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Northern heroes

#1 User is offline   koehkont 

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Posted 06 September 2014 - 02:23 PM

I really liked how ICE wove a few scandinavian epics into this book. A few are literal, like he mentioned jotunhome as the halls of the icebloods and in the Edda Jotunheim is the world of the Ice Giants.
Another one was merely on discription. I got the feeling that Orman was a lot like Odin. Odin was hanged from a tree, misses an eye and has a spear named Gungnir. The first two are also true for
Orman and for the last one the name is different, but it is still a spear with a name :D. The second thing that only struck me after the mentioning of the Kantele instrument is that Fisher resembles
Väinämöinen. He is from the Kalevala, the Finnish epic. Väinämöinen is called "the eternal bard" and made the kantele. So anyway I was wondering if there are people who saw other parallels or references
to the northern literature?
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#2 User is offline   Aptorian 

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Posted 06 September 2014 - 04:10 PM

Oman certainly had some striking resemblance.

After losing an eye he went to visit a Jætte/Jaghut for wisdom, which is the legend inverted.

Odins spear was said to never miss when it was thrown.

The twins that become a kind of Hearthguard to Orman resemble the two wolves that guard Odin, Geri and Freki.
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#3 User is offline   koehkont 

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Posted 06 September 2014 - 04:18 PM

Now that you mention it he also has two ravens. Huginn and Muninn, which are also kind of hard to tell apart I image. So the twins might be both, though seeing them as guardians would be a better fit.
The ravens provided Odin with information and since the twins aren't of the talkative kind I think you're right about the wolves.
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#4 User is offline   worry 

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Posted 06 September 2014 - 06:41 PM

I did think it was kinda funny that with book after book of defying fantasy world cliches, it's the final book in the series that employs such a cavalcade of Northern Europe influence. It's like "So that's where they've been hiding!" Still it was sufficiently weird and Malazan-like that it didn't feel cliche anyway.
They came with white hands and left with red hands.
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