Gaiman brings all of that awe to Norse Mythology, and you’ll be hard-pressed to finish it and not feel just as inspired ... While the stories are ancient, Gaiman makes them fresh and lively, as if the antics of the gods and giants only just happened. He revives the myths not as stories to be read but as tales to be told, read aloud to rapt listeners just as they would’ve been done long ago ... Those familiar with the storytelling techniques of traditional folklore and myths will immediately get where Gaiman is coming from. Norse Mythology deftly blends ancient and contemporary literature styles, paying homage to the former with the flair of the latter ... When I first picked up Norse Mythology, I only planned to read a few chapters, but the deeper I got the more I felt like as if I was sitting in a Viking longhouse by a roaring fire and a cup of mead listening Gaiman recite mythic poetry ... quite simply breathtaking.
Gaiman’s sentences appear so simple and plain that one wonders if the book is actually intended for 9-year-olds. At the same time, the author’s penchant for short paragraphs, some of only a single sentence, adds an air of portentousness. This combination of the faux-naif and the melodramatic is then further complicated by the diction of the gods. They speak a bit like comic-book superheroes ... In fact, despite the mishmash of its styles and the sometimes irritating egregiousness of Gaiman’s celebrity, Norse Mythology turns out to be a gripping, suspenseful and quite wonderful reworking of these famous tales. Once you fall into the rhythm of its glinting prose, you will happily read on and on, in thrall to Gaiman’s skillful storytelling.
Gaiman’s characteristically limpid, quick-running prose keeps the dramatic impetus of the medieval texts, if not their rough-hewn quality. His telling of the tales is for children and adults alike, and this is both right and wise, it being the property of genuine myth to be accessible on many levels ... Gaiman plays down the extreme strangeness of some of the material and defuses its bleakness by a degree of self-satire. There is a good deal of humour in the stories, the kind most children like – seeing a braggart take a pratfall, watching the cunning little fellow outwit the big dumb bully. Gaiman handles this splendidly. Yet I wonder if he tries too hard to tame something intractably feral, to domesticate a troll ... he simply tells us the story, and tells it well. What finally left me feeling dissatisfied is, paradoxically, the pleasant, ingratiating way in which he tells it. These gods are not only mortal, they’re a bit banal. They talk a great deal, in a conversational tone that descends sometimes to smart-ass repartee. This chattiness will be familiar to an audience accustomed to animated film and graphic narrative, which have grown heavy with dialogue, and in which disrespect is generally treated as a virtue. But it trivialises, and I felt sometimes that this vigorous, robust, good-natured version of the mythos gives us everything but the very essence of it, the heart.
Norse Mythology employs a curious, childlike tone that seems intended to be polarizing ... Gaiman’s intended audience of both kids and adults can’t quite explain away such guileless prose. Either the entire volume is secretly narrated by the not-too-bright Thor, or this is sly provocation, an invitation to compare the modesty of the language with the depths of wit and trickery that it might conceal ... Such a theatre of apocalypse may seem ill-fitted to Gaiman’s Looney Tunes physics, his delight in meting out violence for a comic, no-real-harm-done effect. The cold core of the source material is the nihilistic knowledge that these glorious characters, like all of us, are living on borrowed time ...The author does conclude his telling on a note of fragile hope, conjuring a time, post-doomsday, when 'the green earth will arise once more' ... This is hardly a true resurrection—if anything, a chess metaphor quietly suggests that the wars and loves of the Asgardians were never more than a game. But a game is more bearable than a tragedy. Gaiman, who can’t forestall the night, can still whistle in the dark.
As always, Gaiman’s a charming raconteur. The project itself, though, seems oddly superfluous ... Unsurprisingly, Gaiman recognizes a ripping yarn when he sees one. The bits of the 'Edda' material he’s plucked and fleshed out here are pretty entertaining on their own, and Gaiman's takes on them play up the characterization that the extant sources only hint at ... Gaiman can be very funny, sometimes so much so that his own voice's commentary upstages the story he's telling ... For the most part, though, the diction of Norse Mythology is that of someone telling a story to children while entertaining the adults sitting with them ... As charming as Norse Mythology is, it's still a little perplexing that it exists. Why would the world need Gaiman's particular, straightforward take on this material.
Mr. Gaiman milks such situations for all their humor and incongruity, very much in the spirit of the originals. For a modern audience, though, he has to spell things out ... Mr. Gaiman has produced what the modern world likes: a clear, continuous narrative, with big scenes the same as they always were but with emotional pointers added. Yet he can feel the undercurrents as well: the jealousies and betrayals, the sense that Odin is always playing a long game revealed to no one.
...determinedly a collection of stories with narrative arcs and conclusions, peopled with characters who have consistent, coherent psychologies. Gaiman’s voice is not so much heightened and lyrical as it is grounded and calm, with a wry, ironic sense of humor that spills over into the characters’ dialogue ... Loki is the star here: His love of chaos is the narrative engine that sets each story in motion, and watching him lie his way out of trouble and then back into it again is one of the chief pleasures of this book ... fresh, vital, and compelling.
Any travelers from Middle-earth or the Marvel Avengers universe dropped into Gaiman’s novelistic reboot will find this fantastical place familiar ground ... Aside from the occasionally labored, Yoda-like syntax ('Nothing did he eat for nine days or nine nights, nothing did he drink') Gaiman finds the right balance. He captures an appropriately legendary tone, while being more irreverent than previous tellers ... As a novelist, Gaiman was likely tempted to imbue his heroes with rich inner lives and back stories, but he manages to keep plots clean and the chatter of inner thought spare ... In these accessible, retold tales, fantasy is odd, and real, and dire. They remind us that even as the Norse gods wielded war hammers and magic spears, and smote giants that once ruled the earth, still they could not rule their own fragile destinies.
Readers hoping for a fully novelistic reinvention of these myths in Norse Mythology will be disappointed. Gaiman has neither fabricated passages that might fill lacunae in existing manuscripts, nor concocted new adventures for old gods. Instead, Norse Mythology is a considered retelling of sixteen familiar tales, presented in virtually the same sequence as they are found in Snorri’s Prose Edda, and crafted as sympathetically as any modern author can ... Gaiman does, however, take some creative license—largely for the better. This is perhaps most evident in his fantastic riffs off the pun-heavy Old Norse sense of humor ... By and large, his lively expansions to existing passages succeed in being true to the spirit of earlier tellings. His alterations neither fundamentally change the source material nor our understanding of it, but they may very well enhance our experience of reading it ... Gaiman’s retelling adds another leaf to this ancient tree: It’s not a new species in its own right, but rather a fresh sign that the old one is still thriving.
Gaiman’s not reinventing the wheel, but simply offers his modern take on the ancient tales. Unfortunately, that means it starts slowly, in the tradition of biblical writings, recounting characters, their relationships to one another, and the creation of everything ... Once the busywork is out the way, though, Gaiman hits his stride...Gaiman offers quick, easy reads. He plays into the folkloric traditions of the Norse tales, keeping lines straightforward but incredibly vivid ... Gaiman is consistently engaging in these chapters. The tales range from funny to tragic, and Gaiman wisely foreshadows Ragnarok—the end and rebirth of all things, for the gods—to give the book a narrative arc ... it is nice to see someone passing these stories along to inspire another generation.
Gaiman’s prose is bright and fluid, his storytelling clear and cogent, discarding any scholarly stuffiness. The individual chapters are filled with telling moments and magical details. As outlandish as their behavior can be, the motivations of the gods are made more understandable in this version. Unlike Greek and Roman tales that were written down, Norse myth was an oral tradition, its tales recounted but rarely recorded. Norse Mythology ably captures the essence of a myth cycle that deserves to be better known, in an edition likely to speak to readers of all ages.
