Gannungagap

I wanted my students to have experience with more mythology than just the Greek and Roman varieties, if you count those two as separate, which I don’t. So I spent an hour this morning researching Norse mythology. The more I read about it, the more fascinating it is. It is unbelievably complicated, which gives me the challenging of picking out the essential bits for my students and simplifying it down, and is very different from the mythology I’m used to studying. However, although its outward forms are unfamiliar and strange, it is also a mythology with which I, and all of my students are intimately familiar. Although Greek mythology is the one whose stories we know, and for whose gods we named out planets, and the pantheon we study over and over in school, Norse mythology is the one that has captured our fantasies since our ancestors lived in the deep forests of Europe. Our academics may have adopted the Greek mythologies, but our folk tales have many more elves and dwarves than they do chimeras and centaurs.

Not only that, but it contains even more fun words than Greek mythology does. Although I love words like Diomedes and Hephaestus, they can’t compare to something like Gannungagap and Ymir and Niflheim.

Two unrelated notes:

1) I have now officially applied for my own job. Applying for the job I already have feels slightly weird.

2) In a brief moment of boredom, I cyberstalked someone today. I admit it! I googled them. And I found pictures of them when they were in high school and the address of their blog. I guess I have now officially joined my generation.