Maps and legends

Following the mention yesterday of my facsimile John Speed map I set about searching for the map in question since it's managed to survive all these years. For the moment I haven't been able to find it but going through a portfolio of old drawings I finally found this item, a map or chart or the Nine Worlds of Norse mythology which I drew when I was 11 years old. Various family traumas mean a lot of my early artwork hasn't survived so this drawing is the earliest piece of my work that I own. (Click below for a bigger view.)

Sol in her Sun Chariot. The horse evidently looked better after a second attempt.

I can be specific about my age since I remember drawing this in 1973 shortly after moving to secondary school. The paper is the horrible stuff that was standard issue at that place, rough and terrible for pencil work. I'd been given a new set of coloured pencils so took advantage with this to use just about every colour in the box.

The wolf that chases Sol.

Beware the red-breasted mutt! The gates of Helheim.

For a while after drawing this I felt it was quite successful which is one reason I took the trouble to preserve it; looking at it now I'm amused at how crude it is compared to my fond memories. A few years later I became fanatic about drawing tiny details but there's hardly any detail here at all. The scary wolf that chases the chariot of the sun across the sky, and the bloody-chested creature guarding the gates of Helheim look like oversize doggies.

Odin on Sleipnir.

The letter shapes were carefully copied from an alphabet I found somewhere but I can't remember the source. My being so well-versed in Norse mythology was down to my favourite book at the time, The Myths of the Norsemen by Roger Lancelyn Green. I also liked the illustrations in Green's book by Brian Wildsmith whose drawing of Odin's magical steed, Sleipnir (below), is echoed by my own minuscule version at the bottom of the map.

This fondness for the adventures of Odin, Thor, Loki, and company sent me to the Marvel Comics stories about Thor which I read for a while but didn't enjoy half as much. Jack Kirby's Thor presented Asgard as a kind of bad science fiction which lacked the darkness and strangeness of Green's retellings. Beneath the surface of Green's prose you sense the harsh and violent world which gave birth to myths of Gods and Giants, the world which also gave us Beowulf; Marvel's equivalent seemed horribly plastic and artificial, like a Las Vegas imitation of something deep and filled with dread; the dread, of course, being Ragnarok which all the gods know is coming but are powerless to prevent. Green's book relates the Twilight of the Gods in a thrilling and powerful final chapter.

This tiny detail of a Viking longship presages the future in a way I couldn't have anticipated. In 2007 I designed a CD package for Finnish metal band Turisas, an elaborate concept album which relates the journey of a longship along the Varangian trade route from the Gulf of Finland to Byzantium. If my 11-year-old self could have seen into the future I'm sure he would have been thrilled by the idea and by the pictures.