Neil Gaiman: Norse Mythology and American Gods

[Music] who has the most to teach us about surviving a trump administration possibly Argos who kept all of his hundred eyes wide open all of the time and kept looking although then he got screwed over and they wound up being put into a tail of a peacock anyway so as I delve into Neil's biography getting ready for tonight I realized that he touched or invented several of the universes that I used to visit as a child so in an order that might surprise even Neil I'm starting with don't panic a companion to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the galaxy through the comic books of 2080 and Judge Dredd not to mention several episodes of Doctor Who a save the applause reveal please um but also including the quintessential episode of Babylon 5 named day of the dead his authorship is found at the heart of many of these creations then to change tracks more recently in 2013 I find that Neil penned an article for The Guardian entitled why our future depends on libraries reading and daydreaming this passion continues today and is yet one more reason that proves why authors and libraries belong together and now in his latest release Norse mythology Neel fashions primeval stories into a novelistic arc beginning with the genesis of the legendary nine worlds delving into the exploits of deities dwarves and Giants and culminates in Ragnarok the twilight of the gods and the rebirth of a new time and people at BPL we have this work now joining the 247 other copies of works authored by Neil here in the collection so tonight we celebrate Neil and his work as we meet of the intersection of reading writing and the imagination police join me in welcoming to the stage our moderator Jared Bowen and welcome back our guest for tonight Neil himself Neil Gaiman white questions your questions the blue questions are mine the blue cards are mine and we'll well coalesce we'll have a great evening asking all of your questions but let me start with Norse mythology and so clearly you didn't want Chris Hemsworth to have the definitive take on the North Norse gods I love Chris Hemsworth I think he actually pulls off so incredibly well putting putting the Marvel Comics tour on the screen and Marvel is where it started for me you know and I'm like knowledge it in the introduction I would have been about seven years old six or seven and there were Marvel Comics in the UK that were reprints of the American marbles and and what was fun is they started at the very beginning so um it was a comic call I think fantastic with an exclamation mark and the very first story about the Mighty Thor I ever read was was a doctor mild-mannered doctor Don Blake trapped in a cave in Norway by I think aliens and a rockfall as you do and he finds a stick in the back of the cave and he's using the stick to try and bang away the rocks and suddenly there was a clap of thunder and he is transformed into the Mighty Thor and the stick that comes mill near Thor's hammer which I thought was brilliant so I spent the rest of my childhood banging stick you know any walking sticks canes kg the things that have fallen off trees that looked possible and it was never worked but I did not give up because you know you have to obviously Don Blake had had to bang a lot of sticks before he was transformed in the Thor so I that was how discovered Norse mythology and then very rapidly now I was curious I wanted to know more about this you know who these people were and I got a copy of a book called myths of the Norseman by roger lancelyn green and I suddenly discovered that actually Thor wasn't like he was in the comics and Loki wasn't really like he was in the comics and and actually Asgard wasn't this amazing science fictional glorious place it was basically you know a wall and inside it a bunch of holes and little courts and things but um it all felt a lot more real and a lot more weird even than Jack Kirby and Jack Kirby did a lot of weird stuff I was struck that if I did you've just written this now but as you just explained they have been living with you I would presume for a very long time and they have they just been kind of circulating in there and this is the right time for them to come out so November the 10th 2008 is a date that I remember not just because it was my birthday um which it was and not just because um a woman that I didn't know very well but but quite liked and Amanda Parma um she surprised me that day in a park has a human statue when I was not expecting it she just told me she was sitting there reading and I went up to the park to say hello from this lunch that I've had and I turned up very late because she told me that she was sitting on a bench reading and I figure well people who are reading you don't disturb them they you know why would she'll probably be grateful for another 15 minutes reading and what I didn't know is she was dressed as a bride and standing on a box and it was cold and I walked up there with my agent and suddenly I turned a corner and there is his bride on a box and I and I pull out some money and I put it in the basket and she gives me a flower and I say Marilee this is Amanda mantis early um and we go off and I say - Amanda you must have been so calm she says no no no I'm a human statue he do not feel the cold in later years particularly after getting married I have discovered exactly how long she stood there and just how cold she was but the lunch that I came from was a lunch with a lovely lady named Amy cherry from Norton books and Amy was asking me to do a book retelling myths and I said I don't know let me think about it and I thought about it so probably about a year before I said yes I think I will do this and then I thought about it having said yes for probably another two years before I thought okay I think I'm a lot of that was rereading the prose edda and the poetic Edda and chewing over what I was doing and how I would tell the story and eventually I realized okay I think I know the voice I think I know how I can do this and I started doing it and I explained I came up with an analogy the other night in Seattle which pleased me so I will use it again tonight I said it was it was as projects go it was like those people who have niching in their bag that sometimes during the downtime they pull out their knitting I mean you know the waiting at the dentist whether they may do some knitting and this was my meeting it was not it was the thing I did between things I read the very first story um at the MFA in I think about 2013 and I that point I had maybe three stories and I just wanted to find out if they worked for an audience so here in Boston I did this event where basically it was no cameras no recording and I am actually swearing everybody in the room to secrecy and bless them everybody was it woman you know there were 400 people there and nobody said a word nobody went out and said he was doing this book and I had learned that the stories read okay and the voices that I picked worked so I carried on doing my knitting um finally in about 2015 ami cherry my long-suffering and incredibly patient editor said you know that that lunch was in 2008 could we expect the book soon and I thought you know I'm nearly there economists I took a week in at the beginning of 2016 and just did nothing else but wrap up the few stories I hadn't wrapped up and just make sure that read it all through make sure it worked and I sent it off and I was very proud and it came out in February this year went straight to number one on the New York Times list then stayed there and then dropped to number two and I went back up to number one that is now a meanwhile had done the same thing in England and in Canada it's simply being number one for eight weeks and the number one and people say well you must have expected this I think know if I'd expected this it would have been done in 2009 well as you are writing this you're dealing with these tales that have been told for generation after generation just for eons how much license did you feel you had I felt I had the kind of license that you have in jazz or in telling a joke where there are things that you can change and there are things you can't change I couldn't change what happened I couldn't invent material out of whole cloth but what I could do was work on the way that something was told the dialogue was mine the voice is mine even if the events at the events of the story um you know if you're telling a joke and the way that the joke is printed is simply a man walks into a bar and sits down and looks across and there is an elephant on the other side of the room and but the way you may tell that is so there's a guy's had a long day at work he's exhausted he thinks you know what I really need is a drink and he heads out and he finds a little bar on the corner goes down some stairs it's cool there it's nice the orders himself a drink sits down at the table looks around and sitting across the room is the biggest greatest most elephantine elephant he's ever seen and it's sipping a gin and tonic and and you kind of that's how you tell the story so I took Snorri Sturluson prose edda and occasionally in some cases some of the poems from the prose edda as my what happened and occasionally I would allow myself to buttress something that happened from another story um for example there's a story in which Thor and goes off to the land of the Giants and he um that he stays he and Loki stay with a family and there's nothing to eat so Thor kills his goats as you do they cook and eat the goats but he tells them not to break the goat bones in any way and at the end of the meal he puts they take the goat bones he puts them on the goat skin and says a magic word and now his goats a whole again but a boy the farmer's son Elfie he has broken a goat bone to get at the marrow and now the goat is his limping and that's the way the story is in the prose edda but there's also a story um where he goes off to try and get a giant a ol pot to brew ale in from the Giants and as he's fleeing with his goats the lane one stumbles and falls and Thor curses Loki whose fault it was that the goat was laying as a result of which I felt absolutely fine about going back into the first story and having Loki take the kid aside and say you know the only reason he's told you not to eat the goat marrow is because that's how you grow up big and strong like Thor so go ahead do it and the kid does because I felt like okay I have enough justification from that other story to go in and put in a buttress ngey sub corroborated detail um that makes the story feel actually a little more likely why would this kid you know you got the Thunder God has just turned up and he's told you don't touch the bones you don't touch the bones you just mentioned Loki and there there are a lot of there's a lot of trickery in treachery in all of these stories and and I was thinking as I was reading this if you think that these are the foundational stories of humankind and mankind and this is what we learned then you come away with a bit of a cynical look at how we got this way given the trickery and treachery I think what you've got Loki is is is a wonderful entity in his own right because to this day if you get five North scholars together and believe me I have talked to many North scholars over the last few years and ask them so what is Loki you will get five answers or possibly 15 answers as they start quoting other people because he is this glorious anomaly um exactly who he is and what he's doing that they're getting what maybe he's a giant maybe you know his father was a giant but then there are other gods in Asgard whoever perhaps you know his mother is called Lao si he's was referred to as Loki son of Lao si he is for reasons never adequately explained a blood brother to Odin and Odin owes him a favor um I you know that there's all this stuff and he is and he starts out as sort of in that sort of Prometheus kind of way of just being a little bit smarter than the rest of the gods that he goes darker and darker and and there's also the weirdness of the fact that there's almost nowhere named after Loki so you get the feeling that maybe nobody nobody was worshipping him you know Thor thereafter thousands upon thousands of places with Thor's name in a place place name meaning that they were sacred to him or they just wanted to appease him or maybe they thought that they named that place after him he'd be happy with them or something like that but but Loki doesn't get places named after that's the first audience question which I had at the top and is now somewhere in the middle but I remember what it was what is it about gods what is it about ghosts what a great question um what it is about God is that they are projections they are things they are they're blank screens upon which we can see ourselves they are masks that we can step behind and then step out of arm they are things that are both ways of explaining why the world is the way that it is which is a peculiar thing to try and understand anyway was for primitive man is now so they allow us to to explain the world and they also give us the stories we can tell about the world that allows us to make the world comprehensible and also you all feel that different cultures get the gods they need you know the the biggest I mean the Norse gods I love because they're so dark and vaguely doomed and everything is cold and unpleasant and and you compare them people say why not the Greek gods what's the differencing them and the Greek gods and you're going all the Greek gods are always such as you know lounging mostly make use and staring at their reflections in pools or you know chasing nymph through through Sylvan glades um you know you can't you can't lounge naked ly beside a pool in Norse mythology you either freeze to death or be got by mosquitoes if this is a place where you better keep warming and going make a fire and you definitely get the feeling that you are reading the stories of people in em in the hospitable world these are not hospitable stories the stories of the Greeks okay okay the world is fundamentally comfortable there are grapes everywhere ardennes follow-up question to that which figure this is not my question because we're going to get a little partisan here which figure from Greek or Norse mythology has the most to teach us about surviving a trump administration oh what a glorious question it's been it's been very odd with with questions about the book that have to do with with the Trump nests of Trump I had somebody on Facebook who got very angry with me because the New York Times talked about the laughter in the room when I read the story about how they decided to build an enormous wall around Asgard to keep the frost giants out and he was like oh my god you know why would you buckle to-to-to trendiness and do it and I had to say no that's a 1500 year old story really it's not Saturday Night Live I and and my favorite question so far from an NPR interviewer was have we reached peak Ragnarok yet and I got the female know we are very early days of Ragnarok um who has the most a teach us about surviving a trump administration possibly Argos who kept all of his hundred eyes wide open all of the time and kept looking although then he got screwed over and they want I've been putting the tail of a peacock anyway so there you go the trumpets of Trump again you have a favorite guard a favorite God um I have a few favorites I love a Nancy and the the spider God and I did an entire book called a Nancy boys just so that I could tell a Nancy stories um which which I fell in love with um in in Norse mythology all other people say to me well obviously obvious that you're I read this and obviously your favorite guard is Loki and I thought no he's not actually my two favorites are probably Freya who I love writing because she's completely no-nonsense no he's not about to be handed over to anybody in marriage and knows her own mind and a god called classier about which we know very little but um but he's smart he's like and he's not crying I gonna OD in his crafty Odin is cunning and crafty and does cunning crafty things um whereas um classes like Sherlock Holmes yes she sort of figures things out and is so clever that evil dwarves make his blood into Mead so yeah the two of them those two any of the goddesses how did you look at them and how did you look at them to the prism of the 21st century mostly with a great deal of frustration and the frustration tended to be because we don't have many of their stories yet um I say yet maybe one day a trove will show up which it almost definitely won't be we have that there are there are stories that we have we have a lot of Greek myths for example because people were writing them down um the what we have of Norse myths were written down long after Christianity had come in to give her had taken over at the world of the North and they were written down mostly so that by a man called Snorri Sturluson and snorey who was a chieftain and various other things wrote them down he said so that arm poets would be able to understand what were called kennings and the chemins were arm references in nordic poetry to other things you know a simple kenning would be the call to see the whale road they traveled on the railroad well that that's that's the sea and that one's kind of obvious and most of the rest of them are obvious as long as you know the story they're from so if you call gold Freya's ransom or whatever or or Freya's tears and um but the trouble was that people didn't understand didn't know the stories so now he felt that they had they might lose the poem so he wrote down a bunch of the stories and they are what have come down to us um it's very obvious that we don't have all of them we probably don't have a majority of them we had the ones that snoring knew the ones he decided were important and one of the things that is missing from them our stories of goddesses and we have so many names of goddesses you know there was the doctor of the gods you can't have a doctor of the gods and not have a story about the doctor of the gods but there is no story about her they occasionally crop up and the edges of other stories but you start thinking okay well women were probably telling stories too there were probably a lot of great stories about the goddesses and we just do not have them Norse mythology - I don't want to make them out I feel like I you know it would have been really tempting and and it's the kind of thing that I can do if I put my fiction head-on you know we're much more likely to get you know North's goddesses showing up in American Gods - than we ever would be in Norse mythology - because Norse mythology I have to play by the rules but American Gods is my rules you just mentioned the mead of poets and when I was reading that story I was so struck because I think it goes to the heart of what I do and interviewing artists and talking about creative process but it really it goes to the question of where creativity comes from and I wondered as you're writing this if you if it was an existential moment for you and if you began to look at your how it is that you're so creative um you know how it is that I'm so creative it tends to be something that I try not to look at too closely on the basis that what happens if I figure it out and then it's done and it goes away so it's like yes I'm very creative that's pretty good now we need to get on with the next thing and and I don't know if you know Amanda sometimes describes me as a workaholic and I don't think I am but I'm certainly somebody who loves what I do it's never felt like work making stuff up doesn't feel like work we telling old stories doesn't feel like work it just feels like you know it's a joy it's really the best thing there is so um so where does the creativity come from I don't know maybe you know there's all that those sort of nice obvious answers and I do know that I had a long conversation with my sister recently we were talking about our childhoods and the weirdness of our childhoods and there was a point where she would think you know but having said that I wouldn't change anything because if I didn't have my childhood I wouldn't be here and happy and with my family and I thought you know it's true if I if I you are how much you've produced yeah daily I mean it's always you know it's always a battle between you and a blank piece of paper and quite often the blank piece of paper wins it's you know any long fiction writing process you are wrestling a bear and some days you're on top and some days the Bears on top when I was writing a Nancy boys I remember phoning my agent Marilee and saying Marilee I I really can't do this this book is rubbish I'm half way through it three quarters of the way through it and everything written is deep it is I don't think I'm ever going to finish it so you need to tell HarperCollins that you know we will send them their money back and I'm really sorry and really I don't think I'm writer maybe I should just get a real job and get a hotel administration or something and and I explained all this to her and I got to the end and it was a not even a pause and she said oh you're at that point in the book um and I said how do you mean I've done this before and she said yeah you've done this before but most of my clients say this and I didn't even feel alone in my misery somehow it was like all right this is this is a thing apparently and it's a thing that I managed to forget you know I think I remember that one only because we had that conversation because the truth is once once you've done the thing and it's all done you no longer remember Amanda assures me that from the books that she has read on childbirth women actually are sort of programmed by brains hormones and so on and so forth to forget the pain of childbirth you just you're allowed to completely forget about it probably until you're lying on that bed going oh my god it's happening again and I suspect the pain of making a book is very similar you once it's out there you just look proudly yes that is my book I I wrote it it was easy we have another great follow-up audience question to that to the notion of fatherhood and the question is as a new again father has her approach to writing from content and methods changed this purse is an artist and a new mom and says she struggles with finding new ways into ideas and her creative process what I struggle with mostly as a new father is finding the time and making the very best use of the time going okay I you know from here to here I'm being my dad and so if I'm going to be writing from one o'clock to 3:30 I actually have to be writing from one o'clock to 3:30 I can I'm gonna have to get a day's worth of work done during that time so that's that for me is the bigger thing is just going I um I need to use every minute of working and um I think the most the biggest thing for me as a as a parent um as an old parent having done it once before is done it three times before but a long time ago um is I'm much much much more cognizant of enjoying every moment because now I know how fast it goes you know when I had my first kids I thought it was probably gonna go very slowly I was looking anger well when are they going to learn to walk when are they going to learn to talk and what about school I'm gonna be graduating and and now I know that what actually happens is somebody hands you a baby and you hand it back and you look away and then you look back and now they're starting kindergarten and you look over here for a moment and you look back and they're at high school and now they're bringing home their first date you look away and you look back and they're graduating from college and you're not sure how it all happened like that it just went so one of the things I'm trying to do with ash is just go okay the time I give you is the time and I I want to enjoy that I suspect I'm much more likely right now to want to write some more children's picture books and probably write some more children's books because I have an audience I have a built-in audience and as I discovered when I gave him as you I think even my my agent to I'd mentioned now several times Marilee was shocked to discover I didn't have them with me so sent me the board book versions of the two books The Adventures of a sneezing Panda which I started reading to him and discovered that I would normally have to read 15 20 perhaps 30 times a day to him to the point where I was you know cursing the writer for only having done three of these things because everybody has their limit did he make you see things differently how kids always make you see things differently um you know I think my first graphic novel the first real one violent cases existed because having Mike his big brother who is now 33 and then was 3 [Music] you know I remember seeing things through his eyes and being shocked I think it the book began when I threw him over my shoulders and took him up to bed because he wouldn't go to bed he kept coming down fine I just that thing you know throw him over walk upstairs and got a flash of my dad doing that to me and sort of beating on his his back because I was carried upstairs to bed I'm thinking to myself back then well I had kids I would never do this to them and suddenly going oh ok there is a thing here about cycles and about about violence and about childhood and wound up with stuff that I had forgotten long since forgotten about my own childhood just coming back because you're around kids you're seeing them things through their eyes and you're learning things as they learn them and going oh ok that was how I worked I remember that I remember what it was like when my mother taught me my letters and she's got these wooden letters and painted the consonants blue with blue paint blue poster paint and then the vowels we did in red with nail varnish and um and I would make words with them and that was my favorite toy and I don't think I'd you know and until I had kids my own I don't think I'd thought about those letters for you know all my lifetime since I was 2 or 3 and I did to get a sense of your process for a little bit you do you archive these thoughts formally do they just Schwimmer in your head and leap out how do you record these memories these ideas these notions um I have lots of notebooks with things written in in no particular order that I can never find again which occasionally but the act of having written things down tends to move things from sort of a you know short-term memory into long-term memory and very often things will irritate me you know you write you write to get rid of a maggot you write to triumph in something down you don't write with answers you write with questions and you don't write necessarily to find out answers you just write to try and infect other people with your questions the question I really enjoy it again audience questions searching searching searching the question is about format and when an idea comes to you it must have been gone flying onto the floor oh here it is if we have another format we have the email questions so you've written in a variety of formats teleplay novel short story graphic novel screenplay when a new story idea comes to you does its format come with that come with it and if not at what point and how do you decide what format it's meant to be so sometimes things turn up with format and then you're lucky sometimes they turn up with format and you're wrong and then the idea sits around for a while and Anansie boys I originally thought was a movie and I remember trying to write it as a film script several times and beginning it just going this isn't right there's a story of mine called daughter of owls which I thought was a poem and I kept starting it as a poem and it never quite worked it seemed hackneyed and weird and then I went actually let me try it as a short story but let me try it as if it's been written and told by by an English writer called John Aubrey who wrote these brief lives and various sort of wonderful things in 17th century England and so I wrote it as a John Aubrey piece and suddenly it flew um but for me a lot of it is sort of looking at the strengths and weaknesses of different media and then trying to think when you get an idea for a story whether it exploits the strength which which media would play to its strengths um comics are really good for making sure that everybody sees the same thing it's a very visual medium but you can't do tricky things inside people's heads as easily with comics um whereas in prose you can do tricky things in people's heads you can do a much trickier because you're giving them just pure words and forcing them to build harm to build a world with it but now you don't have pictures you don't have agreed-upon pictures you don't have agreed-upon images you can't do in prose one of my favorite things in comics which is the silent panel in comics you can have three panels of somebody talking and then just a silent panel in prose you'd have to say everybody was quiet and now you're saying something you're actually you are making a noise and the joy of it is that you had something there that was perfectly silent um radio plays I love radio plays not a medium that is particularly huge in America although now just sort of starting to gain more traction as the world of audio as people start to discover the attraction of it but one that has has never stopped or died away in the UK and I love it because it has the immediacy of film but you're also engaging the imagination there's a glorious line in the first episode or the second episode I think of the original Hitchhiker's Guide to the galaxy radio play where Arthur Dent turns to his companion while they're stuck in the infinite improbability Drive and says Ford you are turning into an infinite number of penguins and it's a perfect wonderful radio moment because you're imagining you're listening to this and you have to imagine that there's no way that you can ever make an infinite number of penguins happen on a screen in any way there is satisfactory so you're what you're looking for is strengths and weaknesses of a medium and when you take something from one medium to another you then have to figure out how you can translate it because all too often what we think of as armed a faithful adaptation is not going to be a very good adaptation and and I learned that because media are different I and I learned that and I was fortunate I think enough to learn that on my very first graphic novel violent cases because shortly after it was published a theatre company in London said we want to do this on the stage I thought well it's amazing great and they did it as an absolutely faithful arm adaptation in that it begins with somebody telling you a story in the graphic novel so basically somebody came on stage sat down and did the graphic novel content as if it was um as their script and I'm mouthing along in the back row very proudly because they hadn't changed anything except that things that were big and painful and horrible in the graphic novel were nothing when they were on the stage but moments that were um almost trivial and the graphic novel gained enormous weight by being on the stage and now it was much lighter and fluffier and you sort of got to the end anywhere but what was the point of that which I don't think people did when they read the graphic novel it was and I realized that even though all of the words were the same people have had a completely different experience because of the change in media and and that was such an important thing I think to learn and to learn young because it meant that I was just less precious and much more interested in okay what makes what are the strengths of a medium what are the differences when I was writing Good Omens which is a that's mostly what I've actually been doing for the last few years is writing a six-part six hour a six hour long episodes full hours adaptation of Good Omens which the BBC is going to be making for amazon.com which which means we have the bbc's experience and and drama allied to enough money to actually make it which I'm quite looking forward to and but I I but when I got to the last episode of that to episode six I should have looked at what Terry and I had done in the book and basically the last episode would consist of everybody saying goodbye I mean you just sort of it would it would have been even more interminable than the last episode last part of Lord of the Rings it just would have been like you would have been sitting there going this has to end soon or perhaps I will just stab myself in the eye a lot so I had to go okay how can I be absolutely true to what Terry and I did in the novel while at the same time keeping a plot that is picking and people care about and that there's stuff going on until 59 minutes and 30 seconds into this and it was really hard I spent a lot of I spent many weeks cursing Terry Pratchett who for being dead and not at the end of the telephones I could ring him up and go Terry what did we do and and I kept no and I sort of built this Terry in my head because and when I know what he'd say he would go ah grasshopper the answer is in the way you phrased the question and I would go it's not cold for Terry as I know the beginning of this I just have to know what he would say them and and when I did come up with it they're like even more angry with Terry for being dead because it was like I wanted to ring him and tell him I did it I solved it I solved it using going what would Terry do if we were doing this together and I figured it out and I couldn't tell him either and both of those things hurt because my friend wasn't there anymore but it was that thing where you've taken something from one medium to another and what is important is what are the strengths what are the weaknesses what's real about what you're doing before I ask about another adaptation which I think everyone is anticipating for American Gods before we leave the Norse gods I don't know if you wanted to do a read as portion like yes I thought it could be fun to do a little reading and I know that it would be fun to read a bit that I've literally never read in public before and I'm gonna so I've been doing a sort of small evening with Neil Gaiman answering questions tool for last week and I've been reading a few of the Norse mythology stories but I've never read this one and I'm actually not going to read the whole of it I'm a story called the children of Loki and the beginning of the story we learned that Loki has gone off and had some children with a giant s who Odin has had very bad dreams about these children and the gods go off into the land of the Giants they find these three children they bring them back one is an enormous serpent boom Odin casts into the sea one is a girl half dead and half alive her left hand side is dead her right hand side is alive and Odin takes her and gives her hell her name is hell and he gives her the kingdom of hell to look after that was two of Loki's children with anger óbuda dealt with them one in the ocean one to the darkness beneath the earth but what to do with the third when they had brought the third and smallest of Loki's children back from the land of the giants it had been puppy-sized and peer had scratched its neck and its head and played with it removing its willow muzzle first it was a wolf cub gray and black with eyes the color of dark amber the wolf cub ate its meat raw but it spoke because a man would speak in the language of men and the gods and it was proud the little beast was called Fenrir it too was growing fast one day it was the size of a wolf the next the size of a cave bear and the size of the great elk the gods were intimidated by it all except here he still played with it and romped with it and he alone fed the wolf its meat each day and each day the Beast ate more than the day before and each day it grew and it became fiercer and stronger Odin watched the wolf child grow with foreboding for in his dreams the wolf had been there at the end of everything and the last things odin had seen in any of his dreams of the future were the Topaz eyes and the sharp white teeth of Fenris wolf the gods had a council and resolved at that council that they would find Fenrir they crafted heavy chains and shackles and the forges of the Gods and they carried the shackles to senri here said the gods if suggesting a new game you have grown so fast Fenrir it is time to test your strength we have here their heaviest chains and shackles do you think you can break them I think I can said Fenris wolf bind me the gods wrapped the huge chains around Fenrir and shackled his paws he waited motionless while they did this the gods smiled at each other as they chained the enormous wolf now shouted Thor been restrained and stretched the muscles of his legs and the chains snapped like dry twigs the great wolf fouled to the moon in a howl of triumph and joy I broke your chains he said do not forget this we will not forget that the gods the next day Tyr went to take the wolf his meat I broke the fetters said Fenrir I broke them easily you did said tear do you think they will test me again I grow and I grow stronger with every day they will test you again I would wager my right hand on it said tear the wolf was still growing and the gods were in the smithee's forging a new set of chains each link in the chain was too heavy for a normal man to lift the metal of the chains was the strongest metal that the gods could find I am from the earth mixed with iron that had fallen from the sky they called those chains drumming the gods hold the change to wear Fenrir slept the wolf opened his eyes again he said if you can escape from these chains said the gods then your renown and your strength will be known to all the world's glory will be yours if chains like this cannot hold you then your strength will be greater than that of any of the gods or the Giants then Rey nodded at this and looked at the chains called me bigger than any chains had ever been stronger than the strongest bonds there is no glory without danger said the wolf after some moments I believe I can break these bindings chained me up they chained him the Great Wolf stretched and strained but the chains held the gods looked at each other and there was the beginning of triumph in their eyes but now the huge wolf began to twist and to rise to kick out his legs and strain in every muscle and every sinew his eyes flashed and his teeth flashed and his jaws foamed he growled as he arrived he struggled with all his might the gods moved back involuntarily and it was good that they did so for the chains fractured and then broke with such violence that the pieces were thrown far into the air and for years to come the gods would find lumps of shattered shackles embedded in the size of huge trees or the side of a mountain yes shouted Fenrir and howl in his victory like a wolf and like a man the gods who have watched the struggle did not seem the wolf observed to delight in his victory not even tear benriya Loki's child brooded on this and on other matters and Fenris wolf grew huger and hungrier with each day that passed Odin brooded and he pondered and he thought all the wisdom of many as well was his and the wisdom he had gained from hanging from the world's tree a sacrifice to himself at last he called the light elf scania phrase messenger to his side and he described the chain called glen near scania rode his horse across the Rainbow Bridge to Sparta fine with instructions to the dwarfs for how to create a chain unlike anything ever made before the dwarfs listened to scanner described the Commission and they shivered and they named their price Scania agreed as he had been instructed to do by Odin although the dwarfs price was high the dwarfs gathered the ingredients they would need to make Glick Nia these were the six things that dwarves gathered but firstly the footsteps of a cat the secondly the beard of a woman the thirdly the roots of the mountain for fourthly the sinews of the bear for fifthly the breath of a fish for sixth and lastly the spittle of a bird each of these things was used to make Glick near you say you have not seen of course you have not the dwarves used them in their crafting when the dwarfs had finish their crafting they gave scare Nia a wooden box inside the box was something that looked like a long silken ribbon smooth and soft to the touch it was almost transparent and weighed next to nothing scare a road back to Asgard with his box at his side he arrived late in the evening after the Sun had set he showed the gods what he had brought back from the workshop of the dwarfs and they were amazed to see it the gods went together to the shores of the Black Lake and they called Fenrir by name he came with a run as a dog will come when it is called and the gods marveled to see how big he was and south powerful what's happening asked the wolf we have obtained a strongest bond of all they told him not even you will be able to break it it wolf puffed himself up I can burst any chains he told them proudly Odin opened his hand to display Blake there it shimmered in the moonlight that said the wolf that is nothing the gods pulled on it to show him how strong it was we cannot break it they told him the wolf squinted at the silken band that they held between them glimmering like a snail's trail of the moonlight on the waves and he turned away I mean rested no he said bring me real James real fetters heavy ones huge ones and let me show my strength this is glared mayor said Odin it is stronger than any chains or feathers chains or fetters are you scared Fenrir scared not at all but what happens if I break a thin ribbon like that do you think I will get renown and fame that people will gather together and say do you know how strong and powerful Fenris wolf is he is so powerful he broke a silken ribbon there will be no glory to me and breaking glit near you were scared said Odin the Great Beast sniffed the air I sent treachery and trickery said the wolf is amber eyes flashing in the moonlight and although I think your Glade clear may only be a ribbon I will not consent to be tied up by it you you who broke the strongest biggest chains there ever were you were scared by this band said Thor I am scared of nothing growled the wolf I think it is rather that you little creatures are scared of me Odin scratched his bearded chin you are not stupid Fenrir there is no treachery here but I understand your reluctance it would take a brave warrior to consent to be tied up with bonds he could not break I assure you was the father of the gods that if you cannot break a band like this a veritable silken ribbon as you say then we gods will have no reason to be afraid of you and we will set you free and let you go your own way a long growl from the wolf you lie all father you lie in the way that some folk breathed if you were to tie me up in bonds I could not escape from then I do not believe you would free me I think you would leave me here I think you plan to abandon me and to betray me I do not consent to have that rhythm placed on me fine words and brave words said Odin words to cover your fear of include coward Fenris wolf you are afraid to be tied with this silken rib and no need for more explanations the wolves turn lolled from his mouth and he laughed then showing sharp teeth each the size of a man's arm rather than question my courage I challenge you to prove there is no treachery planned you can tie me up if one of you will place his hand in my mouth I will gently close my teeth upon it but I will not bite down if there is no treachery afoot I will open my mouth when I have escaped the ribbon or when you have freed me and his hand will be unharmed there I swear if I have a hand in my mouth you can tie me with your ribbon so whose hand will it be the gods looked at each other Balder looked at Thor hemdale looked at Odin Honea looked at fray but none of them made a move and tear Odin's son sighed and stepped forward and raised his right hand I will put my hand in your mouth Henry good tear senri lay on his side and kir put his right hand into Fenrir south just as he had done when Fenrir was a puppy and they had played together then Rhea closed his teeth gently until they held tears hand at the wrist without breaking the skin and he closed his eyes the gods bound him with glut Nia a shimmering snail's trail wrapped the enormous wolf tying his legs rendering him a mobile there said Odin now Fenris wolf break your bonds show us all how powerful you are the wolf stretched and struggled it pushed and strained every nerve and muscle has snapped the ribbon that bound it but with every struggle the task seemed harder and with every strain the glimmering ribbon became stronger at first the gods sniggered then the gods chuckled finally when they were certain that the beasts had been immobilized and that they were in no danger the gods laughed only chair was silent he did not laugh he could feel the sharpness of Fenris wolf teeth against his wrists the wetness and warmth of Fenris wolf tongue against his palm and his fingers been raised stopped struggling he lay there unmoving if the gods were going to free him they would do it now that the gods only laughed the harder saw booming guffaws each louder than a thunderclap mingled with Odin's dry laughter with boulders bell-like laughter been real looked at tear tear looked at him bravely then tear closed his eyes and nodded do it he whispered been a bit down and tears wrist tear made no sound he simply wrapped his left hand around the stump that his right and squeezed it as hard as he could to slow the spurt of blood to a news benriya watched the gods take one end of gluttony and thread it through a stone as big as a mountain and fastened it under the ground then he watched as they took another Rock and used it to hammer the stone deeper into the ground than the deepest ocean treacherous Odin called the wolf if you had not lied to me I would have been a friend to the gods that your fear has betrayed you I will kill you father of the gods I will will wait until the end of all things and I will eat the Sun and I will eat the moon that I will take the most pleasure in killing you the gods were careful not to get within reach of Fenriz jaws but if they were driving the rock deeper Fenrir twisted and snapped at them the god nearest him with presence of mind thrust his sword into the roof of Fenris wolf mouth the hilt of the sword jammed in the wolf's lower jaw wedging the jaw open and preventing it from ever closing the wolf growled inarticulately and saliva poured from its mouth forming a river if you did not know it was a wolf you might have thought it a small mountain with a river flowing from a cave mouth the gods left that place where the river of saliva flowed down into the dark lake and they did not speak that once they were far enough away they laughed some more and clapped each other on the back and smiled the huge smiles of those who believe they have done something very clever indeed here did not smile and he did not laugh he bound the stump of his wrist tightly with a cloth and he walked beside the guards back to Asgard and he kept his own counsel these then for the children of Loki his bedtime like that every night at your house actually I started doing the audiobooks once my kids had grown up and I no longer got to do that every night at my house you know that I remember I remember the day it all went dark we were halfway through the first book of His Dark Materials and Maddie looked up at me and she said I think I'll finish it myself there was a kind so I that's really how I get my I reading aloud gentleman is out of the way so we go through we'll do a round robin of the rating questions and then Oprah that we have left but of course as you can imagine there are a number of questions wondering how satisfied you are with the television adaptation of American Gods which is premiering shortly I'm really really excited I've seen finished versions of about 3/4 of the first date I think I've seen fixing in completely finished form what I'm just waiting to see the last couple with all of the effects and you know the still is still working on the effects and the music and stuff but it's stunning it's really good harm some of my favorite bits are bits that aren't in the book which is really fun for me but absolutely they're not in the book they're absolutely in the spirit of the book because the joy of a TV series is in the book you're following shadow around and almost very very rarely do we actually pull our sort of camera off shadow he's how we see things um but I doubt this giving too much away here but but for example Episode four of the TV series is Laura's story and his wife and it begins the week before she meets him and you find out how they met and you find out how they started going out tuned and their marriage and what happened and when he went to prison and what she did while he was in prison and how she wound up getting killed and and what happened to her after death and you know what she's doing in his motel room and it's it's stuff that is there in the novel but you never find it out you just go well this must have happened and you get little bits of moments of things through him thinking of things but you don't get that so I love the fact that we can take the camera off shadow and we can follow him around we can take storylines which exist in the book but then characters come onstage and they go off and say well now we can follow them and we can find out what they were doing while we weren't looking at them and we can you know we can make this grow we can make it more strange and big so I mean I mean when I tell people that we end the first season which is eight episodes long just before we're on the way to the house on the rock people have read the novel gulps that's kind of it's not very far through it when it's a no it's not and partly that is because we have borrowed a few things from later in the book and moved them earlier so that we can get to meet people a little bit quicker um but partly it's just because of the the sheer joy of the way that we're doing it we can you know at one point um it were mad we me is one of my favorite characters in the novel but he's not on stage very much you meet him once in Jax crocodile saloon you meet him you know dying under a bridge and then he's dead and you don't know what was happening to him the rest of the time and in the TV show he's you get to follow him around and he's wonderful he's even better than I had hoped and the adventures of mad Sweeney once he has lost his lucky coin and his luck and absolute delight I think this is a question that only a PBS / NPR reporter sitting in the Boston Public Library could ask you but if you could become instantaneously fluent in another language they could read its literature what language would you choose Chinese definitely Chinese um as a whole load of old Chinese literature that I started some years ago working on a project that I put on the backburner isn't canceled it's sort of I've gone you know I have other things that I need to finish and this is starting to take up my entire life the it was researching The Monkey King and the story of The Monkey King the story of The Journey to the West and also the real-life journey to the west' of the relations on the monk who did that that threat to India to bring back the Buddhist texts and there was an enormous lot of frustration just knowing that I was reading translations what is her favorite Sinatra song um great question um that's when I wish that you'd said to me outside hey we got the question what's your favorite song onto something because now I'm doing that thing where you just Rea you bring every single Sinatra song in front of you and Joe are you it is it you I've got you under my skin no I don't think it's you what about you strangers in the night well it could be me strangers maleic but then you know one for my lady and one oh one for my baby and one more for the road and and you get into all of those great songs which basically has to be sung in smoky bars at three o'clock in the morning when she's left you um you know and I don't really mind which one just as long as it's a it's a 3 a.m. my heart is broken I'm going to put this on the jukebox talk to me bartender those kind of songs are you trying to be the scary or does it just come naturally you know I think that I'm not going at all but then every now and then um I'll just sort of write something and give it to people and they give me that look and you go what what ago nothing and you know that they want to just sort of go off and check the list of unsolved crimes and places okay make sure it wasn't you because anybody who thinks like that has to be I I'm like I do love scary stuff but I love scary as a condiment I don't think I would ever want to write a novel I'm happy writing scary short stories but novels it's like a little scary in here once in a while like like a little salt but I wouldn't want to make a meal of it if well I have a couple of library questions and I'm watching the president glare at me here so I'll ask the question about we you spent you've talked about spending your childhood in libraries and what do you see especially this is a perfect time for anyone who doesn't know to ask this question in this library which is just been completely renovated restored you see that there's a cafe there's a WGBH studio it's it has a new life and a new purpose in some regard but of course it remains a library but what do you see as the relevance of libraries in today's society I think libraries probably have more relevance right now than they've actually had for perhaps a hundred years [Music] libraries started out in an era in which knowledge was valuable because it was scarce there was not enough knowledge around if you wanted to find something you had to go if you wanted to know something you had to go and find the book it was in and finding that thing was hard and at that point librarians and and libraries as stores of information libraries as sanctuaries and all the other things became very important um these days that's kind of turned on its head you know in the old days it was like you were trying to find a flower in the desert and that was why you were going off to find two into a library now it's like you're trying to find flowers in the jungle um there's too much information there is information everywhere there is information that isn't actually information it's just sort of so information that looks like it's information but it's not out there there's badly sourced information there's misinformation and there's information that is true but it's not what you're looking for and then there's the weirdness of the fact that you know not that there's there's a lot of the stuff that was actually available in the early days the web is now gone and sometimes trying to find useful information is proving now much harder than it was even ten years ago um and you start going wouldn't it be amazing if there was a sort of task of people who actually trained to go out there into the world and bring you back the useful and important information that you need and so you weren't having to wade through the swamp of gubbins that is weighing you down and oddly enough there are and you also go G in this world in which so much is migrating onto the web that forces armed people you know it creates an underclass of people who do not have access to the web who cannot apply cannot look online for jobs cannot apply for jobs online cannot you know it's the weirdness of watching politicians go aha there are poor people out there with iPhones and you're going good how I think at least they can get onto the web what's what's worse is there are poor people out there without iPhones you know and again you go wouldn't it be great if there was a nice safe place where people could actually go and access the Internet and perhaps ask questions if they had problems with literacy or whatever and and again you go art well weirdly enough a lot of these things exist already um I think that there is a short sighted I mean I think it's so wonderful that this library like Birmingham Library England like Salt Lake City Library like a bud there are a bunch of great libraries out there that have been a well funded by whatever means and had been modified in a way that allows them to face forward in time but the tragedy is right now so many libraries are getting closed so many libraries and not getting adequate funding librarians are being dismissed are beautiful wonderful buildings being closed to save money and then you sort of learned that it's actually costing more to put security guards in these closed buildings than it would have been to keep them open keep them running as libraries and you just go I genuinely it's almost as if there is an actual anti library agenda as if it is to people's advantage to have people who cannot access the web cannot have access information and and you go up I'm so in always I am proud of librarians and proud of libraries and will support them until you know until I'm cold and I think this maybe is our I'm looking at the timekeeper okay this is our last question where did you think you would be now versus when you were 25 and how does it compare ah 25 is a really good age to have picked because it was 1986 and I was a struggling young freelance journalist who wasn't struggling as quite as hard as he had the previous few years and actually could have become a real you know was being offered real jobs and I sort of had two futures ahead of me and there was a future in which I was going to go off and I was going to write comics and I was going to write books and I was going to make stuff up for a living and it seemed a very weird and precarious future but it was the future that I wanted and then there was a future in which I accepted one of these jobs one of the editorial jobs one of the newspaper actual staff jobs that I was being offered and in which I knew that I would be in a safe place I would be on a career track I could raise you that I would be okay raising my children and that you know I think somewhere fairly you know somewhere on the cusp of 25 aged 25 26 I do remember you know living this weird freelance life where you were just at the mercy of the next check coming in and I queried our electricity bill not because I thought it was in any way wrong but I'd learned that if you queried it you can only ever do this once somebody would come over to your house and explain to you how you were using electricity and offer you advice and that would buy you time it would buy me a week before they the electricity off and in that week a check would come in if I was lucky and I would be able to pay the electricity bill so I was in that kind of precarious world and and I think that was so I could see these two futures and you know I have to say this is far and away the least likely version of the ifirst choice anyway I you know that sort of what I really wanted was I thought okay well maybe there's a world in which I get to write comics write some books and you know become a solid sort of midlist author who can basically pay the bills to live and I don't have to get a real job but that would be you know wouldn't that be amazing so every now and then you know from probably about 1992 or 93 onwards I am actually convinced that this is all some kind of weird illusion and I will wake up and it will be I will be 25 again going well that's not going to happen we are all delighted to have been a part of your illusion if that's the case we're honored to be invited Neil Gaiman thank you so much for joining us biblical images burst out from this childhood frontier conversation this is one of them it's about it's about the act of the physical

Channel: GBH Forum Network

Views: 121,702

Keywords: Boston, WGBH, Neil Gaiman, Jared Bowen, American Gods, Norse mythology, Gods, comics, Marvel, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, The Graveyard Book, Anansi Boys, Neverwhere, writing, parenting, Amanda Palmer, marriage, lifestyle, divorce, parenthood, children, Loki, Thor

Id: mX7pvtU9m_w

Length: 83min 31sec (5011 seconds)

Published: Thu May 04 2017