Vitaly Podvorchan Period 7, 1/3/2022

 Recently in class we began the Norse Mythology Unit. Norse mythology has always meant something to me. I have a vivid memory of back when I was around 10 years old, for my birthday my sister bought me a book on Norse mythology. I would read it everyday just learning more and more about their culture and different various myths. Now as I grew up, I obviously slowly fell out of love with it but it was always in the back of my mind, and starting this unit sparked my interest for it again. 

    Now for this unit we had a final project to do where we would have to essentially write fanfiction about a Norse Myth. My group was assigned The Master Builder which I vaguely remember. As I reread it I remembered why I loved Norse culture so much as a child. Their myths always read so whimsical to me and it just had a certain hint of realism that I believed Greek or Roman mythology was missing. Even as it had a sense of realism, there were still so many aspects of weirdness and this was of course the case with The Master Builder. The story reads as any normal myth does but the ending caught my attention and my group by surprise when we read it. In the story, Loki turns himself into a mare to catch the attention of The Master Builder's horse and lead it away to make the MB fail (Abbreviation for the Master Builder  because that is such a long name for no reason). A great plan from Loki to save himself from being killed by the gods using his trickery but after that Loki comes back with an 8 legged horse several months later… Which implies Loki and the horse had SOMETHING going on. Which was so weird. Because Loki didn't even need to do that with the horse. He could've just led it away and turned back into a human but he did this on his own volition. When we read this, my whole group erupted in laughter as we worked on the project and wondered how we were gonna incorporate this into our story. We found a work around this by similarly only implying it into our transformation, and hoping the class understands what we meant. 

    As silly as the story was, working on the transformation of it really helped my group and I hone in our critical thinking and perception skills. We applied our own feminist critical theory by giving Freya a more important role, along with critiquing the Judicial system that was in play, or lack thereof,  by the Norse Gods. This also allowed me to do further research and find out that the Norse actually did have trials in their culture along with lawyers which I found super interesting. I always kind of believed they just killed off their criminals seeing how war based their culture was, so being able to further research into their culture and change my perception of them further influenced my critical thinking. This can help apply to the world around me because rather than just believing something off my own perception, I can further look into it and find out more.