6/1/2023 0 Comments Neil gaiman thor![]() ![]() ![]() Hymir the giant’s wife warns Thor and Tyr that ‘My husband is often bad-tempered when he gets home, wrathful and grim of mind’ a page later, Hymir indeed says ‘I am grim of mind and wrathful of spirit’. Gaiman also has a great ear for patterned, rhetorical dialogue. After a long build-up to the introduction of the cauldron with magical beer-making properties, a single line reads ‘It was excellent beer’, the separation of the line placing especial emphasis on this as a kind of prophetic truth. The fairy-tale style prose is deliberately simple, but used to powerful humorous effect. ![]() Aegir sets the gods the task of finding a cauldron big enough for all the gods to drink from, and so Thor and Tyr (son of a giant) set off to find just such a cauldron. ![]() Here, what is at stake is a banquet, which the sea giant Aegir does not want to throw for the gods who have arrived on his doorstep. ‘Hymir and Thor’s Fishing Expedition’ is one of the slighter stories in the collection, following a structure that is tried and tested throughout the tales: the gods want something, and in order to get that need to complete a task, which in turn requires completion of another task and so on. Mjolnir doesn’t feature strongly in ‘Hymir and Thor’s Fishing Expedition’, but makes a striking impact when it does. ![]()
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