Seven Names for the Bellbird: Conservation Geography in Honduras Book

A good book, but it has very little to do with Norse mythology, and for that it gets a low rating for false advertising.

My real issue with this book is that the title is rather misleading. I hadn't gotten through perhaps four stories before it became very clear that these, while certainly stories, were much less so Norse, or even mythological.

There are only two stories into which Norse religion factors, one of these being a brief appearance of Odin, the other being the brief appearance of a valkyrie who then gives up her power to wed a mortal.

These stories are not mythological in that they do not follow the definition of a myth; they are folk tales, and rarely carry any religious undertone, lesson, or purpose. In short, you're going to see a lot of farmer's children stumbling on magical artifacts which make them strong, beautiful, and rich, but very little of anything else.

I was even more astounded to see that the title header on the left page read, not 'Popular Tales from Norse Mythology', as it should, but 'Scandinavian and North German Tales', which is both a far better description of what this book contains, and probably what the title of the book should have been.

Then, there is the fact that this is rather shoddily put together. The 'author' contributed an introduction, as well as a few footnotes, but these are woefully unintelligently done. The introduction makes grand generalizations and tries to shoehorn these tales into the Norse tradition, when it is clear that they have little to do of the sort, and makes quite a few (major) false assumptions about the meaning and sources of these tales.

The footnotes, which occurred maybe five times in the book, were helpful in that they pointed out similar versions of given tales, and perhaps gave a bit of background info, but there were certainly too few of them. There were some pretty clear parallels between many of the tales in this book, which shared many elements with each other, and with some of the more popular fantasy tales (Disney movies come to mind), but these were not elaborated upon or even noted for the reader who is too lazy to make his own as he goes along.

Now, this isn't to say that I didn't enjoy this book, as the tales were very interesting and at least somewhat related to the topic that the book claimed to be about. I enjoyed them very much. I'm just rather annoyed that I paid for what I thought was Norse mythology, and did not receive it.