Wyrd Gods

The God of Time wants to destroy Eternity. A mysterious immortal seeks vengeance. And a reclusive deity does what no god should ever do: she answers a prayer. As punishment, she is stripped of her powers and trapped in a mortal's body. Now a Wyrd – a fated god – she is haunted by the memories and thoughts of her host and must hide her true identity in order to survive in Niflheim, the rival Norse Underworld. There she discovers the afterlife is not quite what it used to be. Niflheim's new ruler threatens the precarious balance of a world overrun with outcast deities and mortals alike. To save her own sanity and find her way back to the stars, she must help the other Wyrd overcome their grievances to defeat this enemy, but those who would be her allies appear to have motives as hidden as her fragmented consciousness. And yet it seems the greatest threat to her freedom comes from within, and the prize it seeks is her immortal soul...

Interpretations of Beowulf brings together over six decades of literary scholarship. Illustrating a variety of interpretative schools, the essays not only deal with most of the major issues of Beowulf criticism, including structure, style, genre, and theme, but also offer the sort of explanations of particular passages that are invaluable to a careful reading of a poem. This up-to-date collection of significant critical approaches fills a long-standing need for a companion volume for the study of the poem. Larger patterns in the history of Beowulf criticism are also traceable in the chronological order of the collection. The contributors are Theodore M. Andersson, Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur, Jane Chance, Laurence N. de Looze, Margaret E. Goldsmith, Stanley B. Greenfield, Joseph Harris, Edward B. Irving, Jr., John Leyerle, Francis P. Magoun, Jr., M. B. McNamee, S. J., Bertha S. Phillpotts, John C. Pope, Richard N. Ringler, Geoffrey R. Russom, T. A. Shippey, and J. R. R. Tolkien.

Heathen gods are hard to find in Old English literature. Most Anglo-Saxon writers had no interest in them, and scholars today prefer to concentrate on the Christian civilization for which the Anglo-Saxons were so famous. Richard North offers an interesting view of Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian paganism and mythology in the pre-Viking and Viking age. He discusses the pre-Christian gods of Bede's history of the Anglo-Saxon conversion with reference to an orgiastic figure known as Ingui, whom Bede called 'god of this age'. Using expert knowledge of comparative literary material from Old Norse-Icelandic and other Old Germanic languages, North reconstructs the slender Old English evidence in a highly imaginative treatment of poems such as Deor and The Dream of the Rood. Other gods such as Woden are considered with reference to Odin and his family in Old Norse-Icelandic mythology. In conclusion, it is argued that the cult of Ingui was defeated only when the ideology of the god Woden was sponsored by the Anglo-Saxon church. The book will interest students interested in Old English, Old Norse-Icelandic and Germanic literatures, Anglo-Saxon history and archaeology.

The islands of Britain have been a crossroads of gods, heroes, and kings-those of flesh as well as those of myth-for thousands of years. Successive waves of invasion brought distinctive legends, rites, and beliefs. The ancient Celts displaced earlier indigenous peoples, only to find themselves displaced in turn by the Romans, who then abandoned the islands to Germanic tribes, a people themselves nearly overcome in time by an influx of Scandinavians. With each wave of invaders came a battle for the mythic mind of the Isles as the newcomer's belief system met with the existing systems of gods, legends, and myths. In Gods, Heroes, and Kings, medievalist Christopher Fee and veteran myth scholar David Leeming unearth the layers of the British Isles' unique folkloric tradition to discover how this body of seemingly disparate tales developed. The authors find a virtual battlefield of myths in which pagan and Judeo-Christian beliefs fought for dominance, and classical, Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, and Celtic narrative threads became tangled together. The resulting body of legends became a strange but coherent hybrid, so that by the time Chaucer wrote "The Wife of Bath's Tale" in the fourteenth century, a Christian theme of redemption fought for prominence with a tripartite Celtic goddess and the Arthurian legends of Sir Gawain-itself a hybrid mythology. Without a guide, the corpus of British mythology can seem impenetrable. Taking advantage of the latest research, Fee and Leeming employ a unique comparative approach to map the origins and development of one of the richest folkloric traditions. Copiously illustrated with excerpts in translation from the original sources,Gods, Heroes, and Kings provides a fascinating and accessible new perspective on the history of British mythology.

The islands of Britain have been a crossroads of gods, heroes, and kings-those of flesh as well as those of myth-for thousands of years. Successive waves of invasion brought distinctive legends, rites, and beliefs. The ancient Celts displaced earlier indigenous peoples, only to find themselves displaced in turn by the Romans, who then abandoned the islands to Germanic tribes, a people themselves nearly overcome in time by an influx of Scandinavians. With each wave of invaders came a battle for the mythic mind of the Isles as the newcomer's belief system met with the existing systems of gods, legends, and myths. In Gods, Heroes, and Kings, medievalist Christopher Fee and veteran myth scholar David Leeming unearth the layers of the British Isles' unique folkloric tradition to discover how this body of seemingly disparate tales developed. The authors find a virtual battlefield of myths in which pagan and Judeo-Christian beliefs fought for dominance, and classical, Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, and Celtic narrative threads became tangled together. The resulting body of legends became a strange but coherent hybrid, so that by the time Chaucer wrote "The Wife of Bath's Tale" in the fourteenth century, a Christian theme of redemption fought for prominence with a tripartite Celtic goddess and the Arthurian legends of Sir Gawain-itself a hybrid mythology. Without a guide, the corpus of British mythology can seem impenetrable. Taking advantage of the latest research, Fee and Leeming employ a unique comparative approach to map the origins and development of one of the richest folkloric traditions. Copiously illustrated with excerpts in translation from the original sources, Gods, Heroes, and Kings provides a fascinating and accessible new perspective on the history of British mythology.

Weaving Germanic Paganism with mysticism, magic, and his background as a transpersonal therapist, Matthew Ash McKernan introduces you to wyrd, a mysterious web of being that connects everything. Wyrd encompasses all organisms, ecosystems, matter, phenomena, purposes, and possibilities. It is destiny, nature, soul, magic, and mystery intertwined. In Wyrdcraft, McKernan guides you through a process of attuning to wyrd as it manifests within all the domains of your life, teaching you how to sense and intuit the ways of wyrd more clearly than ever before. Exploring the intersections of psychotherapy, ecotherapy, Heathenry, and magic, this contemplative and experiential book offers nearly fifty exercises to help you cultivate wyrd consciousness—an awareness that is naturally revealing, healing, transformative, and becoming. Becoming what, you may ask? You will see as you align with the wisdom of wyrd, heal yourself and our interconnected world, and remember the nature of your Higher Self.

This book invites readers into Tolkien's world through the lens of a variety of philosophers, all of whom owe a rich debt to the Neoplatonic philosophical tradition. It places Tolkien's mythology against a wider backdrop of Catholic philosophy and asks serious questions about the nature of creation, the nature of God, what it means to be good, and the problem of evil. Halsall sets Tolkien alongside both his contemporaries and ancient authors, revealing his careful use of literary devices inspired by them to craft his own "mythology for England."