I am weirdly tired today, and once again I hate being alive, but I need to write this note for the week.
So here we go.
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Rick Riordan’s Approach to Norse Mythology is Very Strange
Did I write about this already? I don’t think I did, other than mentioning it on a Tumblr post. But I’m re-reading Son of Neptune and I’ve been having a lot of thoughts about American Gods recently, and I came back to this thought again on my morning walk: Rick Riordan does some weird stuff with Norse myth.
With Percy Jackson and the Olympians, his approach to Greek myth is sort of ‘superheroes meets Harry Potter’. All the heroes are demigod children of Greek deities, and they almost all have a set of superpowers or abilities based on the godly parent. They go on quests and fight monsters and such. It’s not quite like Greek mythology, but it’s definitely close enough that one can see how it fits, and considering how much the modern superhero owes to the heroes of Greece and Rome, it makes sense that when retelling this story to children you take it in a direction that’s more along the lines of the stories they’re more used to.
When he set out to take on Egyptian mythology in The Kane Chronicles he actually takes a slightly different approach. The heroes are not children of the gods; instead, they are descended from the pharaohs, and that makes them more suitable to be the hosts for the Egyptian gods, who are much more like spiritual beings than physical ones. And this fits with Egyptian myth, with more focus on magic and mysticism, and about restoring Order and defeating Chaos. It takes a lot of cues from the Greek series in terms of overall plot and the character types, but the worldbuilding was different enough that it stood out.
And then he did Norse mythology in the series Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard, and it didn’t really feel like Norse myth? Even aside from all the pop culture references. All the main characters are demigods again, which feels off right from the get-go. The idea that the gods had children with humans wasn’t unheard of in Germanic nations, and many countries’ kings claimed that they were descended from Odin. But it wasn’t anywhere as near as common as it was in Greek myth. If it was something like Scion, in which every pantheon has demigods, that would be one thing, but with Kane Chronicles we’ve already seen that Rick Riordan understands that not all mythologies use them as heavily as Greek and Roman.
Demigods don’t really get elemental superpowers from their parents in Greek myth, but again it works in Percy Jackson and the Olympians because it reads like a superhero story, a form directly descended from Greek myths. But Norse myths aren’t like that? Their modern-day descendant is the fantasy genre, sword and sorcery, that sort of thing--so having the the heroes be demigods with different powers because of it doesn’t really feel like Norse mythology. It feels like applying the template of PJO to the new series. Which is what he always did, but it’s more obvious here.
It’s also the first one of Riordan’s serieses that has a character who is explicitly religious, and that’s Samirah, a Muslim character. Which is fine, and Samirah’s great, and the books explain that contact between the Islamic world and the Viking Northmen was a thing that’s on the historical record. But Heroes of Olympus features an Italian-American, a Mexican-American, a Chinese-Canadian, a Native American, an American from the Deep South, an African-American from New Orleans who explicitly went to a Catholic school and whose mother was into Voodoo, and a Puerto Rican whose family has been on the island for generations and can trace her lineage back to conquistadors… and then we’ve got Kane Chronicles, of which huge chunks take place in Egypt, and one of the characters is Middle Eastern and has an Arabic last name… and the first time we talk about religion, it’s Islam, in the Norse series?
I’m not making this up, it’s a bit odd, isn’t it?
And the Norse gods are all oddly cool with it? I’m not saying anyone should start a fight with them, as Samirah explains that while she knows the Norse gods exist, she doesn’t seem them as divine deities to be worshipped, and Heimdall kind of nods and is all like, “You’re right, we’re not worthy of worship, we’re pretty terrible.”
This series is in part where Riordan’s negative attitudes towards the gods is in full force as well--at the end of the last book we find out that Odin actually had some of the McGuffin they had been searching for half the book and he just didn’t think about giving it to them because that’s not how he thinks. Which is pretty at odds with the Norse mythological idea of Odin, the god who is constantly trying to put off Ragnarok. He’s always trying to put off Ragnarok but he didn’t think to help the heroes do it because it never crossed his mind?
It’s a bit like Riordan stomping around shouting, “The gods are so stupid!”
There are some elements that the trilogy does pretty well, like the protagonist being dead. See, he’s not just dead, he’s one of the einherjar, the warriors who were chosen to go to Valhalla. And that gives the heroes a ‘hub’ of Valhalla, and that’s kind of cool.
But there are other things that just stick out as very strange and stray very far from Norse mythology? Ratatoskr, the squirrel that runs up and down the World Tree with gossip? In Magnus Chase he’s a gigantic squirrel monster that kills anyone it comes close to and it telepathically insults them? I know that there are different interpretations of the character, but this is the guy who’s a joke character in SMITE.
Loki’s also remarkably one-dimensional. He’s an interesting character when he first shows up in the original novel, but after that his motives are just “I’m going to destroy everything,” with little subtlety or substance. And he’s defeated by the Power of Friendship. And I get that Riordan has a brand and everything, but considering how the final battles in every other of his series go, it felt a little lame. This is Norse myth! The world is supposed to perish in flame! The sun and the moon will be devoured by wolves! And yet Loki is defeated… by the power of friendship? Not he and his friends all teaming up, by Magnus bragging about how he has friends and Loki has none. Like… this pales in comparison to the final battle against Kronos, or Reyna strangling Orion, or the gods facing Apophis. It’s just… fluff.
And it doesn’t feel remotely like Norse myth. So the entire trilogy felt a bit off to me.
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