March
30
/ 2017
“Brothers shall fight | and fell each other,And sisters' sons | shall kinship stain;Hard is it on earth, | with mighty whoredom;Axe-time, sword-time, | shields are sundered,Wind-time, wolf-time, | ere the world falls;Nor ever shall men | each other spare. ( Poetic Edda¸ 9.) And so began the final battle of the Norse gods: the one-eyed leader Odin, hammer-wielding Thor, and the mortal comrades chosen at death to fight alongside them against the forces of Hel and the trickster god, Loki. These comrades, once human men—princes and kings—were chosen in their final breaths of life by women who moved swiftly and suddenly through grounds hazy with blood; women whose primary role was to determine which men would be immortalized to
