|
|
Joined: 4/26/2011
Posts: 77
|
I was looking at John Speikers' Cool Assassins and noticed his use of the phrase nej tack, Swedish for no thanks. My own work, Small Bore, is set in a Stockholm five hundred years hence. Of course The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is the envy of us all.
I'm an admirer of Swedish detective fiction in general, and Sjowall and Wahloo in particular. They inspired me to write, in part.
Do you use Scandinavian elements in your fiction? Any Norse gods or berserkers out there?
|
|
Joined: 3/12/2011
Posts: 376
|
Actually, I used Norse gods in my Contemp Fantasy - Crowbar Girl. I used them mostly as villains, but I used... Um... Odin, Loki, Hel, Surtr and Fenris as active characters, as well as Tyr, Urd, Skuld and Verdandi as passive / flashback characters.
I"m not sure how fond I am of Swedish elements; I used Norse gods for a few reasons, but they weren't the only influences on the novel.
Kinda funny, since My grandfather *was* Swedish.
|
|
Joined: 4/26/2011
Posts: 77
|
Sun day, moon day, Ty's day, Odin's day, Thor's day, Freja's day, bath day, as we say in both Swedish and English. Speaking loosely.
I named a planet after Ratatosk, the squirrel who runs up and down the tree of life carrying messages.
|
|
Joined: 3/13/2011
Posts: 51
|
I grew up in Glasgow and London, so I wasn't inherently connected to Swedish culture, but I was an avid and passionate fan (and still am) of Norse mythology, and the names will forever continue to show up in my work. The most recent example I can think of is Loki, which I used as a name for an MC in a graphic novel script I never finished.
There's such a wonderful sense of epic scope and drama in Norse myth that you just don't find anywhere else - Greek mythology is very personal and dramatic, and there's something about the events leading up to Ragnarok that just sit right with me as a reader. Like they're all leading towards that point inevitably, and every god and mortal has a specific role to play. Too Human (a video game released not too long ago) was a decent use of these myths, but I'd love to see someone take them all the way, rather than shoe-horn them into yet another comic book property like Thor.
|
|
Joined: 5/2/2011
Posts: 59
|
I wrote a post-apocalyptic sci-fi/fantasy story a few years ago, titled Moonglade, that worked off of Norse mythology a fair bit. It was a world in which man grew to be far too powerful, and attempted to cross the bridge to Asgard and attack the gods. They turned them into serpents, the creature most sinister to those people (as this would be about modern, so Islamo-Judeo-Christian dominance) and turned the Earth to ice. The story ends with one of the protagonists using her venom to destroy Yggdrasil and bring about Ragnorak. Been meaning to rewrite it for a while now, but I've been consumed by another project. Not as much Scandinavian goodness in that one, but the protagonist is clearly inspired by the god Týr, and their language (little of it though we see) is an Icelandic-Russian hybrid.
|
|
Joined: 4/26/2011
Posts: 29
|
When crafting a new setting, I decide on a real-world parallel for naming conventions. It helps me break away from traditional Briton naming conventions. I have a trilogy (1/3 complete) where the names are primarily Scandinavian. I rolled in some German, Polish, and Russian to show the diversity of the kingdom, but most names (people and places) are taken from the four Scandinavian countries.
|
|
|
|