Neil Gaiman has written about gods and myths of nearly every stripe. With American Gods coming to TV, Gaiman’s next challenge for Odin and his ilk is a new novel called, simply, Norse Mythology. The new book will be published February 2017, giving a new look at the Norse myths of legend.
“To get the opportunity to retell the myths and poems we have inherited from the Norse was almost too good to be true,” Gaiman said in a statement to NYTimes. “I hope the scholarship is good, but much more than that, I hope that I have retold stories that read like the real thing: sometimes profound, sometimes funny, sometimes heroic, sometimes dark, and always inevitable.”
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Norse Mythology will tell the myths of Asgard, including all nine realms, giants, demons, gods like Thor, Odin, Loki, and Hel. No Norse novel would be complete without the cycle of apocalypse, death and rebirth known as Ragnarok, either (one being told also in Thor: Ragnarok, the third film from Marvel Comics featuring their version of these Asgardian gods).
One of the lead characters in the aforementioned American Gods, which tells the story of old gods fighting for their place in a world now populated by gods of things like technology and mass media, is “Mr. Wednesday,” a codename for Woten aka Odin, the father god of Norse myths, so Gaiman knows the characters well. That novel becomes a TV series on Starz in 2017.
