NorsePlay: Lester Del Rey's "Day Of The Giants".

Long out-of-print and originally published in a shorter version titled When The World Tottered in 1950, Lester Del Rey ambitiously tackles the Twilight of the Gods in his 128-page novella.

Most authors take the easy way out by instead writing a story about nearly avoiding doomsday, but Del Rey rises to the challenge and gives the audience the lead-up and final battle ... but perhaps not just as prophesied. A predecessor to Greg van Eekhout's Norse Code, Del Rey delivered Ragnarök fifty years earlier in the genre.

An inexplicably long winter strikes, vexing weathermen, and causing worldwide privation, the results of which start communal breakdown & vigilantism in Leif Svensen's small rural town. Only because of their ancestors' stories do Leif & his recently returned prodigal brother Lee even think to reference Fimbulwinter, and when a mysterious hitchhiker also happens to mention the prophesied world-ending final winter, do the pieces begin to fall into place. 

[Airmont Books takes a very misleading artistic licence with the cover art.]

Mismarketed as sci-fi given the completely errant War of the Worlds-style flying saucer attack cover, Day of the Giants is more contemporary fantasy fare, which takes a protagonist of the current day & inserts them into the warp & weft of a magical & ancient hidden under-verse. Leif & Lee are the wildcards that get shuffled into the deck that changes the game of Ragnarök.

The text has a fair share of awkward sentences and typos. But Del Rey was amazingly prolific & possibly didn't have or make time for copy editing in the rush-to-print days of quick 'n' dirty sci-fi pulp, so compared to his contemporaries, it's good on a storytelling level.

[Earlier Armchair Fiction two-fer edition, Valkyrie on Bifrost art by Robert Gibson Jones. Note the odd choice of pairing with Richard Shaver (go look up The Shaver Mystery ... which could have something to do with the Svartalfar, trolls, or huldrafolk, if one applies the lens of Norse Lore to Shaver's cthonic encounters).]

While Del Rey gives protagonist Leif a lot of then-modern American common sense & know-how, we find fault with the idea that any 20th century man would be technologically more savvy than the Gods, especially given they're cited to be 50,000 years old in the story. That they would not advance, even with a very restrictive cultural adherence, stretches credulity.

On the other hand, there are some really creative additions to the mythology that add to & fill in some blanks:

• That the Valkyries used an Alfheim magic to breathe an "elf seed", or regenerative flesh, into their chosen fallen, which is then drawn out to regenerate the hero whole back in Asgard. The new "elf flesh" then allows them to fight, die, and be reassembled at battle practice day's end.

• Freya's falcon cloak is in origin elf-made (perhaps given her brother's rulership of Alfheim?).

• Thor's hammer Mjölnir has magnetic properties which allows it to disarm others if it passes by an enemy's metal weapon. (*Yoink*!)

• Decades before the Marvel Film's "Thor" & "Thor: The Dark World" adaptations, Bifrost is not only a dimensional connector to earth/Midgard, but to all the Nine Worlds.

These extrapolations show Del Rey did a fair amount of thinking and his Edda homework. While there are some mistakes, reassignments of lore roles, and willful omissions to skip lengthy background explanations for the novella format, Del Rey garnishes his text with some lesser-used epithetical Gods' names, place references, and details that would make Snorri Sturluson proud.

[Avalon 1959 hardback cover art by Emsh. Note the misspelling of Del Rey's surname.]

In Del Rey's 1950s Atom Age, technology & the modernist future were ideals to be pursued, the new secular science replacing the old religious beliefs, and here he uses the Gods as a foil for that moral: Some traditions need to be re-examined if they stop a more useful progress. Yes, that's totally unfair to retroactively impose that ideal on the Norse Gods, especially since they inspired cultures that invented seafaring & navigational innovations to travel the world over, themselves bore the first smart weapons (i.e Gungnir, Mjölnir, & Sumarbrander) into battle, and created fish nets. But again Del Rey presents the Gods as nearly frozen in their personas & ways, so only in the context of his book can he get away with it.

Despite this then-contemporary misapplication, Del Rey's Day of the Giants is a fun read, his imaginative addenda to the lore is inspired, and seeing the details of the story NorsePlay'd out in the fateful tale of Ragnarök is rather worth it.

#     #     #

While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.