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Mara999 In reply to TheMorreyaGods [2021-09-15 18:44:22 +0000 UTC]

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TheMorreyaGods In reply to Mara999 [2021-09-16 03:19:02 +0000 UTC]

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Mara999 In reply to TheMorreyaGods [2021-09-16 18:07:11 +0000 UTC]

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TheMorreyaGods In reply to Mara999 [2021-09-19 03:53:28 +0000 UTC]

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Mara999 In reply to Zeonista [2020-02-01 10:50:43 +0000 UTC]

I don't remember hearing the term "Sons of the Wolf" before, but otherwise this is quite familiar. To my understanding, more-or-less civilized giants with god-like powers like the Jotnar and Titans might be a leftover from religions of earlier times. Perhaps a memory of the earliest humanized gods, from back when people started to live more stable lives based on agriculture. Gods seem to become more human-like in appearance and character as civilizations develop, which can be seen in how pantheons like the Aesir and Olympians are just as snobbish and fickle towards mortals as human nobility would behave. But older gods seem to be more primal and fickle in an inhuman way, like nature would seem to hunter-gatherers. The most interesting thing to me is the implication that different forms of worship have existed simultaneously throughout all time-periods, especially how older nature-worship has survived in the countryside long after Christianity came and replaced the city-dwellers' gods.

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Zeonista In reply to Mara999 [2020-02-11 18:05:56 +0000 UTC]

  I grabbed "Sons of the Wolf" from L. Sprague De Camp, who knew a few things about old stories. I don't know the full sources for "The Roaring Trumpet", his first Harold Shea story set in the Fimbulwinter, but his transliteration of the epic stories into a modern fantasy format inspired a lot of people, especially TSR Games.   It was probably a kenning for the hill/mountain giants, and De Camp liked it enough to swipe it as a referential title. There is something about the ancient gods having an opposition in the form of supernatural giants that represented aspects of Nature that seem to pop up everywhere in the northern hemisphere, so the idea is deep-set and widespread. Even when the giants, ogres and trolls are represented in later tales as being only the debased form of an earlier, more powerful type, they are still the existential threat to adjacent human communities, and a worthy challenge for a brave and clever hero. The new human world triumphs over the older world, the vague boundaries of The Wild are rolled back some more, and people breathe a little freer.

These days everyone is oh so skeptical about anything they didn't directly experience, or at least watched on YouTube.   But in an older time, the idea of Wild Men who lived outside the boundaries of human civilization and could be dangerous if crossed, even in unknowing or casual trespass, was accepted as fact. There were hairy woodwoses, and giants, cyclopes and so forth, the hulder-folk and their sidhe counterparts, and the dwarves and gnomes at work under the ground, in the barn, or even behind the cook-stove. And even in Christian times the belief persisted, for did not Scripture mention giants explicitly, and mention the night monster calling to its fellow? The Mercian monk who wrote down "Beowulf" in its entirety was not making a scholarly record or critique of the pre-Christian saga, he was making a serious presentation of a hero story from the old days, when his people were newly settled in their home, and the deeds of kings and heroes in the old neighborhood were relevant, and sometimes inspirational. For the monk and his audience, giants were there, part of the human experience as much as the historical kings and heroes also mentioned. Attempting to deconstruct the role of the giant is a waste of time that misses the point, as Professor Tolkien mentioned in his essay.
 

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Mara999 In reply to Zeonista [2020-02-18 16:08:23 +0000 UTC]

I've had a thought-experiment about how people in the olden days might have handled first contact with extraterrestrials. My guess is that they might have had it easier to handle the surprise and emotional shock of suddenly experiencing a brand new type of life-form, specifically because of their existing belief in so many supernatural entities. I feel that modern Western society has tried so hard to take everything metaphysical or unproven to exist and made it automatically debunked as nonsense, unless presented with hard evidence, so much so that many people have become even skeptical of all proof not directly gathered by themselves. Because of this I have a feeling that many have a very rigid sense of reality, meaning that they have big difficulties adapting to sudden changes or simply changing their mind about any given subject. That's why I feel that a poor illiterate farmer living in the woodlands of northern Sweden in the 17th century might have it easier to encounter aliens, without his mind being shattered in a Lovecraftian vein, because he already assumes that the world is full of non-human entities he doesn't understand.

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Zeonista In reply to Mara999 [2020-03-06 18:09:27 +0000 UTC]

I'm not sure if people living in a pre-industrial society wouldn't have their minds blown less easily. However, I do agree their coping mechanism would better parcel out and place the strange being in its own category, in its own place. Then life goes on, because the sheep still have to be led out to pasture and the wheat field and turnip patch still need tending. Legend springs from some old tradition which was put in place to counter a strange event which might or might not have threatened the community to some effect. The locals say about a certain hill or darkly wooded valley that "no one ever goes there" and the old wives mutter tales to the children. In places less impacted by the Age of Reason, belief in the supernatural and/or paranormal continues unabated. Not just in the snarkily reported news stories from sub-Saharan Africa, but in contemporary Ireland and Japan, where confrontations with the Other are accepted as part of the human experience. Nearly all Native American tribes have a Bigfoot type creature in their tribal lore. No big debates about their existence, the tribesmen know and accept those creatures exist, the creatures have their own habits and customs and living space, and are best left to their own devices. Note: the Native Americans generally speak of Bigfoot not as an alien or bipedal ape, but as a "hairy man", a different type of human-type being which happens to be larger and hairier than normal people. Sort of like a Scandinavian giant or troll.   

For myself I tend to blame the Age of Reason for the Lovecraftian panic attack that sets in when the Other shows up and upsets our carefully crafted lifestyle. Lovecraft was a big fan of the Age of Reason, which he considered the high tide of civilization, and he faithfully followed its tenets to a conclusion which gained him a posthumous following in the troubled 20th century. This period though, which for all its intellectual gains and advancements in human thought, marched hand in hand with authoritarian and totalitarian nation-states where the authority of King, Church, and Academia passed judgement on what could and could not happen, and the scholars who founded our modern educational system took that cue, whether in support or rebellion against the system. The Enlightenment took a large part of the human experience and dismissed it out of hand as superstition or a placebo for the masses. The insistence on physical proof for everything or it didn't happen too often has the legitimate tool of scholarly enquiry tossed aside. It becomes instead a club of skepticism that restricts inquiry, investigation, and belief to cow all people to accept the rulings of Authority on what does and does not exist. 

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Mara999 In reply to Zeonista [2020-03-06 18:46:05 +0000 UTC]

Yup, that's a pretty neat summary of the past 200+ years of development. I'm a bit of an omnivore in my interests and the various knowledges I've accumulated so far, because I want to have a well-rounded sense of the world I live in. That's why I want to have at least a trivial knowledge of scientific discoveries in various academic fields, while also immersing myself in various meta-physical topics raised within religion, folklore and philosophy. Every subject seems to have a potential to be very interesting, so I keep reading about new stuff and old things while also testing out loads of DIY-projects. I know that my own knowledge, theories and assumptions are inevitably limited and I assume that I will never know everything there is to know about the universe, but I have a lot of fun finding out about things and sharing these tidbits with others. I've accidentally tricked a few dozen children into believing that I know everything, mainly because I remember a lot of random trivia I've read, but also because I listen to the questions that their parents don't have the time for.

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