The Nine Mothers of Heimdallr by Miriam Nash with artwork by Christina Edlund-Plater

Hercules Editions (2020)

A Review by Chris Powici

Everybody knows the Norse myths. At least we think we do, the gist of them anyway. From comic books to Hollywood blockbusters by way of Neil Gaiman novels, archaeology programmes, even lager adverts, images of a thunderbolt-flinging Thor or Odin hanging from a tree, have taken root in the modern imagination. But amid all this elemental drama, some things have been obscured, which is what makes Miriam Nash’s version of The Nine Mothers of Heimdallr so engaging and timely in its re-telling of the killing of Ymir.
In the best-known versions of the myth, Ymir, the first and oldest giant, is slain by Odin and his brother gods who then form the earth and humanity itself from his corpse. It is, as Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir makes clear in her introduction to Nash’s poem, an exclusively masculine act of creation.
    I began this ‘chapbook’  (a rather too under-stated word for such a colourful and beautifully designed wee book) by letting the images that illustrate the text – wet-felting and needle-felting pictures by the poet’s mother Christina Edlund-Plater – work their magic. This is an unmistakeably northern world. You feel the bite of the wind and the heat of the hearth flame. A particularly striking image consists almost entirely of a black circle at the centre of the page, evoking the void before the world is formed but also, significantly, a mouth opened to tell a story or ask a question.
    The poem itself begins with a question: ‘What do you see in the flame-light child?’ The answer –  ‘You’re my mothers, mothers nine’ –  means we know from the outset that we’ll be reading or, better still,  listening to (read these resonant, echoey quatrains aloud) a creation myth that challenges the dominant version of the story. Here’s how Ymir is described:

            Ymir was frost was wind was flame
            Ymir was form was voice was name
            Ymir, the giant, the first, became
            our mother-father
 
Later the narrator tells how the debt to Ymir for the created world was disavowed and responsibility for ‘his’ murder concealed:

            Then Odin and his brother-gods
            built palaces from Ymir’s thoughts
            and looking down on Ymir’s realms
            they said the world was made by Gods.

From this point, the poem not only restores Ymir and a sense of female agency to the creation of the world, it also highlights how well-told stories don’t deliver cut-and-dried truths. Instead it asks the listener to think about choices:

            Am I a giant or a god?
            Child, you’re a giant to us
            Who was my father? Odin, child
            god or giant, you have a choice.

This isn’t a story that tells us what to think; it simply asks us to think: about what stories have been obscured by dominant narratives and how they may be retrieved and re-imagined. After all, the power of myth, of narrative, isn’t a narrowly academic issue. Consider the furore surrounding the Dundas statue in Edinburgh or the media vilification of historians for daring to shine a light on the links between some National Trust properties and the slave trade. For good or ill, we live by the stories we tell.      
According to the late Australian poet Les Murray, the ‘big’ narratives in our lives – religions, political creeds, national identity – take hold of us so completely, body and soul, they have the force of poems and are, therefore, largely immune to rational critique, no matter how deft or well-intentioned. ‘Only a poem can combat a poem’ wrote Murray. The Nine Mothers of Heimdallr may be just such a poem.