It’s an idea that never quite left me alone.įour or five years ago, I dragged the manuscript of Witchlight out of its drawer and read it aloud to my daughter, Anouchka. In this world, the gods have survived, although their powers are much reduced, and they live on Earth (and sometimes under it), occasionally battling other gods, fighting giants and quarrelling among themselves. So I created for myself an imaginary universe, based on that of the Norse legends, but a world post-Ragnarók, in which the Prophecy of the Seeress has been revealed to be as inaccurate as those Christian re-tellings of the old tales. Of course, according to Voluspá (the Prophecy of the Seeress), the gods are all doomed to die at Rangnarók, the end of the world. In these early versions, Loki is a youthful skateboarder (and has much in common with a certain Bart Simpson yet to come) Frigg is enormously fat Balder the Beautiful is (of course) bald Idun is a kind of New Age hippie chick and Thor is just like Desperate Dan huge, bearded and not very bright. The original material was sketchy enough for me to allow full rein to my imagination, and I wrote hundreds of adventures – many of them in comic-strip form – in a series of school exercise books. And so I did I took the characters I liked best from the Norse pantheon and wrote my own versions of their stories. No-one had written them down at the time, and the fullest accounts came from Christian chroniclers centuries later, and were at best, incomplete, and at worst, badly distorted.
The only problem was there weren’t enough of them. I started off with the Greeks and the Romans, but found the Norse tales more attractive somehow, funnier and more human and hugely more dramatic. Why Norse gods? Well, I’d always been interested in mythology.
Its heroine was also called Maddy, she had a sister called Mae, a goblin friend (whose name, like that of Sugar-and-Sack, was taken from accounts of the Pendle witch trials) and most of the action went on in World Below – but Runemarks goes back even longer than that.Īnyone who remembers me from school will probably tell you that I was always doodling in class but instead of just drawing random stuff in the margins of my rough books, my doodles took the form of long, complicated comic-strips – inspired, I think, from Astérix, but often starring Norse gods. It was set in the same place, the valley of the Strond. In many ways, Witchlight was the prototype of Runemarks. My first full-length try at a novel was a sprawling 1000-page monster (with illustrations) called Witchlight, written when I was nineteen and rejected by every publisher I sent it to on account of its length, its complexity and the darkness of its imagery.
About the book | Using Runes | Fingerings | Witchlight Background
0 kommentar(er)
