Odd and the Frost Giants is a short book that tells a tall tale about a Viking boy named Odd. Written by Neil Gaiman for World Book Day in the UK, the author has called it “a book about using your head… and about beauty.”
Plot Summary of Odd and the Frost Giants
The story begins in a small Viking village in ancient Norway. Odd is a strange but clever young boy, who, after his father’s death, meets with an accident that shatters his leg. Crippled and harassed by the villagers, whom the never-ending winter is beginning to unhinge, Odd runs away to his father’s hunting cabin.
It is there that Odd meets an eagle, a bear, and a fox – and they all need his help. They are in fact gods Odin, Thor, and Loki, imprisoned in animal shapes. These shapes will become permanent if Odd doesn’t get them back to Asgard, the city of the gods.
Odd becomes the brains behind the operation in a quest to win Asgard back from the Frost Giant. On the way, he will discover new things about gods, about stories, about beauty, and about himself.
Themes in Odd and the Frost Giants
As Gaiman states, Odd’s cleverness is at the centre of the book, setting each event into motion and offsetting in a refreshing way the traditional notion of Vikings as bloodthirsty brutes. Furthermore, Odd is always confident in his choice of action, seeming always to have faith in his own reasoning.
Take, for instance, his methodology for creating a prism, which has its own kind of truth to it: you can find rainbows at waterfalls, Odd affirms, and in ice when the light hits it; rainbows must get caught when water is frozen, and light must be the key to getting them out.
It is with this kind of reasoning that Odd is able to negotiate with some very fearsome beings indeed. In so doing, Odd discovers the chief difference between somebody like Thor and himself: “He doesn’t learn.” Freya, a goddess and important figure at the book’s close, explains: “It’s all part of being a god.”
Thus does the book make a statement about the relationship between a culture and its mythology. Gods are static, iconic, and often extreme in terms of their actions; the human beings that think them up are dynamic, and can negotiate their way through complicated situations. In short, gods are human beings writ large.
Accordingly, when Odd sees Asgard from above, he is not surprised to find that it looks familiar. It is “bigger, of course, but of the same pattern” of the village back home. In his dealings with the Frost Giant, Odd makes it clear that he knows how gods work; they’re like people, only bigger, and while both are susceptible to wild passions in quest of beauty, neither are immune to reason, in the end…
Publication Details
Odd and the Frost Giants is currently in print in a hardback edition by HarperCollins Publishers (ISBN 978-0-06-167173-9). The edition features remarkable full-page illustrations by Brett Helquist, best known as the illustrator of Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events.
Short on page count but tall on subtext, history and humour, Odd and Frost Giants is a great read for anyone who has ever recognized themselves in a story.
References
Neil Gaiman’s Journal, 28 Sept 2009
MouseCircus.com: A Note from Neil
