Hi, everybody. My name's Heather O'Donoghue, and I'm going to talk today about Neil Gaiman's celebrated fantasy novel 'American Gods'.
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''.
In 'American Gods', Neil Gaiman characterises America to use his own anachronistic and in many ways
a problematic term as a country of immigrants from its very earliest times.
Gaiman's starting point is how gods and the heroes of folklore are exported to the new world along with each wave of immigration.
What intrigues Gaiman is what happens to belief in the gods when their believers emigrate.
As Mr Wednesday, an avatar of the old Norse God Odin proclaims to his fellow gods and folk heroes in the novel.
We rode here in their minds and we took root.
We travelled with the settlers to the new lands across the ocean.
But did they really take root? Mythical figures survive by being remembered by immigrant communities,
but only in relation to events remembered in the old country.
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
Mr. Wednesday echoes the scholarly explanation of our true believers passed on or stopped believing.
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.
This lies at the heart of 'American gods'. It's action initially involved Mr. Wednesday, accompanied by Shadow,
who we later learn is his son travelling all around the mid-west of America,
drumming up support for a great battle against the new gods of the new world.
Now,
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.
Mr. Wednesday's opponents, for instance,
include the goddess media with its neat echo of the classical goddess media and technical boy, the new young God of the digital age.
And a major part of the fun of American gods is simply spotting which gods or heroes the figures in the novel represent,
and then enjoying the witty contrast that Gaiman sets up between their traditional and often
formidable mythic identities and the grim appropriateness of their presently reduced circumstances.
Thus, for example, the Slavik deity Czernobog literally black God is a sinister figure associated with death,
and he appears at American gods as a terrifying ex-abattoir worker who relished his bloody and murderous
job and is now living on the edge of poverty in shabby rooms at the top of a Chicago brownstone.
So it's clear to anyone with even the most basic knowledge of Old Norse mythology that Mr. Wednesday is an avatar of Odin.
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,
widely believed to be the equivalent of the Old Norse Odin.
Mr. Wednesdayis a confidence trickster, a grifter reflecting Odin's reputation asnan oath breaker and a cheat.
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.
The slander of the Gods and the Source or Smith of all deceits.
Further Wednesday has a glass eye,
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.
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.
For an Old Norse myth,
Odin was hanged or hanged himself in a mysterious act of self-sacrifice on a windswept tree usually identified as Yggdrasil the world tree.
And thereby he gained wisdom and occult knowledge before returning from this temporary death.
This particular myth explains a great many passing references in American gods such as Mad Sweeneys
casual abuse of Wednesday's tree hammer. But it's also the source of one of the major climaxes in the novel.
A Shadow is destined to re-enact Odin's self-sacrifice himself.
Does it really matter if readers don't understand all these allusions?
Well, in fact, Gaiman has Mr. Wednesday explicitly identify himself as Odin.
Shadow asks, who are you,
what are you and Mr. Wednesday responds with a list of Odenic pseudonyms all taken from Old Norse mythic sources.
I am called Glad of war, grim raider, third, I am one eyed, I'm called highest and true guesser.
I am grimnear, I am the hooded one, I am all father.
My Ravens are Hugin and Munin, my wolves, Freki and Gery.
Finally he uses the name Odin and repeats it three times.
Similarly, Low-key liesmith confirms his identity to shadow.
Low-Key lyesmith said shadow low-key, he said, low-key Lyesmith. You're slow, said Low-key but you get there
in the end. These explicit identification's mean that American gods does not depend on prior detailed,
knowledge of Norse myth to be understood on a broad level.
But the novel builds up layers of meaning, which only the most specialist readers will be able to decode fully.
And Gaiman's prose is scattered with literary allusions.
For example, we are told of one group of migrants, a bad journey they had of it echoing
Of course, the first line of T.S. Eliot celebrated poem, The Journey of the Magi, a cold coming
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.
But there's a striking analogue in the fifth stanza of Seamus Heaney's acclaimed poem 'Follower'.
I wanted to grow up and plough to close one eye and stiffen my arm.
All I ever did was follow in his broad shadow around the farm.
As in American gods, the key relationship here is between father and son, the son shadowing the one eyed father.
In one of the novels, several interpolations about purportedly actual historical migrants,
the segment called Coming to America eight one three A.D.
Norse travellers fear that they're going to be deserted by their gods, but their leader reassures them if the old father,
Odin, made the world, then he must have made this country, too, and they should continue to worship him.
The next day. They capture a Native American and they sacrifice him to their God, Odin, by hanging him on a windswept tree.
The arrival of two Ravens the following day to peck at the corpse is seen as a sign that their sacrifice has been accepted.
But in the depths of that winter, a large raiding party of indigenous people ambushed the Norse and they're all killed.
Well, in outline at least,
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,
they, too, encountered hostile indigenous people.
But there are two startling differences between Gaiman's narrative and the story as told in the sagas.
Firstly, there is no mention in the Vinland sagas of Odinic sacrifice, and that's a crucial point, which I'll come back to.
Secondly, the year ascribed in the novel to this voyage, EIGHT ONE three A.D. was actually more than a hundred years before Leif
the lucky, the son of Erik the Red discovered the land which he would call Vinland Vinland, as Gaiman. himself explains.
Gaiman has, in fact, invented a powerful but totally fictional precursor to the Vinland voyages, which are documented in the sagas.
The most obvious entailment of creating a prelude to the Vinland voyages is made clear at the very end of Gaiman's new narrative,
because when Leif Ericson arrived in the New World, as Gaiman explains, his gods were already waiting for him.
They were there. They were waiting.
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.
This element reaches into the heart of not only old Norse myth, but also American gods itself.
The ostensible plot of American gods is an attempt by Mr Wednesday to gather the folk,
the gods and folk heroes to fight back against America's new gods and the new threat that they pose to the old order.
But this apparent threat is, in fact a misdirection engineered by Mr. Wednesdays and Low-key
Lyesmith. To understand what's actually going on.
We need to return to the figure of shadow and the question of sacrifice.
Now, Shadow himself is based on Odin's son in Old Norse myth, the god Baldr and incidentally,
Baldr in Old Norse. myth is associated with whiteness and brightness whilst in American gods, it seems that shadow is biracial.
And in the screen version of the novel produced as a television series, Shadow is Black.
And indeed, the racial politics of the novel are made much more prominent and edgy in the television series.
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,
we apparently have a rerun of the death of Baldrr.
It's gradually emerging then that human sacrifice and not just belief or even worship is what sustains the gods.
Now, although we may associate sacrifice with ancient religions,
Gaiman plays with the extended meaning of the word to associate it with the new gods as well.
Thus, for instance, towards the end of the novel, we're introduced to the car gods and I quote,
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.
Now, in the screen version of American Gods,
a figure called Vulcan is introduced and he's an industrial divinity to whom ghastly industrial accidents are represented as a sacrifice.
And people, of course, are also the victims of his production, i.e. guns.
In the novel, by far, the darkest episode of human sacrifice takes place in the cosy, idealised town of Lakeside.
Shadow is given a lift by a kindly old man who introduces himself as Richie Hinzelmann.
But in Germanic folklore, Hinzelmann is a goblin reputed to be helpful to humans if they respect him and reward him for their help,
but liable to become malicious if not propitiated. Hinzelmann appears to be a good citizen of a good town.
But he's surviving as a supernatural being on human sacrifice in this case its the murder of local children.
One of the charming traditions of Lakeside is that during the winter,
an old car is driven onto the centre of a frozen lake and the the inhabitants bet on what time,
on which spring day the ice will melt and the old car will sink into the lake.
Tickets specifying five minute spells are sold for five dollars each and the prize is a thousand dollars.
And each year there's a murdered child in the boot of the car.
In the television series, the sequence equivalent to coming to America 813 AD.
Shows the north immigrants not sacrificing a Native American,
but engineering a battle and dedicating the dead of that battle to Odin in order to secure a favourable wind for a journey back.
It's very significant that the series actually opens with this immigration episode,
unlike the novel, because it confirms a second piece of narrative misdirection.
The sacrifice which Mr. Wednesday and Loki have been engineering is not simply that Odin's son Baldr or shadow.
For Odin is the God of battle, as well as the God of poetry and the dead in battle are Odin's prize,
the great battle between the old gods and the new has been set up.
By agent provocateurs, Mr. Wednesdays and Loki as a means of bolstering Mr. Wednesday's power through sacrificial slaughter on a major scale.
So this then is Gaiman's mythology of emigration.
Those who emigrate and settle in America bring their gods and folk heroes with them as objects of belief. In the novel
These creatures assume human form and interact with the human world.
But just as belief in the old gods fades as their relevance to the new world diminishes,
Gaiman's quasi-human gods are shown in shabbily reduced social circumstances, fighting hard to survive and to sustain their old powers.
This brings into play the dark heart of religious worship, the horror of human sacrifice.
If, America is, and I quote, a bad place for Gods then it would seem that this is no bad thing.
Interspersed with this grim take on religion, we have Gaiman's witty and often funny links between the mythological gods and their degraded avatars.
Sometimes the appeal of these links leads Gaiman to play fast and loose with actual history.
Take, for example, the irresistible parallels between the two directors of a funeral firm,
Ibis and Jackel and their Egyptian originals, Thoth and Anubis.
But there's a problem here. The Egyptian gods were worshipped millennia before America was settled, so which emigrants could have brought them?
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.
They call it little Egypt because back oh maybe a hundred and fifty years, there was famine all over and crops failed.
But Mr. Ibis, the funeral director, has a different explanation.
This region takes its names from us.
It was a trading post back in the old days. Shadow is incredulous.
Are you trying to tell me that ancient Egyptians came here to trade 5000 years ago?
Mr. Ibis stoutly maintains this claim of an ancient Egyptian settlement, and he echoes Gaiman's mythology of emigration.
These immigrants, like all the others, stayed here, says Mr. Ibis, long enough to believe in us and to sacrifice to us.
Gaiman's fantasy fiction also has serious, real world relevance.
For example,
we might be prompted to ask ourselves whether major wars are inevitable or whether they're the result of deliberate and cynical provocation,
like Mr Wednesday's War of the Old and the New Gods. Further,
Gaiman uses the historical sweep of the novel with its succeeding waves of emigration to imply that emigration is
an ongoing process and that immigrants have always been part of an American identity and indeed always will be.
In fact, in the screen version released in 2017,
there are some updates and we can assume that they were sanctioned by Gaiman himself since he's named in the production team.
There is, for instance, the introduction of the new God Vulcan based on the Roman God of fire and metalworking
and representing heavy industry and especially gun manufacture in Gaiman's America.
But it's impossible to ignore the implied possibility that Vulcan's own survival is
precarious too in the light of real world contemporary decline in blue collar manufacturing.
The television series also has an additional historical segment,
this time recreating the experience of Mexican migrants fired on by the U.S. authorities but aided by their own deity, Jesus.
As Mr. Ibis declares. This country has been Grand Central Station for 10000 years or more.
And even Mr. Wednesday for all his deceit and untrustworthiness recognises this fundamental principle.
Nobody's American, not originally. That's my point.
Perhaps the strongest message is delivered by American gods are that no single group of
immigrants is better than any other and that none is detrimental to the state of the nation.
The emigrants are invariably presented sympathetically in their struggles, their hardships and their aspirations to a better life.
The narrative perspective is very far from that of an embattled American nation facing an invasion of immigrants.
And if indeed nobody is American originally, then no one group can claim priority or superiority. Claims to Scandinavian heritage,
for example, have sometimes been used to bolster racial supremacy claims.
But although Gaiman sent us his narrative on the gods of the first Scandinavian immigrants,
there is no sense in the novel that those that the immigrants who brought them have any
privileged claim to American identity. In its creation of a mythology of immigration.
Gaiman's highly literary fantasy novel raises some of the most pressing issues in the contemporary world.
Thank you.