Hey everybody. So imaginary worlds comes out every other week. This is an off week. But I'm trying something new.

Every so often when there's an episode where there's a lot of great material that I couldn't fit in, I'm going to play the outtakes in a bonus

episode that comes out the following week. My previous episode was about Norse mythology.

And I talked with two experts who I found totally fascinating.

I'm going to start by playing some bonus material for my interview with Caroline

Larington. She is a professor at Oxford and the author of the Norse myths that

shaped the way we think. I asked her if there was ever a moment in her

academic research when she first came across a Norse myth in its raw form and she thought to herself

this is very different from the Norse mythology that I read in children's books growing up

probably when I read I first read the poem Locker Center, translated as

Loke's Quarl. And it's a poem in which Lokey, who's gradually becoming very alienated from the other gods,

bursts into a hall where everybody's feasting and starts picking fights with everybody inside and accusing people of all kinds of

disreputable behavior and I thought the first time I came across it, wow, the gods are totally different from us, clearly.

They have, if they have a moral code, it's not a moral code that really applies to humans.

And these are not the stories that I read in the

heroes of Asgard when I was seven. So that was a moment of which I I thought

the gods are more complicated than I had thought when I was I was

little and reading these stories in a kind of wide-eyed way and thinking that

they're all heroes in or maybe not offering any kind of

particular moral example but simply doing their best under trying circumstances not quite getting up to the kind of stuff that

Loki accuses them of.

You know, one of the things I think is so interesting is that, you know, storytellers are really drawn towards

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