Books and Norse Gods, amongst other things

I just rented the Italian Job - the new one. I think it's an excellent movie. I need to get a copy all of my own but the delivery is crap this time of year so rental it is.

Yet another Sunday has come and gone when I did bugger all. Good fun really, I started making my Grandma's stocking but it's not done yet so I won't take photos till all three are finished. I'm going to take a picture of them next to some regular sized socks so you can see the difference.

They're pretty frigging big to be honest. If they do turn out to be loads bigger than the kids then, well actually I'll probably giggle, but it's not like I expect more or anything. Hell, I'm 20 years old, I shouldn't be getting stocking presents by rights! But we do get stocking presents, or at least I hope we do - by we I mean me and my brother 20 and 18 respectively. My brother probably can expect stocking pressies as he's only technically an adult so I can't be the only one left out! It'd be unfair! Besides, it'd ruin Christmas!

Lol, anyway less pretend whinging. They are big though, I should have gotten a smaller pattern - they'd take me less long to make! I'm starting to worry about whether or not they're gonna hold anything, whether they're strong enough. As I've said before I don't sew much so I have no illusions about how good it is, but I've never had the strength tested so this is gonna be interesting. I'm gonna line them first then fill them with stuff till I get worried, if they turn out to be a bit flimsy then maybe I'll go over the stitching with my step-mother's sewing machine at home. Hopefully that'll help.

I came up with a simple but ingenious solution to my curtain problem. My curtains - if you sewed them together down the middle, turned them on their side and then cut them back up the new middle - would fit my windows perfectly. However the person who made them obviously cut the wrong part of the material; they are too narrow and too long. As such my computer chair was always getting scrunched up in them, because my desk is by the window. By window I mean french doors, only less glamourous/pretty/nice. And so, after months of being completely pissed off at whoever made the bloody things (and who put one on back to front ¬_¬ ) I realised that if I just safety pinned up the bottom the problem would go away! Which made me feel pretty daft for not thinking of it about five months ago, but there we go.

Books then, I finished 'Barking' it had some more twists and turns, still pretty good, still not my favourite.

Then I was telling my friend what I thought of Beedle the Bard and I told him that despite what I'd said he still needed to own it, like owning the Silmarillion even if you can't understand the bloody thing. In theory just owning things because you should doesn't make sense to me but when it comes to books it's a whole different story - besides I'm a collections person. I have all the Harry Potter books. But I also want to collect them in as many foreign languages as I can theoretically read - so I won't get them in Dutch or German or Swedish - but I do want them in French, Spanish, Italian and... Latin and Greek, I'm a nerd, I admit it. And so I have the sexy black matching set of the Lord of the Rings including The Hobbit and The Silmarillion. I already own the Hobbit and the Silmarillion (sort of, I accidentally nicked it from the school library) but it was a birthday present and I think they're simply beautiful. If I were never going to read The Silmarillion then I probably wouldn't have asked for it but I have tried and I'll probably try again thus justifying owning it.

So, on to Norse Gods, when I mentioned the Silmarillion he said he couldn't understand it either - I didn't try hard I admit - we couldn't get our heads round all the names. And I said it reminded me of the Ring Cycle - the one by Wagner. Before you get into your heads that I'm a cultured opera goer I'll clear that up. I have read a book, Tom Holt incidentally, to do with various Norse Gods and the ring and belt of Brunnhilde. It was very interesting and, being written by Tom Holt, very funny. I'm kind of an admirer of people who know more about various other religions, the Norse ones, Celtic, Roman, Greek etc. I'm quite interested in them myself, but in that easily distracted way or the "I'd love to buy a book and learn more about that, maybe when I have more money..." rather than actually getting down and doing something about it. Luckily for me I manage to read books whereby I accumulate vague knowledge of the matters of interest to me - through fiction of course. And so I read that book (Odds and Gods I believe) and then I read The Whale Rider much more recently, I don't remember if I mentioned it on here, if I did I probably said something like: very interesting, kinda dull. But it had more about the Norse people and about the Huns, really cool stuff too. I'm rambling, I just realised, oh well.

Anyway, I was reading about the Ring Cycle on wikipedia because I knew my friend wouldn't know what it was so I thought I'd read up on it so I could pretend to be vaguely more knowledgeable ;) And it seems I was right, in a way. Though the Silmarillion, and indeed the Lord of the Rings, is probably influenced by the *actual* Norse gods rather than the opera, I wasn't far off the mark. A cursed ring and all that jazz. Plus a full complement of dragons + treasure, people with lots of names, lots of people with similar names and probably great amounts of drinking along the way. That encompasses all of Tolkein's stuff by the way, well the similarities between them anyway. Of course, dragons + treasure is a well established myth, before or after Fafnir (the norse one) I'm not sure. So Tolkein probably didn't borrow that specifically, the ring stuff might have been more influenced, who knows. I would like to say that I'm not bashing him for taking the idea from somewhere else or any such nonsense. He was a legendary writer and all writers are influenced by most things, in fact a lot of sci-fi/fantasy apparently can be passed off as reproducing one of about four classic works, one of which is - of course - the Lord of the Rings.

So even if he did pilfer the Ring, as it were, doesn't matter, he's created a whole following of his own - who gives a damn? But it *is* interesting to actually locate where influences came from. I have loooooooads in my book, just little things that I've picked up here and there, most writers I've read will have a tiny mark or so on it somewhere. Not that people can necessarily see it, but I know it's there and I'm not ashamed. I think what's more shameful would be to say that what you've written is 100% completely original, no influence from anyone. Partly 'cos it's a lie. The only person who can say that is someone who grew up completely alone. Then their only influence is themselves. Because even if other authors haven't influenced you, the world has, society has, your mother has. Fact of life.

Umm, I have a headache and I'm out of musings. Night night. 18 sleeps till Christmas