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Hi, everybody. My name's Heather O'Donoghue, and I'm going to talk today about Neil Gaiman's celebrated fantasy novel 'American Gods'.

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So the title of this talk is 'Old Norse in the New World: The Mythology and Politics of Immigration and Neil Gaiman's 'American Gods''.

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In 'American Gods', Neil Gaiman characterises America to use his own anachronistic and in many ways

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a problematic term as a country of immigrants from its very earliest times.

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Gaiman's starting point is how gods and the heroes of folklore are exported to the new world along with each wave of immigration.

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What intrigues Gaiman is what happens to belief in the gods when their believers emigrate.

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As Mr Wednesday, an avatar of the old Norse God Odin proclaims to his fellow gods and folk heroes in the novel.

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We rode here in their minds and we took root.

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We travelled with the settlers to the new lands across the ocean.

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But did they really take root? Mythical figures survive by being remembered by immigrant communities,

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but only in relation to events remembered in the old country.

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This consigns belief in them to a slow death, since they can have no continuing relevance in the new world of the immigrants. In American gods

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Mr. Wednesday echoes the scholarly explanation of our true believers passed on or stopped believing.

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And we were left, lost, scared and dispossessed only with what little smidgens of worship or believe we could find and to get by as best we could.

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This lies at the heart of 'American gods'. It's action initially involved Mr. Wednesday, accompanied by Shadow,

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who we later learn is his son travelling all around the mid-west of America,

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drumming up support for a great battle against the new gods of the new world.

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Now,

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this structure gives tremendous scope for a large cast of gods and folk heroes and allows for a good deal of satire on what America worships today.

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Mr. Wednesday's opponents, for instance,

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include the goddess media with its neat echo of the classical goddess media and technical boy, the new young God of the digital age.

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And a major part of the fun of American gods is simply spotting which gods or heroes the figures in the novel represent,

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and then enjoying the witty contrast that Gaiman sets up between their traditional and often

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formidable mythic identities and the grim appropriateness of their presently reduced circumstances.

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Thus, for example, the Slavik deity Czernobog literally black God is a sinister figure associated with death,

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and he appears at American gods as a terrifying ex-abattoir worker who relished his bloody and murderous

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job and is now living on the edge of poverty in shabby rooms at the top of a Chicago brownstone.

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So it's clear to anyone with even the most basic knowledge of Old Norse mythology that Mr. Wednesday is an avatar of Odin.

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The name Wednesday itself as one of the days of the week is derived from the old English Wodens dæg or Woden's day after the Anglo-Saxon pagan deity Wotan,

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widely believed to be the equivalent of the Old Norse Odin.

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Mr. Wednesdayis a confidence trickster, a grifter reflecting Odin's reputation asnan oath breaker and a cheat.

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His partner is named in the novel as Low-key Lyesmith again, clearly an avatar of the malicious, semi divine trickster of old myth Loki.

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The slander of the Gods and the Source or Smith of all deceits.

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Further Wednesday has a glass eye,

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and Odin is said in Old Norse mythology to have deposited one of his eyes in the well of Mimir in exchange for a wisdom giving drink from it.

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Mr Wednesday has a tie pin in the shape of a tree. Odin's connexion with the Old Norse world tree goes much deeper than this.

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For an Old Norse myth,

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Odin was hanged or hanged himself in a mysterious act of self-sacrifice on a windswept tree usually identified as Yggdrasil the world tree.

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And thereby he gained wisdom and occult knowledge before returning from this temporary death.

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This particular myth explains a great many passing references in American gods such as Mad Sweeneys

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casual abuse of Wednesday's tree hammer. But it's also the source of one of the major climaxes in the novel.

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A Shadow is destined to re-enact Odin's self-sacrifice himself.

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Does it really matter if readers don't understand all these allusions?

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Well, in fact, Gaiman has Mr. Wednesday explicitly identify himself as Odin.

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Shadow asks, who are you,

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what are you and Mr. Wednesday responds with a list of Odenic pseudonyms all taken from Old Norse mythic sources.

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I am called Glad of war, grim raider, third, I am one eyed, I'm called highest and true guesser.

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I am grimnear, I am the hooded one, I am all father.

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My Ravens are Hugin and Munin, my wolves, Freki and Gery.

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Finally he uses the name Odin and repeats it three times.

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Similarly, Low-key liesmith confirms his identity to shadow.

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Low-Key lyesmith said shadow low-key, he said, low-key Lyesmith. You're slow, said Low-key but you get there

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in the end. These explicit identification's mean that American gods does not depend on prior detailed,

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knowledge of Norse myth to be understood on a broad level.

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But the novel builds up layers of meaning, which only the most specialist readers will be able to decode fully.

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And Gaiman's prose is scattered with literary allusions.

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For example, we are told of one group of migrants, a bad journey they had of it echoing

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Of course, the first line of T.S. Eliot celebrated poem, The Journey of the Magi, a cold coming

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we heard of it. We are told, for example, that Shadow got his nickname because when he was a child, he followed adults around like a shadow.

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But there's a striking analogue in the fifth stanza of Seamus Heaney's acclaimed poem 'Follower'.

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I wanted to grow up and plough to close one eye and stiffen my arm.

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All I ever did was follow in his broad shadow around the farm.

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As in American gods, the key relationship here is between father and son, the son shadowing the one eyed father.

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In one of the novels, several interpolations about purportedly actual historical migrants,

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the segment called Coming to America eight one three A.D.

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Norse travellers fear that they're going to be deserted by their gods, but their leader reassures them if the old father,

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Odin, made the world, then he must have made this country, too, and they should continue to worship him.

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The next day. They capture a Native American and they sacrifice him to their God, Odin, by hanging him on a windswept tree.

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The arrival of two Ravens the following day to peck at the corpse is seen as a sign that their sacrifice has been accepted.

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But in the depths of that winter, a large raiding party of indigenous people ambushed the Norse and they're all killed.

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Well, in outline at least,

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this passage is a dramatised version of what we learn in the Old Norse Vinland sagas about the first Scandinavians to come to North America,

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they, too, encountered hostile indigenous people.

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But there are two startling differences between Gaiman's narrative and the story as told in the sagas.

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Firstly, there is no mention in the Vinland sagas of Odinic sacrifice, and that's a crucial point, which I'll come back to.

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Secondly, the year ascribed in the novel to this voyage, EIGHT ONE three A.D. was actually more than a hundred years before Leif

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the lucky, the son of Erik the Red discovered the land which he would call Vinland Vinland, as Gaiman. himself explains.

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Gaiman has, in fact, invented a powerful but totally fictional precursor to the Vinland voyages, which are documented in the sagas.

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The most obvious entailment of creating a prelude to the Vinland voyages is made clear at the very end of Gaiman's new narrative,

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because when Leif Ericson arrived in the New World, as Gaiman explains, his gods were already waiting for him.

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They were there. They were waiting.

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And the other novel or inauthentic element of Gaiman's pre-Vinalnd voyage, which I said I'd come back to, is the sacrifice to Odin.

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This element reaches into the heart of not only old Norse myth, but also American gods itself.

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The ostensible plot of American gods is an attempt by Mr Wednesday to gather the folk,

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the gods and folk heroes to fight back against America's new gods and the new threat that they pose to the old order.

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But this apparent threat is, in fact a misdirection engineered by Mr. Wednesdays and Low-key

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Lyesmith. To understand what's actually going on.

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We need to return to the figure of shadow and the question of sacrifice.

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Now, Shadow himself is based on Odin's son in Old Norse myth, the god Baldr and incidentally,

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Baldr in Old Norse. myth is associated with whiteness and brightness whilst in American gods, it seems that shadow is biracial.

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And in the screen version of the novel produced as a television series, Shadow is Black.

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And indeed, the racial politics of the novel are made much more prominent and edgy in the television series.

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So when, as it seems, Mr Wednesday is killed in an act of provocation by these new gods and Shadow agrees to re-enact his sacrifice on a tree,

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we apparently have a rerun of the death of Baldrr.

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It's gradually emerging then that human sacrifice and not just belief or even worship is what sustains the gods.

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Now, although we may associate sacrifice with ancient religions,

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Gaiman plays with the extended meaning of the word to associate it with the new gods as well.

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Thus, for instance, towards the end of the novel, we're introduced to the car gods and I quote,

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with blood on their black gloves and on their chrome teeth, they are recipients of human sacrifice on a scale undreamed of since the Aztecs.

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Now, in the screen version of American Gods,

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a figure called Vulcan is introduced and he's an industrial divinity to whom ghastly industrial accidents are represented as a sacrifice.

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And people, of course, are also the victims of his production, i.e. guns.

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In the novel, by far, the darkest episode of human sacrifice takes place in the cosy, idealised town of Lakeside.

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Shadow is given a lift by a kindly old man who introduces himself as Richie Hinzelmann.

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But in Germanic folklore, Hinzelmann is a goblin reputed to be helpful to humans if they respect him and reward him for their help,

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but liable to become malicious if not propitiated. Hinzelmann appears to be a good citizen of a good town.

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But he's surviving as a supernatural being on human sacrifice in this case its the murder of local children.

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One of the charming traditions of Lakeside is that during the winter,

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an old car is driven onto the centre of a frozen lake and the the inhabitants bet on what time,

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on which spring day the ice will melt and the old car will sink into the lake.

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Tickets specifying five minute spells are sold for five dollars each and the prize is a thousand dollars.

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And each year there's a murdered child in the boot of the car.

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In the television series, the sequence equivalent to coming to America 813 AD.

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Shows the north immigrants not sacrificing a Native American,

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but engineering a battle and dedicating the dead of that battle to Odin in order to secure a favourable wind for a journey back.

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It's very significant that the series actually opens with this immigration episode,

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unlike the novel, because it confirms a second piece of narrative misdirection.

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The sacrifice which Mr. Wednesday and Loki have been engineering is not simply that Odin's son Baldr or shadow.

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For Odin is the God of battle, as well as the God of poetry and the dead in battle are Odin's prize,

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the great battle between the old gods and the new has been set up.

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By agent provocateurs, Mr. Wednesdays and Loki  as a means of bolstering Mr. Wednesday's power through sacrificial slaughter on a major scale.

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So this then is Gaiman's mythology of emigration.

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Those who emigrate and settle in America bring their gods and folk heroes with them as objects of belief. In the novel

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These creatures assume human form and interact with the human world.

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But just as belief in the old gods fades as their relevance to the new world diminishes,

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Gaiman's quasi-human gods are shown in shabbily reduced social circumstances, fighting hard to survive and to sustain their old powers.

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This brings into play the dark heart of religious worship, the horror of human sacrifice.

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If, America is, and I quote, a bad place for Gods then it would seem that this is no bad thing.

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Interspersed with this grim take on religion, we have Gaiman's witty and often funny links between the mythological gods and their degraded avatars.

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Sometimes the appeal of these links leads Gaiman to play fast and loose with actual history.

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Take, for example, the irresistible parallels between the two directors of a funeral firm,

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Ibis and Jackel and their Egyptian originals, Thoth and Anubis.

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But there's a problem here. The Egyptian gods were worshipped millennia before America was settled, so which emigrants could have brought them?

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Here, game and play a little game with place names, a local woman explains to shadow why there are places called Cairo and Thebes in Illinois.

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They call it little Egypt because back oh maybe a hundred and fifty years, there was famine all over and crops failed.

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But Mr. Ibis, the funeral director, has a different explanation.

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This region takes its names from us.

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It was a trading post back in the old days. Shadow is incredulous.

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Are you trying to tell me that ancient Egyptians came here to trade 5000 years ago?

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Mr. Ibis stoutly maintains this claim of an ancient Egyptian settlement, and he echoes Gaiman's mythology of emigration.

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These immigrants, like all the others, stayed here, says Mr. Ibis, long enough to believe in us and to sacrifice to us.

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Gaiman's fantasy fiction also has serious, real world relevance.

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For example,

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we might be prompted to ask ourselves whether major wars are inevitable or whether they're the result of deliberate and cynical provocation,

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like Mr Wednesday's War of the Old and the New Gods. Further,

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Gaiman uses the historical sweep of the novel with its succeeding waves of emigration to imply that emigration is

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an ongoing process and that immigrants have always been part of an American identity and indeed always will be.

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In fact, in the screen version released in 2017,

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there are some updates and we can assume that they were sanctioned by Gaiman himself since he's named in the production team.

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There is, for instance, the introduction of the new God Vulcan based on the Roman God of fire and metalworking

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and representing heavy industry and especially gun manufacture in Gaiman's America.

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But it's impossible to ignore the implied possibility that Vulcan's own survival is

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precarious too in the light of real world contemporary decline in blue collar manufacturing.

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The television series also has an additional historical segment,

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this time recreating the experience of Mexican migrants fired on by the U.S. authorities but aided by their own deity, Jesus.

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As Mr. Ibis declares. This country has been Grand Central Station for 10000 years or more.

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And even Mr. Wednesday for all his deceit and untrustworthiness recognises this fundamental principle.

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Nobody's American, not originally. That's my point.

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Perhaps the strongest message is delivered by American gods are that no single group of

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immigrants is better than any other and that none is detrimental to the state of the nation.

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The emigrants are invariably presented sympathetically in their struggles, their hardships and their aspirations to a better life.

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The narrative perspective is very far from that of an embattled American nation facing an invasion of immigrants.

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And if indeed nobody is American originally, then no one group can claim priority or superiority. Claims to Scandinavian heritage,

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for example, have sometimes been used to bolster racial supremacy claims.

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But although Gaiman sent us his narrative on the gods of the first Scandinavian immigrants,

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there is no sense in the novel that those that the immigrants who brought them have any

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privileged claim to American identity. In its creation of a mythology of immigration.

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Gaiman's highly literary fantasy novel raises some of the most pressing issues in the contemporary world.

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Thank you.