Review On: Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman
Rating: 4/5
I have been an avid fan of anything related to mythology since I was little. From the copy of the Philippine myths and legends in our bookshelf at home, to Edith Hamilton’s The Mythology book in high school which was a game-changer for me, to the Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan, to the stories of youkai and other otherwordly creatures in Japanese and Oriental folklore, and to the stories of the faeries and leprechauns of Scotland that I would sometimes encounter; mythology has always been a topic that has piqued my curiousity. When Neil Gaiman came out with his book, Norse Mythology, I did not know what to expect to be honest. I didn’t read any reviews of it, nor did I read the summary. I purchased the book without knowing what its pages would hold, except that Goodreads listed it among the Goodreads choice awards in the year it was published.
Just like any story, Norse Mythology starts at the beginning–the beginning of everything. At the beginning there was heaven and earth….or something to that effect. Neil Gaiman begins the telling of Nordic mythology by sharing its genesis story, giving us a detailed and descriptive look into the origins of gods that we’ve often read about or seen in movies (such as in the Marvel movies). Many of us have met these gods/characters in books and movies we’ve seen, but there’s not much about their backstory that we know about. The beautiful thing about how Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology begins is that it explains at the beginning how everything came to be. After that we’re introduced to the worlds (not just one or two, but quite a few) and the unwordly and godlike creatures that have manifested in each one.
How Neil Gaiman writes his book is like a collating of adventure stories, each one introducing a variety of characters and/or going more in-depth into the backstory of more pronounced and well-known Norse gods. We see characters we’re familiar with, and characters we may not have encountered or known about before. We see their happy adventures, their sad encounters, their mischievous exploits, and everything in between. While each story is like a stand-alone adventure, there is a progression in the way the stories are collated, and you see characters introduced in previous chapters re-appearing in later stories. You also see earlier stories being spoken of in later chapters, as if the book is a linear progression of the past to the present.
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