Day 21, another milestone moment! I didn’t manage to stay on-prompt yesterday, today I have cunningly combined yesterday’s instruction to write using kennings with today’s prompt to re-tell a myth or fairytale. So here is a Norse myth, incorporating some Norse-style kennings.
The Stone That Slew The Magician Otr
Were I a stone of the road, I would have known to edge away
from the tread of the trouble-reapers, like all the stones of Midgard.
But I was idling at the river-hem, lazed back on sand,
like an otter I was half and half, my belly sun-warming.
I didn’t call Loki to reach for me and turn me into a flying axe,
I didn’t want to be death for the happy midstream water-tumbler.
Had I voice or breath I would have cried out there and then –
That is no more an otter than am I! That frog-chomper you think
to stew, he is shape-shifter, hidden wizard, heir to power! He is Otr,
and his slayer will pay a heavy price! Loki, be satisfied with the silver rope
of trout now fringing your shouldered pole, or you’ll lose twice that in gold!
I could not speak. I had no choice but to be the end-blow
of a god’s unlucky throw. Bleared and drowned in remorse, I saw
through the glass hall of the river, the mighty Otr skinned,
and the gods depart unwittingly to lay son-flesh on his father’s table.
Even this water won’t deafen me to the righteous roar to come,
the screams for bloodgold enough to bury a beloved pelt.
So consequences run ahead, for where can Loki find ransom
but by forcing the underwater cave of the dwarf-king?
I can see the entrance glint through the pike-patrolled weeds,
the future shining with it in fragmentary lights like warning beacons.
Here comes greed, and curses, and the death of lovers.
In this quote, Boris demonstrates two things. Firstly, a certain deftness with sentence construction, a breadth of vocabulary and an almost proprietorial familiarity with fine art history that is entirely fitting in one who has received so staggeringly privileged and expensive an education. Secondly, a terrifying ignorance of the tendency of otters, according to Japanese folklore, to shapeshift into beautiful women with the express purpose of seducing, killing and eating unwary men.
Kirsten Luckins 