INTRO
 
Welcome to CHAPTER 68 of the Kinsmen Die podcast, home of fantasy fiction based on Norse mythology that’s written and read by me, Matt Bishop.

In this podcast I read my first novel, Kinsmen Die, one chapter at a time. And, with each episode, when it makes sense, I provide some commentary about the source materials I’ve referenced in the text.

This week, we’re back with Odin.

Several chapter ago, Odin left Gladsheim…and his wife, Frigg, to get answers from the dead witch Angrboda…who was Loki’s first wife.

Why Angrboda? Because Odin found his uncle, Mimir, trapped inside Angrboda’s house. And in that house he discovered the remnants of an old ritual that appeared to involve her children — Fenrir the wolf, Jorm the serpent, and Hel. Upon returning to his body, Odin unearthed a memory of Loki threatening him, his family and everything he’d built. So, Odin decided he’d been blind and, naturally, cut out his own eye and, using the rune magic he seized when he’d hung upon Yggdrasil, bound his eye to the pool in Mimir’s glade.

So in this chapter we find Odin making a pit stop on his journey to raise Angrboda from the dead. 

Let’s stop in with him at the Circle K now.


Chapter Sixty-Eight
Odin
Odin shivered back into wakefulness at the rushing sound of fast-moving water. Sleipnir clomped to a stop beside the Gjoll and bent her head to drink. He yawned and slid from her back onto the slippery stones littering the river’s bank. The river itself rushed past, gray beneath heavy, low-lying clouds. About nine yards downstream, the river turned frothy and white as it reached the rocks before the falls.
When Sleipnir finished slurping water, he walked her back up to the pair of boulders he always camped beside. His breath a fog around him, he dug in Sleipnir’s saddlebags for some oats, removed her saddle, and attached the feed bag to her bridle. She whickered her thanks, and he began to brush her.
Afterward, he kindled a fire, sat on cold stone and drank thirstily from a wineskin. He closed his eye, rubbed his temples and, ignoring the dull throb from his missing eye, leaned back against the boulder, and just for a few moments enjoyed the fire’s heat. Normally when he traveled, his familiars went with him, but they were out in Asgard doing his bidding. Besides, for what he had planned, they’d be more hindrance than help. 
And for that task, he needed seidr. Which was why he’d stopped here. He cast an eye toward the Gjoll’s fast, dark current and the dozens of partially submerged rocks comprising his route to the river’s center. Just beyond them, to his right, the Gjoll fell hundreds of feet to flow beneath the rude bridge onto the shores where the dead lingered. None living besides him knew this path, besides Sleipnir. They had it from Ratatoskr who himself knew many secret ways through the realms. 
Odin called Gungnir to his hand, walked down to the river’s edge and set booted foot upon the first broad, slick stone that lay belly up along the bank like a washed-up corpse. He sprang to the next rock, used Gungnir to vault to the next stone and the one beyond it. From here, the path grew more dangerous. A dozen rocks waited for his feet to slip. If they did, Rán would certainly cast her net and try to snare him.
Not that she ever would. He’d dodged that net more than once in his many winters.

***

Two rocks left. The first a leap, the second just a step.
On his blind side, the water fell away into a mist that obscured the height of the drop—what he risked falling into. He held Gungnir sideways before him for balance and turned his head to look down. Memories stirred of when, as a much younger man, he’d stared into the Ginnungagap and felt a deep, belly-clenching awe.
Now, he almost wanted to throw himself over the edge, to experience the rush of wind and then, the snap of his wings when he shifted at the last possible moment.
Instead, he returned to his task. Sól picked that moment to throw a spear of light on the remainder of his path. The next rock was wide, but pitched just slightly toward him, so he’d be jumping onto a sloped, slick surface. It glared at him that rock, a snow bear at bay.
He jumped, the wind’s chill fingers plucked at him. His cloak billowed and he hit the rock at an unplanned angle. His feet slid, he grabbed the sharp stone—Gungnir clattered away and vanished into the darkness of his blind side—but he held on.
Gasping, clothes wet from the spray, beard dripping, he hauled himself upright. Teetering and tired, he made the short step to the final, mercifully flat-topped boulder at the river’s center. In the past he’d tried to simply fly to this rock. But there was something perverse about the Gjoll. It didn’t like him, this river into which the blood of both Ymir and Audhumbla had once flowed. It didn’t want him here, doing what he was about to do. No matter his shape, it was always a struggle getting to this cold, wet rock in the middle of a chill, gray river that emptied into the sea where the dead took ship for the Gap. 
He unclipped his cloak and dropped it beside him. He called Gungnir to him; she flickered into his hand, ice cold and frosty.
He marshaled his strength, eye shut, face upturned to catch what warmth he could from Sól. As he listened to the Gjoll’s thundering passage, he slowed his breathing and extended Gungnir over the foaming, rushing water. He plied the long spear in rhythmic movements parallel to the water. Stiff with cold and frozen clothing, his first efforts were jerky. After several long passes, he eased into the motion, his entire body moving along with the spear as he plied it above the gray river.
Again, he closed his eye and focused on seeing the flow of witchblood with his mind’s eye. It coursed within the torrent. He caught a tendril and slowly spun Gungnir in his hands, curling that tendril around the flat of the spear’s blade. He brought the spear back to catch another, and another, wrapping the mingled blood of both the Departed Mother and Ymir around the blade.
On and on he went. Sometimes he caught a tendril. Sometimes it slipped away, pulled down by some current in the Gjoll. He kept going until the witchblood was wrapped around Gungnir’s blade like a cloud around a mountain’s peak.

***

Back on shore, he stared tiredly into the fire and sipped his wine. Sól had retreated behind dense, gray clouds. His hands were red and raw from the wet and cold—and from scouring, straightening, cleaning, sorting and then flattening the witchblood like women did with batts of sheep’s raw wool. Such was the price of seidr.
Now that batt of witchblood, fluffy, coarse and damp, was wrapped around Gungnir’s blade and ready for the next stage.
He picked up one of his mostly depleted spindles and unspooled a knife-long strand of remaining thread. With Gungnir in the crook of one arm and the spindle pinned beneath his armpit, he teased free a bit of the raw witchblood and drew it down in a wispy tuft.
He brought up the thread and, between his thumb and forefinger, spliced the witchblood to the finished thread. That done, he withdrew a heavy soapstone whorl inscribed with runes and affixed it to the bottom of the spindle. Trapping Gungnir securely between his arm and body, he set the spindle spinning and dropped it.
With his right hand, he drew the witchblood down from where it was wrapped around Gungnir’s blade. With swiftly dancing fingers, he spun it into a thread of magic that he could use to power his charms. He could use the raw stuff if he had to, but the refined witchthread lent much more precision.
And so he stood there, fingers dancing delicately up down and the thread of magic running from the batt to the spindle whirling before him. Firelight danced across his face and threw wild shadows on the landscape around him. The wind cavorted past, occasionally blowing gray smoke into his face, but with his eye closed, he held his breath until the wind shifted again.

OUTRO
Well, folks, that was CHAPTER 68 of Kinsmen Die. I hope you enjoyed it.

Odin stops alongside the river Gjoll — spelled GJOLL. In Old Norse, it means “loud noise,” which is why I have the river flowing rapidly and then a waterfall near where Odin stops.

According to Snorri, the Gjoll is one of the Elivagr and it is specifically the river of the underworld. There’s a bit more to it both in the myth and how I’ve used the Gjoll, but I’ll some of that for a later chapter.

The rest of the chapter largely involved providing more insight into the magic system I created. One of the types of magic in Norse myth is seidr, which is specifically referenced. In the myths, Odin learned seidr from Freyja who is a member of the Vanir tribe or pantheon of gods. And if we want to get into comparative mythology, she roughly equates to Inanna of Sumerian myth, Ishtar of Mesopotamia and Aphrodite of the Greeks. These are all basically the same goddess figure. But, that’s a rabbit hole for another time.

In this chapter, we see Odin harvesting the blood … witch blood … that flows within the river Gjoll. The blood was shed by Ymir…the progenitor of the Jotunn and Odin’s great grandfather (on his mother’s side)…and Audhumbla who I refer to as the Departed Mother. In Norse myth, Audhumbla is a cow that licks Odin’s grandfather, Buri, free from a block of primordial ice.

Why their blood is in the river at all is part of Odin’s backstory…which I will leave for another day, as well.

So in creating the seidr portion of my magic system … and remember, Odin learned seidr from Freyja. Seidr is also associated with sending out and bringing back — like casting one’s intention out into the world to do something — find a duck and bring it back to me. And using seidr you can also deliberately…and by accident…attract the attention of greater and lesser spirits.

I’ve come across a few academic articles that associate the etymology of the word seidr with cords and snares but also with speaking and singing. Cords can be used to catch and bind; snares are used to trap.

And some archaeological finds have uncovered staffs used by female magic practitioners, mostly seeresses, that look like distaffs. 

A distaff is a wooden stick onto which wool is wound for spinning. That was traditionally women’s work.

In this chapter I cite a whorl — whorl — which was used as a counterweight to aid in actually spinning the thread. And I mention a batt — bat t — which is basically just a bundle of fibers…the raw wool ready for processing.

Also recall that Vidar uses a hand distaff — it’s on his belt opposite his sword — and he has short hooks on his belt from which he hung the spindle of witchthread Odin gave him.

So, I combined all of these elements into my seidr magic system.

The raw material is the witch blood. We see Odin gathering it from the river…and then he processes that material in much the same way raw wool is processed before it is spun into the material that is used to create wool that can then be used for clothing.

I watched a bunch of videos on what the process of actual spinning looks like, so I tried to describe that as best I could.

So in this scene, we have Odin engaged in the “women’s work” of spinning raw magic into refined witchthread which is stored on spindles and he can then use to cast spells in the class of magic called seidr.

We’ll soon see Freyja use seidr, but how she uses it…and her power source, so to speak…is a little different from what Odin uses.

Giving Odin a material cost for his spells…at least for his seidr…was one way to limit his power. Otherwise he could just do whatever he wanted whenever he wanted and that would potentially be plot breaking. Vidar ran into the limits of seidr in his early chapters…and we encountered one of the limits of being a baresark…which is being bound to a spirit. If you screw up, the spirit can take control of your body. Even Odin is not immune to that limit as one of his early chapters demonstrated.

Odin also has access to other types of magic. We know he has “old songs” taught to him by his uncle…that uncle being Mimir. And there’s a hint in the myths that Mimir is Odin’s mother’s brother … Odin’s mother is Bestla. Odin used one of those old songs, powered in that case by seidr, to speed the passage of the Einherjar to the town of Hals in one of the early chapters.

We also saw Odin use rune magic to free Vidar from his fylgja’s power and then rebind and subdue that fylgja. He also used rune magic to bind his severed eye to the pool in Mimir’s glade…and to keep that eye alive.

Odin can also send his spirit out of his body into the spirit realm.

And we know that Odin can speak with the dead. He’s claimed that power himself and Frigg alluded to it in the previous chapter, as well, saying that this whole murder investigation would be way easier if Odin could just ask the dead woman who killed her.

And if you’ve seen the movie Dungeons & Dragons, there’s some funny stuff that happens there with the “speak with dead” spell.

What else can Odin do? Well, he is often called the “father of enchanters” or “father of magic” because "All your magic are belong to him.”

Next week, we’re back with Frigg and the next stage of her investigation into Bera’s murder.

Until then, if you have the time and inclination, please rate and/or review the podcast — that helps boost the show’s visibility. As does sharing it.
  
As always, I’m going to read from both the Bellows and Larrington translations of the Havamal, the sayings of the High One, Odin himself.

Bellows, Verse 68
Fire for men is the fairest gift,
And power to see the sun;
Health as well, if a man may have it,
And a life not stained with sin.

Larrington, Verse 68
Fire is best for the sons of men, and the sight of the sun
his health, if a man can manage it, living without disgrace.

So I will again reference Kodratoff’s translation and commentary because Bellows’ use of the word “sin” is not a good translation. Sin is a great word for Christians, but not so much for those belonging to a pre-Christian world…much less the god (lowercase g) of that pagan world.

Larrington translates the word — which is Löstr in Old Norse — as “disgrace.” Kodratoff says the word lostr “does not express any contempt for those who do not manage to avoid a disgrace, it presents it only as a lack of some kind” so it can be rendered as  “living without error or rebuke.”

Kodratoff also suggests that the first two lines are especially relevant for people who live in cold climates. Speaking just for myself, when it’s a cold winter day but the sun is out…well, that’s near to being shorts weather.

Thanks for listening.