Lately, I’m all about the Vikings.  I pick up a mythology book and find that Odin- the Zeus of Viking lore- did not eat at the fancy feasts of the gods, but sat listening to the stories of the ravens on his shoulders: Huginn (which means thought) and Muninn (which means memory).  His food at the table goes to the 2 wolves at his feet.  Odin is associated with wisdom, war, poetry, and others.

The Vikings are seeping into my life in the most random of ways, and at some point, I know the impact will be manifest in my thinking and then perhaps my actions, and certainly my writing.  Earlier this fall on a field trip with my daughter’s sixth grade class to the air and space museum, a man gave a demonstration using liquid nitrogen.  He froze some flowers, and had a student put on an oven mitt and grasp them- they flaked to the ground like wood ash.  At one point, he said the following (or this is how I heard it):

Vikings didn’t fight in the winter.  They ran their swords in the ground to the hilt.

They found that the swords came out sharper when pulled from the frozen earth in the spring.

Freezing changes steel.  It stays sharper longer.

I can find nothing in a quick search on the internet to support or refute the above (Google offered the option of “Vikings put words in ground in winter.”  Hm… I like it!)

As I find myself in a frozen time- frozen with decision-making, frozen with moving forward in some important places, frozen in fixated thinking- I take great solace in the idea that I may come out of the freeze into the thaw sharper than I ever was.