wow. Wonder what it once opened.

I am going to start using some of those

I can now imagine some courtiers squinting at her hands, assesing glove size.

NIce bit of the world, NOrmandy.

These places are always more colourful than you often get from wanderinga round ruins.

Frustration is doing it then the shelf collapses :-)

Others too like Gandalf. But I guess we should not be surprised he taught much of this - Icelandic, Germanic etc mythology aong with Anglo Saxons stuidied at Oxford. To get such a depth to his world you need to draw from something.

only to find 4 people have written the story already!

I read in the history of middle earth books that Tolkien often got stuck and not sure where things were going but some how managed to blunder through the blocks - even if some lasted a year and we have the Lord of the Rings as a result.

I picked up you book in a German version (trying to expand my German vocab). Reading it slowly as my German is not great., But a great idea Loki being confined to earth as a teen.

There are some good points here. I remember listening to Bernard Cornwell at a talk once saying he wrote about 10,000 words of his research at the start of his anglo saxon series explaining about the period and the history and then having to just rip out 90% of it.