Hey, I’m probably gonna go when Tumblr kills itself in a couple of weeks so if anybody wants to keep in touch with me, send me a message and we’ll figure something out.
if youve never physically been in the presence of like, a real live wolf, and you probably wont get the chance to, heres some stuff about them you should know
a wolf’s fur is so unbelievably thick that you can get like, your whole hand into it while petting. and then you can keep going
wolves are a lot bigger than you think they are. think about how big you think a wolf is then just like double that
they dont really smell like dog but they DO smell and youre not going to be able to figure out if its a good smell or not
a wolf really wants to lick the inside of your mouth. he will not stop trying to lick the inside of your mouth at any cost, and generally speaking you need to press your lips together kind of tightly when he approaches your face so that he doesnt worm his damn tongue in there to give you what he thinks is an appropriate greeting
a wolf doesnt really want to look at you while you pet him but he wants you to pet him. hes embarrassed
if a grown ass wolf decides to lay down on you, you just have to deal with it and thats your life now
young wolves, much like young dogs, are overwhelmingly goofy and stupid. a teenage wolf will see your very fragile, very human shoulder and go “i can probably step on that with my full weight” and then he will do it
letting a wolf eat out of your hand is actually not remotely frightening, and youll want to do it all day
One of the contractors at work drove past my shack on a forklift yesterday, stopped, backed up to my window and said, “hey, do you have a boyfriend or girlfriend?”
My knee jerk response when asked this, even if it’s by a companionable dude old enough to be my dad, is to go, “uh, nah-” and then ramble uncomfortably until someone stops me-
-which is what I started to do, only to be cut off by Contractor saying, in an embarrassed rush, “some of the guys were asking me because you and I talk sometimes, but I didn’t want them to hit on you at work, so I told them that you Worship the Devil and would Hex them if they tried. I’m sorry.”
Which leaves me wheezing helplessly, trying to get my shit together, because this is honestly one of the nicest, most hysterical things I’ve ever heard someone say to me.
Oblivious to this, Contractor then follows up with, “and they were like ‘forreal??’ so I was like, ‘yeah, she’s probably a sadist, too, you can tell by her jewelry. She’ll stab you or something.’”
And tbh I can’t even come up with anything witty to say in response, so all I manage to choke out is, “pleASE LET THEM CONTINUE TO THINK THAT, I’M BEGGING YOU.”
And Contractor just smiles and is like, “Okay! I just wanted to let you know!” before driving off with his forklift.
Like?? Thank god for Contractor tbh. He’s an angel among men, and I hope the rest of his life is filled with prosperity and happiness and like, that he finds $20 on the ground every week for the rest of his life.
Update: Every time Contractor sees me, he does a little Devil Horns gesture at me and its adorable.
Update the Second: I saw Contractor while doing my tour and he told me that the guy that asked if I was single was around, and that if I saw him, I should just make complicated hand gestures at him while I walk by to scare him off.
Like the thing about Loki in Norse mythology is there’s like 8000 myths about Loki just being chaotically mischievous and the other gods are like lol oh that scamp, no matter how disastrous his schemes are, their reaction is still pretty much always ‘haha oh that’s just Loki.’
EXCEPT for basically….one myth. Where Loki’s instrumental in the death of Baldur and the gods are all WHOA TOO FUCKING FAR DUDE and send him to Hel to be tormented for all eternity, leading to his ultimate escape/release in Ragnarok to end all things and lead the army of the damned and his monstrous children to pretty much…eat all the gods, destroy Asgard, and burn the World Tree all to the ground so it can all start over.
Here’s the thing though. Norse mythology spanned centuries. The tales of Loki as the mischievous trickster god were told for centuries.
However, for most of that time, the myths were told as part of oral traditions passed down generation to generation, until they were finally compiled in manuscript form in the 13th century, roughly. This is when pretty much all the sagas, as Norse myth compilations were called, are considered to have been written down for the first time, and so they included thousands of stories that had been told over hundreds of years.
They were also regional, though there was a lot of overlap, given that the Vikings traveled widely and regularly across the various parts of Scandinavia. Still, different parts of Scandinavia had their own sagas. Norway had different sagas than Denmark who had different sagas than Iceland, etc. Even though all of them featured primarily the same figures, they each had their own unique stories featuring the gods. However, very rarely did they have radically different takes on those gods.
Now what’s significant about the fact that pretty much every saga we have, where these myths were all finally written down and preserved, is from the 13th century….
Is that pretty much all of Scandinavia had converted to Christianity by the early 12th century, with active worship of the Norse gods being scattered and mostly underground from that point on.
Why is this significant?
Because it means every Norse myth we have a written recording of was not written by people who still actively worshiped those gods. Nor were they intended to be read as such at the time.
They were written down by Christian scholars who wrote them AS stories. They were intended as collections of their regions’ cultural histories, but not by or for people who still actively believed in these stories or the figures they featured. They weren’t like….TRYING to be super accurate, is the thing. The scholars who wrote these sagas were writing down the stories that had been passed down for generations, but through the lens of people who saw them as stories their ancestors once believed, not ones that pertained to their own current worldview.
And they were writing these sagas for an audience of people who similarly believed as they believed.
Which means that inevitably, some things got ‘adjusted’ to fit the current world view, the zeitgeist of the scholars writing down the stories and that of the people who would read or have the stories read to them from thereon. Because again, they weren’t aiming for being 100% faithful to the tales as they’d been told to them. They were just treating them as stories. And what do you do when the story you’re writing down has elements that don’t make that much sense to you because they were born of and aimed a worldview that doesn’t match yours?
Well, if you’re the Christian scholars writing the Norse sagas, you ‘tweak’ those elements until they make a story that fits your worldview.
So remember how I said the various sagas were regional and had a lot of overlap but some stories were distinct to some regions and didn’t show up elsewhere?
Yeah, Ragnarok is one of those.
Thousands of sagas encompassing centuries of Norse mythology and oral traditions were written down all over the various regions of Scandinavia in the 13th century.
Ragnarok only showed up in one.
The most famous, granted, but still. Everything we’re told in Norse myths about the death of Baldur and Loki’s role in it, leading to his punishment and torment in Hel and his ultimate release and bringing forth the armies of Hel to slay the gods and end the world?
Comes from the Prose Edda and the later Poetic Edda, from Iceland.
Which had primarily converted to Christianity as far back as 1000.
Now, the Vikings? Were actually surprisingly not a big doom and gloom people. Pretty much every assumption of them as such comes from how synonymous we regard Ragnarok with their culture.
It is after all, the ultimate Judgment Day myth, isn’t it? Right up there with Christianity’s Book of Revelations. An apocalyptic end of the world scenario, a war between heaven and hell, where everything is destroyed so that the world can basically start fresh with a clean slate. Nothing old ‘deserves’ to survive, pretty much the only way for a world free of sin and evil to arise is from the ashes of the old, after everything has been cleansed with fire.
Now contrast this ‘myth’ with pretty much every other Norse myth that’s survived. Larger than life tales of grand adventures, noble quests, gods walking among mortals in disguise and heroes fighting giants and stealing from dragons.
Where the closest thing the Norse pantheon has to a devil figure is Loki, the god of mischief….not even evil, but MISCHIEF, because a far more accurate representation of the Vikings’ world view is that sometimes shit happens, because Loki the god of chaos likes to make a mess of things. And what do you do when that happens? If you’re the Vikings, you basically just shrug, go “well, that’s Loki” for you, and drink some more mead.
Loki isn’t vilified in a single myth until Ragnarok, because the Vikings didn’t hate him. And they certainly didn’t fear him. They LAUGHED at him. In nine out of ten myths, Loki ends up the subject of ridicule himself, as he has the tables turned on him or outsmarts himself
Until Ragnarok.
Which, granted, could very well be another Norse myth that was passed down generation to generation in Iceland, land of frequent volcanic eruptions and likely inspiration for Musplheim, the land of the fire giants.
BUT. Which could equally likely, and far more plausibly given the overall context of Norse mythology, simply be a story the scholar who wrote the Prose Edda made up to ‘finish off’ his saga of the world according to the Vikings, from beginning to end.
An ending his Christian audience of the times would understand and identify with a lot better than they would understand the concept of a devil-figure that existed to be LAUGHED at, to show how little the Vikings feared some mythical figure with the power to lie and deceive them….the complete opposite of the way Christians feared Satan.
Basically put….Ragnarok, for all that we think of it as the ultimate Norse myth….DOES NOT MAKE SENSE in the context of almost EVERY single other Norse myth AND in the context of how Norse society viewed the world and their place in it, or their gods and their relationship with them.
Same with Loki’s depiction in Ragnarok.
What both Ragnarok and Loki’s role in Ragnarok DO make sense in the context of, however, is in a bastardization of Christianity’s own doomsday tales of a Judgment Day, stylized to fit the trappings of Norse mythology and feature their gods instead of Christian figures.
With Loki recast in the role of the Devil, as he was the closest fit they could find to that.
And with Baldur, god of light (a Norse god who is at best a footnote in Norse myths other than Ragnarok, and certainly was never the major pantheon figure he’s assumed to be), recast in the role of the Christ figure. Whose death starts the ball rolling for Judgment Day and who is destined to return for it, to triumph over Loki/Satan and preside over the new, purified world once it’s reborn from the ashes of the old one.
Anyway, tl;dr, don’t believe the hype, Ragnarok’s probably not even an actual Norse myth but the invention of Christian writers who were like lol this would make for a great Book of Revelations fanfic AU, and Loki was almost certainly never regarded by actual Vikings as some evil, malicious world-destroyer who would lead armies of the dead at Armageddon whoops I mean Ragnarok.
not to be harry potter on main but i honestly think the fantastic beasts series would have been so much more interesting if it was just about the beasts. i don’t give a fuck about grindelwald, just give me a movie about an eccentric wizard travelling the world looking for magical animals and teaching us the power of friendship
newt’s character should have been like the crocodile hunter but in a wizard hat send tweet
I will always be angry about the fact that Fantastic Beasts wasn’t a Walking With Dinosaurs/ March of the Penguins style documentary about magical creatures. Newt could have been a narrator who is never seen and the film could have gone over mythical creatures, HP-universe creatures and, actual animals we can find and look at and learn about that really exist but which are weird and Newt explains why they’re NOT magical. If the documentary needed a driving plot it could have been about Newt looking for a Lethifold or a specific Dragon, or something.
