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Miscellaneous Myths: Loki

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    Most of us get exposed to mythology
    through illustrated kid's books
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    This gives us the false impression
    that mythology is like a book -
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    written down and not particularly prone to change.
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    But that's more like...
    what mythology fossilizes into over time.
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    The actual living mythology looks very different
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    from the carefully articulated skeletons
    that we put in the museums.
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    Mythology is stories, and stories change with every telling.
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    If youre passing stories down generationally
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    through folklore and oral tradition,
    things change a lot.
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    Specially the characters.
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    And in mythology, the characters are gods.
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    So the gods end up evolving alongside their society.
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    Every time a myth of a god gets written down,
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    it's like a photograph of that god
    in that single moment of their development,
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    or like a single frame from an animation.
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    That single frame might be very cool and interesting,
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    but if we can find enough of those keyframes
    and put them in the right order,
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    we can try and trace out what the full animation
    might have looked like
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    and get a feel for how this god
    actually evolved over time.
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    When we do a deep dive like this,
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    I usually go as far as I can
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    to try and find the earliest stories
    so we can trace this evolution,
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    and watch as the gods we're familiar with now
    start out as wildly unfamiliar figures
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    before growing and changing
    with their societies
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    to eventually become the figure we recognize today.
Title:
Miscellaneous Myths: Loki
Description:

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Video Language:
Danish
Duration:
27:10

English subtitles

Incomplete

Revisions