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And that’s how it’s presented in media like ‘God of War.’”Īccording to Crawford, “God of War” benefits immensely from a current wave of increased interest in Norse mythology inaugurated by the likes of Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” films and the advent of the inescapable Marvel Cinematic Universe. They interpret it as less of something that belonged to a different culture, and more of a story they can interpret on their own. That affects people’s attitude towards it. In Norse mythology, the seams are a lot more visible, because 90% of the sources are the ‘Poetic Edda’ or the ‘Prose Edda,’ and the different variants are more well-known. As a result, people often assume that Greek mythology has more of a ‘canon’ than it really does, because of books like Edith Hamilton’s ‘Mythology,’ which typically presents one version of a story, rather than all the different variants from Ovid or Hesiod. As Jackson Crawford, a translator and scholar of Old Norse texts who teaches at the University of Colorado Boulder, puts it: “Greek mythology is typically taught as a very scholastic subject, whereas Norse myth is typically encountered for fun. Though popular culture typically presents these gods as belonging to a coherent “canon” of well-defined stories, in reality, most mythological systems are based on a narrow skein of sources and fragments that offer a radically-incomplete and sometimes self-contradictory portrait of an alien society. Since the team knew that this new entry would have to be much grander in scale than its largely-linear predecessors, Barlog felt that those bawdy tales would help the game find a more dynamic emotional palette, rather than what he calls the “morose and dour” themes of the previous trilogy. To Barlog, though the Norse myth system possessed many obvious parallels to the Greek pantheon that Kratos spent a trilogy-and-a-half smashing through, he was more interested in its subtle deviations, such as what he dubs “the bizarre Scandinavian sense of humor,” one quality that he admits the previous trilogy lacked. That’s basically what Kratos would be doing.”
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If you’re going to go hide out, hiding out at your neighbor’s house isn’t a smart move. There’s a lot of crossover in the culture. But I didn’t know if we were ready for it technically, and geographically, it’s not that far away from Greece. We didn’t do a lot of that in the early games. I really loved the idea that the pharaohs were the early vessels for the Gods, and they existed in an active, urban civilization. The last two we came down to, that ones that were so exciting, were Egyptian and Norse. “But I knew there was a place for each of them, but not right away. “There were fantastic stories in each system,” Barlog says. Eventually, the field tightened to three choices: starting over at the beginning of Greece, going south to follow Egypt’s Book of the Dead, or crawling up to the land of snow and ice. After all, translating the ashen-skinned “Ghost of Sparta” from the series’ baroque vision of mythic Greece to an entirely different culture proved to be a lot harder than just sticking a pair of Viking horns on his head and calling it a day.Īs creative director Cory Barlog recalls, the northward shift was the logical endpoint of a lengthy research cycle that involved Barlog and his fellow writers delving into as many mythological systems as they could get their hands on, sifting through the likes of the ancient Mayans and the stories that gird modern Hinduism, trying to decide which direction to take. It might seem silly to say this now - now that “ God of War” has emerged from nearly a decade of slumber to rapturous acclaim - but when Kratos and Atreus took those first halting steps into the swirling snows of fantasy Norseland back at E3 2016, there were some that wondered if Sony’s Santa Monica Studio could really stick the transition.