few illustrators that I can think of offhand) never found a more appropriate subject than the Norse world, with its odd blend of gorgeousness and violence, its wild prodigies and grim humor.
What makes the book such a powerful feat of visual storytelling is the way in which the prose and the pictures (reflecting, perhaps, the marriage and lifelong partnership of the authors, a Norwegian and a Swiss who lived in Connecticut and collaborated on picture books from the 1930s to the late 1960s) complement each other, advance each other’s agenda. Almost every page that is not taken up by a giant bursting lithograph of stars and monstersis ornamented with a smaller drawing or with one of the curious, cryptic, twisted little margin-men, those human curlicues of fire, that so disquieted me as a kid and continue, to this day, to freak out and delight my own kids.
Through this intricate gallery of marvels and filigree the text walks with cool assurance, gazing calmly into every abyss, letting the art do the work of bedazzlement while seeing to it that the remarkable facts—the powers and shortcomings of Thor’s hammer, Mjolnir, which always returned to its thrower but whose handle was too short to grasp without burning the hand; the strange parentage of Sleipnir, Odin’s eight-legged steed, who could carry his rider over land, sea, or air—are laid bare. This simultaneous effect of wonderment and acceptance, this doubled strength, allows the D’Aulaires to balance their re-creation of the Norse world exactly on its point of greatest intensity: the figure of Loki.
Ally and enemy, genius and failure, delightful and despicable, ridiculous and deadly, beautiful and hideous, hilarious and bitter, clever and foolish, Loki is the God of Nothing in Particular yet unmistakably of the ambiguous World Itself. It was in reading this book that I first felt the power of that ambiguity.
When the gods decide to put a wall around Asgard, a giant stone-mason offers to do the onerous work, but demands as payment the hand of the love goddess Freya. This is clearly too steep a price, but Loki persuades the gods to cheat and deceive the mason, promising him Freya if he can complete the work in less than a year. Loki’s confidence in his cleverness is typical—no one could fence Asgard in less than a year!—as is his ability to sway others with that confidence, and as is, in the end, the inexorableness with which the stonemason and his gigantic draft horse proceed to build that giant fence of stone. The gods turnin panic and outrage to their glib cousin Loki, with his easy assurances. And then, with days to go and the work nearly done, a beautiful mare appears to distract and seduce the stallion, luring him away from the job site. So the wall goes unfinished, Freya is saved, and the enraged giant pays with his life. But the true ambiguity of Loki is yet to be revealed. The joke, in the end, is always on him: for the giant’s stallion succeeds in mounting and siring a foal on Loki, and after several months of embarrassed seclusion the brood-mare god returns to Asgard leading his horse-child behind him. And yet we still have not reached the end of the tale—the typical tale—of Loki’s fertile and fatal gift. Because Loki’s foal is a wonder horse, the magical Sleipnir, of whom Loki makes a present to his blood-brother Odin: a blessing brought forth out of treachery and lies.
Loki never turned up among the lists of Great Literary Heroes (or Villains) of Childhood, and yet he was my favorite character in the book that was for many years my favorite, a book whose subtitle might have been “How Loki Ruined the World and Made It Worth Talking About.” Loki was the god of my own mind as a child, with its competing impulses of vandalism and vision, of imagining things and smashing them. And as he cooked up schemes and foiled them, fathered monsters and stymied them, helped forestall the end of things and hastened it, he was god of the endlessly
What makes the book such a powerful feat of visual storytelling is the way in which the prose and the pictures (reflecting, perhaps, the marriage and lifelong partnership of the authors, a Norwegian and a Swiss who lived in Connecticut and collaborated on picture books from the 1930s to the late 1960s) complement each other, advance each other’s agenda. Almost every page that is not taken up by a giant bursting lithograph of stars and monstersis ornamented with a smaller drawing or with one of the curious, cryptic, twisted little margin-men, those human curlicues of fire, that so disquieted me as a kid and continue, to this day, to freak out and delight my own kids.
Through this intricate gallery of marvels and filigree the text walks with cool assurance, gazing calmly into every abyss, letting the art do the work of bedazzlement while seeing to it that the remarkable facts—the powers and shortcomings of Thor’s hammer, Mjolnir, which always returned to its thrower but whose handle was too short to grasp without burning the hand; the strange parentage of Sleipnir, Odin’s eight-legged steed, who could carry his rider over land, sea, or air—are laid bare. This simultaneous effect of wonderment and acceptance, this doubled strength, allows the D’Aulaires to balance their re-creation of the Norse world exactly on its point of greatest intensity: the figure of Loki.
Ally and enemy, genius and failure, delightful and despicable, ridiculous and deadly, beautiful and hideous, hilarious and bitter, clever and foolish, Loki is the God of Nothing in Particular yet unmistakably of the ambiguous World Itself. It was in reading this book that I first felt the power of that ambiguity.
When the gods decide to put a wall around Asgard, a giant stone-mason offers to do the onerous work, but demands as payment the hand of the love goddess Freya. This is clearly too steep a price, but Loki persuades the gods to cheat and deceive the mason, promising him Freya if he can complete the work in less than a year. Loki’s confidence in his cleverness is typical—no one could fence Asgard in less than a year!—as is his ability to sway others with that confidence, and as is, in the end, the inexorableness with which the stonemason and his gigantic draft horse proceed to build that giant fence of stone. The gods turnin panic and outrage to their glib cousin Loki, with his easy assurances. And then, with days to go and the work nearly done, a beautiful mare appears to distract and seduce the stallion, luring him away from the job site. So the wall goes unfinished, Freya is saved, and the enraged giant pays with his life. But the true ambiguity of Loki is yet to be revealed. The joke, in the end, is always on him: for the giant’s stallion succeeds in mounting and siring a foal on Loki, and after several months of embarrassed seclusion the brood-mare god returns to Asgard leading his horse-child behind him. And yet we still have not reached the end of the tale—the typical tale—of Loki’s fertile and fatal gift. Because Loki’s foal is a wonder horse, the magical Sleipnir, of whom Loki makes a present to his blood-brother Odin: a blessing brought forth out of treachery and lies.
Loki never turned up among the lists of Great Literary Heroes (or Villains) of Childhood, and yet he was my favorite character in the book that was for many years my favorite, a book whose subtitle might have been “How Loki Ruined the World and Made It Worth Talking About.” Loki was the god of my own mind as a child, with its competing impulses of vandalism and vision, of imagining things and smashing them. And as he cooked up schemes and foiled them, fathered monsters and stymied them, helped forestall the end of things and hastened it, he was god of the endlessly
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