In The Days of Giants

Some stories are so old they were already ancient when the first books were written. The Norse myths are like that, and Abbie Farwell Brown has gathered them here for young readers who are ready for tales of genuine power and terror. These are stories from a land of midnight suns and crushing winters, where the mountains themselves seem like giants and thunder rolls overhead like the footsteps of gods. You will meet Odin, the one-eyed All-Father who sacrificed his eye for wisdom; Thor, whose hammer shakes the world; and Balder, whose death heralds the long darkness. Against them stand the frost giants, ancient beings of cold and stone, enemies of warmth and life. The book begins with the very first murder - when the gods killed the giant Ymir to make the world from his body - and ends with Ragnarök, the twilight of the gods when everything burns. This is myth at its rawest: not sanitized legend but the real stuff of creation and doom, winter and spring, rendered accessible for readers who can handle darkness.