Posts Tagged with Loki

Reasons to love Thor: Ragnarok

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Thor: RagnarokOK, before we get into discussing why you should see Thor: Ragnarok, we’re going to ignore for a moment that the title of this post misspells “ragnarök” as “ragnarok.” I’m sure if it were a section of Taika Watiti’s Thor movie, there would be a “devil’s anus” joke to riff on here. And I’m a bit disappointed that a movie willing to use Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” not once, but twice, didn’t get an umlaut in its title.

But such petty concerns are beside the point. I loved this movie. It was exactly as fun as I hoped it would be.

And, in its many departures from Norse mythology, it actually uses them to make a point. Unlike the first two Thor movies (which I enjoyed in their own right), Taika Watiti’s Thor: Ragnarok finds a way to make the Marvel superhero Thor both epic and funny. (In Thor, he was funny, but not epic. In Thor: The Dark World, he was epic, but not exactly funny.)

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More Wrestling With Gods: 18 Days of Tesseracts interview

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Corey Redekop has undertaken the Herculean feat (like that Greco-Roman mythic metaphor there? I’m so subtle) of interviewing the contributors to Tesseracts 18: Wrestling With Gods as part of the 18 Days of Tesseracts event, on now. I have the honour of being interview number seven.  Here’s a taste of the thought-provoking questions he had, and my best attempts at provoked-thought answers. You can see the entire series as it unfolds at Corey’s site.

What is it about so-called “genre” writing that makes it such an effective avenue for theological discussions?

I think genre stories can tap into what we now call myth. Modern audiences maybe need that little lever to get us out of literalist thinking—as if any fiction, genre or otherwise, is absolutely realistic. I don’t think people treated stories in such a fragmented way in the past; we didn’t have to distinguish between the historical or factual or fantastic to get enjoyment and value out of a story. But since religion and faith necessarily deal with questions of meaning, as I think the really old stories do, and aren’t bounded by what we conceive of as the natural world, I think speculative fiction is aptly suited to tackle similar questions.

Who’s your favourite god?

My favourite is Thor, but I think the best stories in the Norse tales we still have access to are about Loki. If you take them as a whole, you see how problematic but also necessary the Trickster figure is. Loki is at times helpful, indispensable, foolish, spiteful or disastrous. We’re much poorer for all the Norse myths that went unrecorded and were lost.

If you were a god for one day, what would you do?

I’d visit the bottom of the ocean and wrestle with krakens.

You can read the entire interview here.

Thunder God Thursday: Chadwick Ginther’s Thunder Road

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Full disclosure: I’ve not only read Chadwick Ginther’s Norse-mythology-infused novel set in Manitoba, Thunder Road, I got to do so in my capacity as freelance copy editor.  So I felt, having had a part in its production, I shouldn’t interview Chadwick about his book.

But, I figured, there was nothing wrong with hosting him as part of a blog tour. (Info on the book launch can be found at the end of this post; he’ll also be appearing at Thin Air: the Winnipeg International Writers’ Festival this autumn.)

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Thunder God Thursday: Thor hits the funnybooks

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Artist Oliver Coipel revamped Thor’s look for Marvel Comic’s reboot of the series, written by J. Michael Straczynski, in 2007.

Author’s note: a few things have changed since this was written. First, there was the resurrection of Thor by Marvel Comics in the acclaimed run on the new title by J. Michael Straczynski, alluded to in the comments from Tom Brevoort below. Also, there were new incarnations of Norse myths in independent comics, such as Grant Gould’s The Wolves of Odin.

And one other thing, what was that?  Oh yeah, Marvel’s Thor is going to be a female character now, which has some people excited (nothing wrong with a more diverse Marvel lineup) and some people upset (because they forget Marvel’s Thor has also been a frog and a horse-faced alien, among other incarnations).

Add to that, two blockbuster movies starring Chris Hemsworth as the titular thunder god, who also featured in The Avengers movie and in its sequel, The Age of Ultron, due out in 2015.  If you want to see how the god of thunder went from medieval god to modern superman, read on…

The Modern Edda: Norse myths in comics

Though their names leap out at us from the days of the week, Norse gods were relatively obscure until recently. Opera figures of Siegfried and Brunnhild were one tentative step into this pagan world, but it took another form of entertainment to plunge a new generation into the old myths: comic books.

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Norse code

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ONE of the reasons Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were able to cast ancient Norse gods as modern comic-book superheroes was that they were comparatively unknown, Richard Wagner and the names of our weekdays notwithstanding. Here, then, are a few terms so you can tell your Asgard from a Hel in the ground.

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