Bonus-Hiatus-Guest-Post: About Ull (from S.T. Bende, Author of Elsker!)

[Note from Amalia: We've mentioned Ullr in passing now and again, mostly in relation to his family members, so I was thrilled to invite S.T. Bende to tell us a little bit more about him, especially since she's made Ullr into her hero, Ull, in Elsker!]

Amalia and I met on Twitter, when @NazareaAndrews tipped us off to our mutual admiration of Thor.  I clicked on Amalia’s website and I was hooked - come for Thor, stay for more?  Good heavens, how had we not met before?

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My debut novel, Elsker, is a modern twist on the mythology surrounding Thor’s stepson -- Ull.  You see, once upon a time in Asgard, Sif had a son.  Nobody’s clear on who she had the son with, the Prose Edda just says she had one.  (The Prose Edda is Snorri Sturluson’s epic 13th Century account of the Norse stories -- it’s more or less the gold standard of Norse mythology.  I tried to read it at my library, and ended up picking up D’Aulaire’s Book of Norse Myths for children, instead.  Baby steps.)

Anyway, Sif had a son.  Then she married Thor, making Sif, Thor, and Ull the original blended family. Ull grew up to be the Norse God of Winter.  He was renowned for his athletic abilities, and he pulled extra duties as the God of Archery, Hunting, and Skiing.  Mythologically speaking he may have married Skadi, the jotun/goddess associated with skiing and winter.  And considering the number of sites throughout Scandinavia bearing his name, he must have been a pretty major diety at one point.

But scholastically speaking, Ull was a pretty blank page.  And that made him the perfect casting choice for the god who steals the heart of Elsker’s small town protagonist, Kristia Tostenson.  I had an epic time creating my Ull.  I knew he was a hunter, so I gave him a day job as an Asgardian Assassin.  I knew he was God of Winter, so I let him enroll in Midgard’s (Earth’s) graduate schools to study climate change and environmental sciences.  After all, global warming would wreak havoc on the God of Winter’s job security.  But most importantly, I knew he’d lost his father at some point in his life, so I gave him some serious insecurities.  When Ull meets Kristia, he’s absolutely terrified.  He’s seen a lot of loss in his life, and knows the Norse apocalypse (Ragnarok) is around the corner.  Ull can’t fathom dragging someone he could potentially love into the middle of the battle between good and evil, any more than he can fathom someone choosing to spend their life with a trained killer.  But there’s more to Kristia than meets the eye, and she’s determined to show Ull that he deserves her love.  Because sometimes fulfilling your destiny means doing the exact opposite of what The Fates have in store.

Thanks so much for hosting me Amalia, and happy Tyr’s dag -- Tuesday!

You can learn more about Elsker over at Entranced Publishing, add it on goodreads, and be sure to check out the fantastic, Thor-Lovin' S.T. Bende on twitter, facebook, and her blog!

Sif, Goddess of... Prosperity?

We've talked a little bit about Sif before on the blog -- mostly in regard to how little we have in the source material attesting to her character, which I'd like to recap briefly:

Sif

Thor's wife, Sif, is only related to us in any real detail in two places. A story in the Skáldskaparmál (from Snorri's Prose Edda) during which Loki shaves off her hair in the night as a cruel prank, and within a poem called the Lokasenna in the Poetic Edda where Loki insults by turns the majority of those residing in Asgard, Sif included. Sif is greatly upset by the loss of her hair, and Loki, to make amends (and probably to prevent Thor from delivering a beating he wouldn't soon forget) retrieves for her a wig of golden hair from the dwarves to replace it. In the Lokasenna, Loki accuses Sif of taking him as her lover. We don't know if Sif actually did have an affair with Loki or not, as it is neither confirmed nor denied anywhere else in the remaining myths and she doesn't refute it in the poem.

We know Sif is beautiful, but other than these two accounts, we know nothing about her character. My own interpretation of Sif from these bits and pieces is of a vain goddess, and from the way she addresses Loki in the Lokasenna it almost sounds as though because of her relationship with him, she expects him not to insult her. I wouldn't be surprised if Loki appealed to her vanity to get her into bed with him, since Thor is so often out wandering and getting into fights with giants.

But there's a third discussion of Sif's character that I mentioned in a later post, from the Lay of Hárbarðr, wherein a disguised Odin, in a match of insult with Thor, tells his son that Sif is having an affair and he should get back home and deck that guy instead of standing around unarmed in a battle of wits. Add to this the established fact that Sif has a son, Ullr, who is most explicitly named as Thor's step-son, and it gives you some food for thought. Either Sif had an affair with someone before her marriage to Thor (totally plausible) or she had an affair after she married Thor.

Admittedly, both of these accusations regarding Sif's fidelity are brought out in Flyting Poems, wherin the entire point is to out-insult the other party. And just as admittedly, calling a dude a cuckold is probably low-hanging fruit. But you have to wonder. Or at least I do. Especially when there is so little else to support any indication of Sif's character beyond the story of her hair being shorn, are these two references to her as an adulteress preserved for a reason? Is it another way to show that Thor is kind of a dumb ox, too stupid to realize his wife is fooling around behind his back? But if so, it's only powerful if it's true.

Now it's pretty well assumed that Sif's golden hair is an association with wheat and the bounty of the harvest, and her marriage to Thor is maybe representative of the union of sky god and earth goddess -- the rain falling to fertilize the fields -- but I'm not sure this makes Sif herself a goddess of fertility, so much as it reflects upon Thor's position as a god of fertility. But what if Sif with her golden hair made of magic, practically living gold, was a goddess of prosperity instead? The sheering of her hair being representative of the harvest and the reaping of wheat is pretty well accepted, but instead of Sif growing that hair back like any normal person, it's replaced with gold. What if she's the goddess invoked to protect the STORES, the goddess of the gathered bounty, and the wealth it can provide in exchange.

There isn't, that I've found so far, any sign or symbolism related to Sif as a healer, but prosperity is hardly limited to grain and money (though I do kind of like the idea of her being a goddess of bread and beer, just because... alliteration). Prosperity is a product of health -- a man being strong enough to plow his fields and plant his seed, then capable of harvesting it, bringing it to market after that. It's a product of surviving childbirth and raising those kids to adulthood to help work the fields and support the family.

But if she's a goddess concerned with wealth, that certainly might relate to greed and vanity, in addition. Success and prosperity is so often caught up in honor and respect. Appearances and keeping up with the Joneses, next door. And if Thor is running around having affairs with Giantesses -- Jarnsaxa is the father of Magni, Thor's son -- and leaving her at home while he goes about Adventuring, it isn't difficult to believe that Sif might be inclined to punish him for the perceived slight to herself. And what Sif can give by way of prosperity, bounty, children, gold, honor, health, I have no trouble believing she can take away.

Maybe that's why the only child Sif and Thor have together is one, single daughter, Thrud.