"He travels from place to place in disguise, to see the world as people see it. When he walks among us, he does so as a tall man, wearing a cloak and hat."
-Neil Gaiman, Norse Mythology (London, 2018), p.2.
We know this from reading Poul Anderson.
Also:
"He has different names in every country (for he is worshipped in different forms and in many tongues, but it is always Odin they worship.)"
-ibid.
This expresses something. Converts to Krishna Consciousness believe that it was always Krishna that they wanted to meet. Now that I practice zazen, I feel that I was always moving towards the Buddha Dharma.
Gaiman also tells us that he does not know whether Ragnarok has happened yet and that this makes the Norse myths linger, remaining "...strangely present and current...," (p. xii) whereas other better-documented belief systems seem old and past. (I saw a juvenile retelling that began by placing Ragnarok not in the future but in our far past so that we are living in the new world.) Poul Anderson's Tau Zero was a modern scientific cosmological cyclical myth.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
And some commentators have wondered if Eddaic ideas about Ragnarok did not ultimately come from Christian ideas about the end of the world. The stories about the Norse gods might have taken their final forms after some Scandinavian pagans were influenced by Christian ideas.
Ad astra! Sean
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