up an English copy of Dracula in a bookstore in Prague on that trip, and as I headed east, I found myself following the steps of Stoker’s young protagonist, as we both traveled by train to what seemed to both of us like the wilderness at the edge of the world. Jon Harker had paprika chicken, so I had paprika chicken. He tried plum brandy, so I tried plum brandy. And on the train at night I turned pages feverishly in my sleeper and made notes in the back of the book!

When I reached Curtea de Argeş, the closest hub to the castle one can get a train to, I had run out of plans for how to get any further to my destination, but I generally refrained from planning and everything always seemed to work out, so I wasn’t worried. I spent my first day touring the city, which did not disappoint. In a few daylight hours, I saw an open casket funeral parade, an older woman with garlic wreathed around her neck and heard a cell phone ring tone that was the opening notes of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor. I also spied a grossly out-of-scale map painted on a wooden sign at the bus station that showed the road to the castle, which I would try to follow the next day.

When I say Castle Dracula, I should specify that I am referring to Cetetea Poenari -- Poenari Castle, not the picturesque Bran Castle that could stand in as a Disney castle with its turrets topped in terra cotta tile. According to scholars Radu Florescu and Raymond McNally’s In Search of Dracula, Bran can be thought of as Vlad’s summer house, but Poenari was his home. I have read that Stoker had no knowledge of Poenari, but he certainly described it as if he did: “The castle was built on the corner of a great rock, so that on three sides it was quite impregnable." Poenari is indeed perched on a rock overlooking the Argeş Valley. It would have been a terrible position to attack, accessible from only one side at the top of a steep climb.

Regardless, I had no way to this castle. Attempts at communicating with the kiosked clerks had failed and I didn’t know which bus, if any, would get me to the closest stop. I looked at the broadly painted map, clearly meant to give a general sense of where the castle lay, and started walking. It was a day of anecdotes, if not a story of reaching Castle Dracula. I saw a horse-drawn wagon with a long, jointed spine and wooden wheels delivering lumber. I saw a man and woman laughing hysterically as they seemed to throw clods of dirt at a chicken in a field. I bought an apple from a boy at a roadside stand. And I ran into Dracula, my version of Dracula, anyway. I omitted him from my newspaper story because I didn’t think I could properly convey him without sounding crazy. He was a short, broad man, middle-aged, with brown, wild, wiry, curly hair, dressed in work clothes. His mustache and eyebrows were enormous and perhaps reminded me of the bust of Ţepeş that I saw days before in Sighişoara, where he was born. But something of his eyes struck me, for they communicated that trait that would once have been described as animal magnetism, which my editor would have laughed at had I used it. I never summoned the courage to talk to him, let alone ask for a picture and to be honest, I don’t believe a picture would do my memory of him justice. I saw him, his face and eyes, and have never forgotten their impression, even if the specific details are now hazily remembered. And then I moved on as I must! I could not have gotten far that day, as the warm October sun sailed to the west and the shadows began to lengthen. I eventually turned back, regretting failure, but fearing the country roads in the vicinity of Castle Dracula at night.

That night I felt defeated. My feet were swollen as my steel-toed work boots were not meant for long walks. My shoulders and back and legs were sore. I teetered at the precipice of deciding to pack my belongings the next morning and hopping a train to Istanbul. Instead of fretting, I took a hot bath in the claw-footed tub in my room’s bathroom. And as I lay there in the quiet, I heard them howling in the streets: the children of the night. In the novel, Dracula controls wolves, and orders them to tear a woman apart. Outside my hotel were the ubiquitous Romanian street dogs really, not wolves, just as my Dracula was a farmer. But they howled, and they were many. And then a shotgun blast sounded and the howling stopped. I wrote in my journal and read Stoker until sleep took me.

Sleep fortified me and instead of giving up, I took a gamble: I jumped on the first bus I saw and hoped for the best. And I won! The bus headed in the right direction and at my request, stopped at the village of Arefu, near the foot of the hills on which the castle lay. The driver, one of many good-hearted people who felt the need to look after me, called out the window to a local to lead me to the castle. What I saw of Arefu included cottages with thatched roofs and little roadside shrines with Orthodox saints and burning candles. I also saw an old woman cross herself as she got on the bus. And then I met my Renfield. Renfield is Dracula’s mad servant. Mine was part Bela Lugosi, part Count from Sesame Street, which is entirely acceptable in a tour guide in any setting. Renfield was the old man the bus driver asked to help me. He wore a fur cap and spoke no English, but he narrated the whole story anyway. I don’t think I could have stopped him. I didn’t understand any of it, but I was very attentive nevertheless. I did catch one word, which made it all worth it. He would from time to time stop walking, point at me and say the name Dracula punctuate it with a slow, deliberate laugh: ha, ha, ha. This happened repeatedly on the journey to the hill and up the oft-noted 1480 steps.

Cetetea Poenari --Castle Dracula

My view as I ascended the final steps to the Cetetea Poenari, the historical Castle Dracula. (Author's Photo)

Given what I went through to get to the castle, and what would happen when I tried to leave, the actual castle ruins are a vague memory. I don’t know if the images in my memory are only based on the pictures I took. It was largely ruined. Impenetrable by assault, earthquakes finally toppled it. One can make out the shape of the castle and see the outlines of the rooms, but what stands out in my memory is its height above the valley, and the tree-covered hills stretching in all directions.

Argeş Valley, View from Castle Dracula

Photograph taken by author from the top of Castle Dracula, October, 2000.

But it was what happened when I left the castle that impresses most listeners, and for many years I feared that in the telling, people would think I was surely exaggerating and I myself had wondered if the danger I felt at the time was more a figment of my imagination. It was only recently, in hearing a story about Romania’s feral street dogs that I have the courage to share what happened and feel that it was indeed something that could have happened as I wrote it so long ago.

Exhilarated with the success, the proof in my camera, I fairly floated down the hill. I did not think much of the dog that began to follow me at a distance, and perhaps not the second dog. Surely the third or fourth stray dog must have alarmed me. But the fifth, the sixth or the seventh dogs to appear made me wonder exactly how my walk back to Arefu would end. I don’t know how many dogs in all materialized, was it ten? More? I know that I felt balanced in a precarious position. The dogs massed around me in a pack with myself forming the apex. We moved in sync. I felt that continuing to move as one was better than distracting them or trying to scatter them. I had been reading of Count Dracula, remember, who commanded his children of the night to tear a woman to shreds and to threaten with grisly death the character I most associated with, who tried to leave Dracula’s castle before Dracula intended him to. These were ragged street dogs, not wolves, but surely if they turned on me… I didn’t intend to find out. I walked stiffly across the valley towards the village and towards a chain linked fence I had not had the time to notice as I walked to the castle with my guide Renfield. Either by recollection or by research I conducted afterward, it was the property of the Romanian military. And behind that fence: a guard dog. And it barked. And my pack’s heads turned as one and then they bolted. I did not run for fear that the movement might catch their attention. I walked a bit more swiftly and did not sigh with relief before I was out of sight.

I would soon leave Romania and continue my travels east into Turkey, where my sights were trained on the far east of the country, but I have not forgotten the week or so that I followed the Dracula trail. Sometimes during the month of October I recall that night when I heard his children sing mournfully to the moon and recall them by day marching in step at my heels. As long as we feed our imaginations with stories of the fantastic, adventures like this will never end.

A Roundup of Mythology News; Folklorist's Notebook

An avenging Medusa, Abenaki Folklore, a new Beowulf, a fascinating take on Norse Mythos, and the 2020 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Louise Glück.

I am happily researching a few projects that will take more time to develop into posts, but I wanted to try to share a bit of my research methods and the excitement of the chase with you, so here are some of the topics I’ve been working on!

Abenaki Folklore

I discovered on Columbus Day that I could text my zip code to a number and a chatbot would tell me which native peoples lived in my area. All the groups in Southern New Hampshire spoke an Algonquian language and seemed to have had an affiliation with the Abenaki Tribe, which was also the easiest to research quickly online. The Abenaki people would have ranged from present day Quebec though most of New England, part of New York state, as far south as Delaware. The name Abenaki stems from the place name Wabanahkik, which means the “Dawn Land.” Not only do I find it a beautiful name, but it immediately forces me to alter my perspective, which considers the US to be of the West. But a people who developed their identity as the easternmost dwelling people before the coming of the Europeans are appropriately the people of the Dawn Land.

Researching the folklore of native peoples presents a few new challenges, political and logistical. The first is that I don’t have reliable sources to turn to. It isn’t a mainstream topic of study in the US. Wikipedia has the greatest amount of material, but I have come to find that Wikipedia, at least when researching unusual folklore related texts, sometimes heads off in directions that don’t have the best support. Picking books from Amazon by authors who do not have a university background is no better, but again, this isn’t a mainstream topic of study for American universities. I ordered two texts, one of is a history, by a scholar of native heritage at Amherst College, another is by authors who have no other publication, but it just looked appealing. Lisa Tanya Brooks’s Our Beloved Kin; A New History of King Philip’s War (Yale, 2018) should tell me quite a bit that I can trust is well-researched, but it’s a heavy book for me to read during the school year, particularly when I am reading other texts. I also bought Seven Eyes Seven Legs; Supernatural Stories of the Abenaki, by Tsonakwa and Yolaikia, (Kiva, 2001). This book was a shot in the dark, but I love what I’ve read so far. It is a visually beautiful book and the stories force me into a different perspective, which I also love. I hope that I will find some other sources to try to verify what I’ve read here, but I can’t see the authors benefitting terribly by fraudulently claiming to write from an Abenaki perspective so I expect I will share some of the ideas and stories that I’ve enjoyed.

Rydberg’s Norse Myths

I am also reading a book of Norse Mythology by the 19th Century Swedish novelist, poet and mythologist, Victor Rydberg. A few years ago, I read a fascinating and somewhat head-spinning essay by Rydberg about Freya’s famous necklace, the Brisingsamen. Rydberg is an unusual scholar with unusual theories, and again, it is difficult to research the methods that allowed him to come to many of his conclusions. I must add though, that Rydberg’s Norse Myths address problems that have always bothered me about Norse Myths; centrally, that there aren’t enough stories and the stories that exist are fairly narrowly focused on Thor, Loki and Odin. Rydberg may have arrived at a lusher set of tales by mixing later materials together with the old reliables, but there may be reason to suspect that later heroic tales were based on earlier mythological versions. I just feel the need to understand the logic that led him to do it. I’ve corresponded with the translator of Rydberg’s Our Fathers’ Godsaga, William P. Reaves, who maintains the prolific germanicmythology.com and I hope that he, or his website, can help direct me to the sort of information I seek. As with the Abenaki folklore text I am reading, Rydberg is worth reading. Even if Rydberg’s research methods would not be supported today by scholars, I suspect that they will be an interesting case study in mythology.

Avenging Medusa

Sculptor Luciano Garbati's Medusa, recently installed outside a Manhattan Courthouse.

There was an interesting story recently that really suits the original purpose of Practical Mythology, in that it is a mythological tale being used to address a modern purpose. A park across from the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse apparently now has a seven-foot tall statue of a nude Medusa holding the severed head of Perseus (her killer in Greek Myth) and a sword. The statue, which plays upon a version of the tale in which Medusa is cursed with snakes for hair after being raped by Poseidon in Athena’s temple, turns Medusa into an avenger for women who have suffered violence at the hands of men. The story has gotten good play (a post in Newsweek) and it was hard for me to think of a way I could turn it around as a fully researched piece as quickly as I’d like. Curiously, I also think that because I hadn’t before heard the version of the story where Medusa was raped, I needed time to adjust to seeing one of the first monster villains I can remember from childhood as the hero. I identified with Perseus after watching Clash of the Titans, but I logically understand sculptor Luciano Garbati’s purpose, and I’m happy for women who are happy to see themselves in a Medusa who turns the tables on men trying to kill her.

Nobel Prize for Poetry

I have been poring through an anthology of American poet, Louise Glück's work after she was announced the 2020 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and heard that mythology was a common theme in her work. I have found several poems on the topic that I like and I have a post planned when I finish reading -- yes, I’m trying to read everything she wrote and, yes, that feels a bit crazy now that I write it. One of my favorite finds so far is a poem about the writer's life, “The Mountain,” which plays on the myth of Sisyphus, and feels about right some days.

A New Translation of Beowulf

Most Beowulf scholars would be afraid to approach Maria Dahvana Headley in a bar.

I have read through most of Maria Dahvana Headley’s lively and irreverent Beowulf and found passages I like, and passages I don’t like. I've been dragging my heels a bit because I wrote several pieces on Beowulf in August and September, and I feel a greater responsibility when I write on the topic from having studied the text for so many years. On the whole, Headley's isn’t a Beowulf for me, but then, I don’t particularly need a new Beowulf, and someone else surely does. Seamus Heaney’s translation was an accessible entry point for many new readers who would not have read the poem otherwise, but Heaney was not the most accessible text for the teenagers I taught. If I were teaching the text today, I would find some way to bring Headley into the classroom. I think she could very well be the right voice for a teenage reader.

Christmas Tomtes and Other Scandinavian Folksong

Harald Wiberg's illustration of the helpful farm protector from Astrid Lindgren's The Tomten.

Finally, I have been working on several folksongs with my seven-string Kravik-style lyre. This is a monthslong process as I am learning to play and sing with the lyre and also developing songs for it that require a bit of finagling sometimes because of the limited number of strings. I am also dedicated to singing these songs in a language my listeners will understand, which means that I usually have to adapt lyrics from literal translation. My current focus is a Norwegian Christmas song called "Haugebonden." I had to pester some people in Norway to find a kind folklorist to translate its archaic Telemark dialect for me, but now I have to make the lyrics match up to the rhythm of the song and make reasonably good enough sense for an English-speaking audience to follow. A haugebonde is a kind of helpful spirit that dwells on a farm. The word, mound farmer, or farmer from under the mound, comes from the belief that he is spirit of the first farmer who cleared the land. The tradition is similar enough to that of the tomte that a haugebonde may today be visualized as a little man with a beard and red hat, a sort of gnome or fairy that protects the farm. It is a very sweet song and I hope to be able to perfect it to record it before Christmas this year. That might be a stretch as I have had a hard time finding a way to play it in a key that allows me to sing it. This, again, is a result of playing an archaic instrument. But hope abounds and I made some progress with my teacher this week. So hopefully I will debut my first song here by the end of the year!