When the Fires Were Lit — The Road from Ásgarðr (Part 1)
I thought we were ready for the negotiations. My apologies for taking so long. This one I have actually had to split into two episodes in order to flesh it out the way it deserves. Part 2 might take a little bit longer to write and publish.
For the first three parts of When the Fires Were Lit, we have walked through this story primarily beside the Vanir. We met Gullveig before she ever crossed the borders into Ásgarðr. We explored Vanaheimr, its people, its relationships, and the world they were trying to protect. Then we followed them into the First War and watched that conflict become increasingly personal until there was very little left for either side to win.
The Vanir are finally ready to talk. So logically, that should be where we go next. Except something kept pulling at me every time I tried to sit and write that next piece. We aren’t ready yet.
We know why the Vanir are coming to the negotiation table. We know what they have lost and what the war has cost them. We have stood inside their homes, met their families, and watched some of those relationships bend or break beneath years of violence. But what do we actually know about the people waiting for them across that field?
We know their names from the lore of course: Óðinn, Frigg, Týr, Vili, Ve, Mímir, and others whose names will eventually become inseparable from the stories of Ásgarðr. We know what the surviving mythology tells us some of them become. What we don’t really know is how they got there.
One of the things I love—and occasionally find absolutely maddening—about working with Norse mythology is just how enormous some of its silences are. Mostly this is due to a lack of primary source material in extant. But there is also the problem that when it WAS written down a lot of gaps were left. I recently watched an episode of Dr. Jackson Crawford’s YouTube channel where he highlights a few reasons for those gaps: the author didn’t know what actually happened, the author didn’t think it important enough to write down, the author presumed people would know what those gaps held, etc. Even he said it was enormously frustrating. We are glad to have anything at all but it is long past time to recognize that those gaps deserve to have their stories told.
Right now, monumental events happen in a handful of lines. Then suddenly everyone has moved on. People appear with little explanation of where they came from. Others disappear just as abruptly. Relationships are mentioned without beginnings. Wars happen without campaigns. Marriages exist without courtships. Children appear without childhoods. Even the creation of the cosmos moves with astonishing speed when we stop and think about the enormity of what is actually being described.
Ymir lives. Ymir dies. A flood follows. The cosmos is shaped from what remains. Life continues.
Those are not small events. There are entire lifetimes hiding between those statements. And those are the spaces I keep wandering into. For this part of When the Fires Were Lit, we’re going much farther backward than I originally expected. Before the war and Gullveig. Before the walls of Ásgarðr. Back to Ymir. Not because I suddenly decided this series needed an extended detour through the Norse creation story, but because the farther I followed the threads backward, the more I realized that the war I have been exploring doesn’t really begin with Gullveig walking through the gates. By then, too much has already happened. Too much we don’t know.
So, we move into the Æsir side of the story. I am pulled to understand the why of what they did. But understanding is not the same as forgiveness. That is as true in real life as in mythology. Nothing we’re about to explore changes what happened to Gullveig. The Æsir violated the rules of hospitality when they turned against their guest. Whatever fears, suspicions, histories, or misunderstandings existed beforehand do not magically make that choice acceptable.
The stories aren’t particularly interesting when everyone can be divided neatly into heroes and villains though. People can do terrible things while believing they have very good reasons for doing them. Sometimes fear wins. Sometimes protecting one person means hurting another. Which often leads us to understand only afterward that the thing we were so certain of was never what we thought it was at all. That doesn’t erase responsibility, it makes it more complicated. And mythology has always been very good at complicated.
So I want to give the Æsir the same opportunity I gave the Vanir. I want to meet them before the war defines them. Before titles and kennings and centuries of retellings make them feel inevitable. I want to let them be people for a while. People who love each other. People who irritate the Hel out of each other. People who make mistakes. People who learn. People who survive things that change them. People who occasionally do something remarkably clever and then follow it with something so spectacularly stupid that you wonder how they survived long enough to become gods. I want to humanize them in a way that is real and visceral without them losing who they are or who they will become.
In other words, people worth sitting around the hearth with. Eventually Gullveig is going to arrive. And when she does, I don’t want us simply asking:
How could they do this?
I want us to know enough about everyone involved that the much more uncomfortable question becomes:
How did they convince themselves they had to?
*A Note About Lore, UPG, and the People You May Not Recognize:
As with the Vanir portions of this series, The Road from Ásgarðr begins with surviving mythology and then wanders quite happily into the enormous territory the sources leave unexplored. Which means this is primarily a UPG storytelling project. There will be events that have recognizable foundations in the Poetic Edda or Snorri’s Prose Edda. But from there, I am exploring possibilities—connecting fragments, imagining motivations, building relationships, and asking what might have happened during all those years the surviving stories skip.
There will also be names and characters in this part of the series that you will not find no matter how enthusiastically you dig through the Eddas. That’s because I created them. For certain parts of the story to work, it requires people that the surviving sources never bothered to name. Giving them names and agency that make sense for what we have of them seemed to build the story more organically. They aren’t secret figures I discovered buried in an obscure manuscript somewhere. They are part of my UPG and creative mythmaking.
I’ll continue trying to make those boundaries clear because I think we can play in the spaces left by mythology without pretending our additions were preserved alongside it. In fact, I think knowing where the surviving story stops makes exploring those spaces even more interesting. We are writing, building, re-telling, and experiencing the mythology of the future. So why not give them something truly entertaining to work from?
This new section of When the Fires Were Lit carries the subtitle: The Road from Ásgarðr: Shadows Before Dawn. There is a reason for that name. Actually, there are several but I’m not telling you what they are yet. ;P
For now, we’re leaving the devastated halls of Vanaheimr and the waiting negotiation table behind. Everyone there will still be waiting for us when we return. Instead, there is another road we need to walk. And it begins much earlier than I expected. Before Ásgarðr was a stronghold. Before the Æsir were a people. Before Óðinn was the Allfather. Back when the worlds themselves were still young enough for the consequences of creation to be settling into place.
Come sit by the hearth for a while and let me tell you a story. It’s time to meet the other side.
For YouTube folks: