Signed title page of Runemarks
" by Joanne HarrisEnglish author Joanne Harris studied Modern and Medieval Languages at St Catharine's College, Cambridge, before spending fifteen years teaching language and literature. Her debut as a novelist was "The Evil Seed" (1989), but it was her third novel that propelled her to international stardom; "Chocolat" earned the number one spot on the "Sunday Times" bestseller list, and the film adaption (with Johnny Depp and Juliette Binoche) was a commercial and critical success. Since that first breakthrough, Harris has written a series of bestselling novels including "Holy Fools" and "The Lollipop Shoes". Two of her sixteen published books are French cookbooks, and her short stories have been featured in numerous collections.
In "Runemarks"(2007), Harris imagines the aftermath of Ragnar"ok, "five hundred years after the End of the World." It's a world quite different from the one suggested in the "Eddas", but it has deep roots in Norse mythology. The old gods have fallen and a new religion has risen. A young girl named Maddy is born with a "runemark" - a rune on her skin that marks her as a relation of the Norse gods and invests her with mystic power. Over the course of the novel, she befriends Odin (as much as one can be a friend with the Furious One), travels with Loki, and becomes embroiled in a struggle involving the resurgent AEsir and Vanir and the minions of the new religion known as the Order.
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Maddy the Old English rune poem provides lines for the cantrips spoken by your characters - cantrip" itself being an archaic English and Scottish word for "spell" or "incantation". In the "Runemarks" world, Red Horse Hill is rumored to have been a place of heathen sacrifice or a burial mound, and it has an ancient carving of a horse that "never grassed over in spring, nor did the winter snow ever hide its shape" - which is reminiscent of the Uffington White Horse and other English chalk horses. "Runemarks"' map shows that the Middle Worlds look like the British Isles, with World's End in the general area of London. Why did you decide to use an English setting, rather than a Nordic one? Did the choice enable you tell a different type of story than if, for instance, the events took place in Iceland?
JH - I don't think I made a conscious choice to set the books in a neo-British setting. To me it simply came naturally. I'm more familiar with my Yorkshire home than I am with, say, Iceland or Scandinavia, and there are already so many links here to Viking culture. There are Viking remains all around Yorkshire, from runic stones to burial mounds. I worked as a volunteer on the Coppergate dig in York when I was a teenager - the site that was to become Jorvik. Scratch the soil almost anywhere here, and you'll find that our back gardens are all filled with Viking leavings.
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Viking re-enactors at the Jorvik Viking Centre in York, England
Just outside my home village of Almondbury - which was to become Malbry in the Rune books - there are the foundations of an Iron Age fort on a hill. Castle Hill became Red Horse Hill without much alteration, and I've used some other local names, such as Farnley Tyas, mostly for my own amusement and that of my daughter, for whom I wrote the books in the first place. I wanted to try and recreate the way in which belief systems migrate and are recreated locally to suit the needs of each location in which they are adopted; in this case, my own region, which has harbored the remnants of Viking culture for centuries, even to adopting Danish words into our local dialect. For instance, the word laik" ("to play") was very common when I was a child, e.g., "A' tha' laikin'?" ("Are you coming out to play?").
All this makes Malbry and the world of Inland very, very familiar to me. I think that, if I'd chosen a more obviously Icelandic - and therefore "foreign" - setting, the story would have been different; less intimate, less familiar. I wanted to tell a story that most of us here already half-knew, if only on a subconscious level - not introduce a new culture that people wouldn't recognize.
KS - You give very nice logical explanations for the mysteries of Norse mythology. For instance, the ability to mystically bind a goblin or god by knowing its true name ("a named thing is a tamed thing") is explained like this:At the beginning of the First Age, it was given to every creature, tree, rock and plant a secret name that would bind that creature to the will of anyone who knew it.
Mother Frigg knew the true names, and used them to make all of creation weep for the return of her dead son. But Loki, who had many names, would not be bound to such a promise, and so Balder the Fair, god of springtime, was forced to remain in Underworld, Hel's kingdom, until the end of all things.
Balder ">
Loki, Sigyn his flaws are very believable, and - of all the Norse gods - he seems to me the most modern. His moral and sexual ambivalence, his inability (or refusal) to integrate into Asgard's society, his outcast status, his subversive temperament, his changes of mood and his almost existentialist sense of humor make him very accessible to a modern audience.
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Angry teenage Loki in Marvel Comics' Journey into Mystery"
Art by Richard Elson
He portrays the insecurities of modern adolescence - the sense of not belonging; the need to make an impact, even a negative one, onto the world of adulthood (represented by Odin and the other gods). And, of course, he is very funny - lifting what would have been a very stolid and serious pantheon into something much livelier and more human.
