Hi folks,
you wanted a detailed report, so fetch food & drinks for three days, lean back and enjoy...
Before we actually started, as people were gathering , Matthias played some very nice neo-folk music from CD. That had quite an interesting effect: People out on the street looked into the yard, saw the mostly black wearing audience inside and hurried on.
That was a pity because most of the metalheads I know are rather friendly in fact.
Then I began my lecture. This time I used some original texts, but I quickly noticed that the listeners found them too difficult, so I changed my plans and returned to telling the stories more in my own words. Those passages that I did read out I summarised and "translated" immediately.
At first I reminded the listener of the things we had talked about on the first Nordic Night because these were supposed to be the background for the upcoming stories. So I told them again of the creation, the enmity between gods and giants, the nine worlds around Yggdrasil. I also reminded them of Thor and his hammer and used this occasion to say a few words about Nordic mythology and nazis / extreme right. I referred to an article in the local newspaper that had called the hammer and the runes nazi symbols comparable to "18" or "88", which is nonsense - Nordic mythology isn't racist, to the contrary. I pointed that out once more so that any guests who might still be unsure about our intentions could calm down and so that any brown-heads present would know they're not welcome. Luckily, there didn't seem to be any.
That said, I continued with newer stories. I told them some nice details about Yggdrasil and then told the sad story of Balder's death in detail. The I told them how Loki fled from the gods after that deed and how they caught and punished him.
After those sad stories I came to more cheerful ones. I told them about the birth of Sleipnir, the Hamarsheimt (Bringing the hammer back home), the Skirnisför (Freyr deeply in love with a beautiful giantess), and finally the journey of Thor and Loki to Utgardloki. The names of these stories may not mean much to you, but they're quite funny in places.
There were short breaks for a little live music on drums strange instruments (monochords, chord instruments with all chords tuned to the same note which gives an interesting sound effect), and as I was talking it got slowly dark on that clear and cloudless late-summer evening.
After the actual lecture we talked a little, and I did get a couple of compliments.
I also fetched, filled and emptied my horn (then refilled and started again).
A friend of a friend of mine had made me a horn holder that can be attached to the belt, gave it to me last night and he asked naught for it. But of course I inaugurated it immediately and filled his horn generously with mead. I also gave a lot of mead to another metalhead who had forgotten his horn, and usually I share that drink only with hornbearers. But in this case I made an exception because I still owed that guy a generous draught.
The evening was concluded by the fire jugglers that Matthias likes to invite for events like this, and their show was well worth seeing again. Swirling torches and fireballs rising up so big that we would feel their heat on our faces. In the end we were allowed to blow out the torches, and I never needed more than one attempt (unlike some other people I could mention
).
I'll let you see the pics as soon as I get some myself. Until then you can get a good impression if you look at the pics from the first event, at the bottom of
this page.
Cheers!
Markus
NTSMS has gone Miskolc! 