Sublime

These deities, which to our more civilized understanding appear vain and passion-possessed, riddled with folly and so prey to humanlike faults and foibles as to be unworthy of being called divine, to the Greeks embodied and personified their belief in that which was, if grander than human in scale, yet human in spirit and essence.

In revenge for Ymir’s death, the crime at the core of the Viking world, the giants’ hatred of the Aesir will extend to the Ragnarök itself when their armies of frost and fire will invade the gods’ home. There have been many attempts to understand what the giants ‘mean’. Unlike the gods, they do not seem to have impinged on the human world of Midgar

But as I studied him – and believe me, I drank him in like a parched animal at a riverbank – I began to see the cold, steady certainty of the chill green depths.

He had the trick of speaking like one, rolling words like great boulders, lost in the details of his own legend.

What a charmer. Lamech's behavior is a textbook example of what Augustine calls the libido dominandi, variously translated as the "desire to dominate" or the "will to power." Libido dominandi is raw violence-unprovoked, unrestricted, unconflicted. It is the characteristic driving force of the earthly city, "which, when it s