Malte reviewed I begyndelsen var skriget by Henning Kure
Review of 'I begyndelsen var skriget' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
In the beginning was not the word, but the scream. The first being in Norse mythology was Ymir, which literally means The Screamer. Everything was made from its body. So much for the world being a void that was then filled by a male figure's words. As if the world could be mansplained into being.
This is a totally avant-garde take on Norse cosmology, showing how it was much weirder and fleshier than earlier scholars thought. Both scholarly on point and spiritually "from within" a tradition that is almost all respects a broken tradition, that is, everyone who finds something of value here could not have relied on much oral transmission and the people who live in this part of the world have been almost entirely colonized the cosmology of the respective nation states. People who role-play "Vikings" and claim a "viking" ancestry today are for the most part missing …
In the beginning was not the word, but the scream. The first being in Norse mythology was Ymir, which literally means The Screamer. Everything was made from its body. So much for the world being a void that was then filled by a male figure's words. As if the world could be mansplained into being.
This is a totally avant-garde take on Norse cosmology, showing how it was much weirder and fleshier than earlier scholars thought. Both scholarly on point and spiritually "from within" a tradition that is almost all respects a broken tradition, that is, everyone who finds something of value here could not have relied on much oral transmission and the people who live in this part of the world have been almost entirely colonized the cosmology of the respective nation states. People who role-play "Vikings" and claim a "viking" ancestry today are for the most part missing the point (to just take the most obvious: the so called "viking age" was clearly a Christian age in the Nordic countries, the act of "going viking" in many cases Christian crusades, and many of the myths from that time in effect having been rewritten by Christian scholars). Kure clears up many misunderstandings that to this day still dominate the popular view on pre-Christian Nordic cosmology. It's a real shame this is not available in English full-length considering the many strange fantasies being projected on "Nordic culture" these years. There's fortunately a 9-page summary of his reading of the creation myths which can give you a sense of where it's going: Go find "In the Beginning Was the Scream: Conceptual Thought in the Old Norse Myth of Creation".