And the If it's Monday it is mister class it's Monday, it is Maisterclass.

It's a short form podcast where I ask questions to experts on medieval life and literature.

This week features a literary question related to the mythology of Bale the Bard, who very much looks like a

Norse trickster. So I get to ask historian Philip Haberkern about tricksters as literary types.

If you have a question for someone like Phil, you can email that to Book at baldmove.com.

All right, here's Phil.

This is irregular.

And yes, well, I suppose that life is irregular.

If you could for my listeners kind of give us a gloss on the trickster as a type in narrative.

Okay, so the trickster figure is universal.

And it's known in Native American lore,

whether it's the raven in the Pacific Northwest or

coyote and sort of right southwest next show you have a figure like Loki who I

think is probably the best known version of this right now. Thank you MCU. From Nordic myth you have

Anansi the spider in Africa everywhere you have these trickster god figures who are amoral.

They are both...

They are both... They kind of live outside, not necessarily that they're bad.

They aren't bad necessarily.

They are simply chaotic. and a lot of times you'll see them sort of as reflecting

both this sort of you know godly divine superhuman abilities to affect the story they're also often

shown in a lot of these cultural context as half human half animal and so there's also a sense of the subhuman has the wrong sense, the sort of

of liminal point between culture and the wilds. And so they occupy these spaces and they show up in stories basically as as

...