Writers can take some simple steps to make their characters as unforgettable as these two contemporary icons.

Give the reader a way to empathize with your characters.

If readers have no way to relate to a character, they won’t hang on for another 400 pages. But how can we create empathy? “Empathy” does not necessarily translate into “likeability.” The key is to give the character a trait or a position a reader can identify with, such as a fraught relationship with her parents or an average place in the world before the conflict of your novel disrupts her world.

In Story Engineering, Larry Brooks writes, “Glimpsing an inner landscape allows readers to understand, which is the key to eliciting empathy. Empathy is the great empowerer of stories—the more the reader feels, the more he will invest himself in the reading experience.”

Katniss Everdeen is a fierce hunter, and perhaps not someone to whom many of us can easily relate. But she has a deeply ingrained sense of responsibility and enough love for her sister to voluntarily sacrifice herself.

These humanizing traits make it possible for the reader to feel for Katniss on a human, vicarious level. She could be any of us, had we been raised in Suzanne Collins’s dystopian society.

A memorable character has an “exotic position.”

Although you want your readers to identify with your characters, characters need to stand apart from a reader’s everyday life. On his blog, author Jim Butcher says, “Locating your character in an unusual location or situation is another way to help create immediate interest.” If we wanted to watch normal characters go to work, come home, and cook dinner, we’d just read our own diaries, right? This element of character crosses over into plot, but you need to make your character stand out in some way.

Just the fact that Harry is a wizard makes him fascinating. More, though, J. K. Rowling made him an orphan and the victim of an evil wizard’s play for power. He is literally marked for danger, something that separates him from the rest of the wizarding children in Rowling’s novels.

Characters have a history and baggage, just like real people.

A character’s backstory will shape his “front story.” We all make decisions according to our past. The lessons we learned as a kid, our last bad relationship, and the burns we got from a spell gone wrong all alter how we’ll deal with future obstacles.

After Katniss’s father died, her mother suffered a breakdown, leaving Katniss the primary breadwinner for her family. Although we see little of this part of Katniss’s life, her role as family protector causes her to volunteer for the games—likewise, the training she received from her father influences her strategy in the games. Had she come from a different past, her tale would have been a completely different one.

The backstory also gives you even more opportunity to create empathy for your character, and many of the empathetic traits you have given your character should arise from their backstory.

An interesting character is an active character.

A strictly reactive character will bore your reader to death within a few chapters: when you construct a plot, your characters need goals, and they need to pursue those goals. To do that, they must interact with the world you’ve built around them, and those interactions will tell us more about the character than any self-reflective internal monologue ever could.

Brooks writes, “If you, the writer, don’t show the reader a deeper dimension, you leave it to the reader to assign meaning and attach value. And because how the reader feels about your character is perhaps the most powerful variable in writing a story, you shouldn’t leave that outcome to chance.”

Your character’s actions define who she really is and how she overcomes her inner demons. Harry’s decision to die for his loved ones tells us more about him than any prophecy or curse-scar ever could.

Let your character show your reader how fascinating he is through his actions, not your words.

Resources:

Story Engineering: Mastering the 6 Core Competencies of Successful Writing, by Larry Brooks.

Jim Butcher’s Blog: Characters

“Plan for the extraordinary,
Make room for the extraordinary,
And you will be extraordinary.”

~ Holly Lisle, How to Think Sideways

Now that we have an idea about we are writing about, we need to begin thinking about the people that are going to populate our world of fiction – the characters.

Since I write mostly romance, my stories usually have a heroine and hero that are trying to overcome some sort of obstacle to be together. This obstacle can be a villain, an evil organization plotting to take over the world, a natural disaster or all of the above – like in my NaNoWriMo winning novel in 2009, Escape from Atlantis.

It has been said to “write what you know” since you have experience with the subject matters at hand and it is more believable. I take this further and say that readers read what they know. They look for characters that they have things in common with and keep returning to their stories because they become attached to these great characters.

So how do we create characters that come alive on the page and bring readers back wanting more?

Every person has wants and needs and your characters are no different. What do they want from life? What do they need to live? When your protagonist’s wants and your antagonist’s wants don’t mesh, you have more conflict in your story.

Check out the hierarchy of needs below:

The needs at the bottom of the pyramid are the ones that your character is going to fight for the most. If you villain is trying to take your heroine’s home, she is going to put up a bigger fight than if he is trying to get her cup of coffee (unless that person is my coffee-addicted little sister).

Your characters need to be consistent in their actions throughout your story, but they also need to have the capacity for change or growth. This is especially import for your main character(s). If your heroine cheats on her husband with the villain and does not learn anything from it, the readers are going to be in an uproar.

Your characters also need history, or a back story. This gives the characters more of a 3-dimensional feel than if they just magically appear on the page from nowhere. The readers are going to want to know why the hero cries every time he sees a bunny. They want to know it is because his evil Aunt Margie cooked his pet rabbit when he was 5.

If you are using The Snowflake Method, Step 3 involves designing your characters and figuring out their storylines.  Randy Ingermanson, creator of this method, believes that if you put the effort in at the beginning, your characters will be well-rounded and believable.

• Character’s Name
• Motivation (what does he/she want abstractly?)
• Goal (what does he/she want concretely?)
• Conflict (what prevents him/her from reaching this goal?)
• Epiphany (what will he/she learn, how will he/she change?)
• One-Sentence Summary of the Character’s Storyline
• One-Paragraph Summary of the Character’s Storyline

Here is a copy of my Step 3 from The Lost Enchantress:

• Name: Maeve (Mae) Icera
• Ambition: To be allowed to make her own choices and find a place where she belongs.
• Goal: To save her people from the Dominion of Sania.
• Conflict: The emperor of the Dominion of Sania is trying to kill her or marry his son off to her to get his hands on her country.
• Epiphany: She will learn that she has to stand up in the face of opposition and fight for what she holds most dear.
• Sentence Summary: Mae learns that she is the ruler of Aradia and must make wise decisions to save herself and country from the Domion of Sania.
• Paragraph Summary: After spending most of her life as an herbal apprentice, Mae learns her true identity – she is the granddaughter of Aradia’s fallen ruler. She enters a world of danger and greed unprepared and finds herself under attack. She must learn to balance what she knows with what is expected of her. The assassination attempts throw her into the arms of a warrior named Bren. She must come up with a plan to save herself and her country or end up spending the rest of her life running or marrying the heir of Sania.

During our last encounter we created a “big picture” sentence that described who and what our story was about.  In today’s shorter lesson we are going to add a layer of description on top of that sentence to give us the overall structure paragraph of our story.

“… expand your one-sentence summary to a full paragraph describing the story setup, major disasters, and ending of the novel. This is the analog of the second stage of the snowflake. I like to structure a story as “three disasters plus an ending.” Each of the disasters takes a quarter of the book to develop and the ending takes the final quarter. I don’t know if this is the ideal structure, it’s just my personal taste.”

– Randy Ingermanson in Snowflake Pro’s Lecture Notes for the One-Paragraph Summary

Here is the paragraph that I came up with when working on my 2010 WIP, The Lost Enchantress:

Maeve is an apprentice healer in Aradia, a country with a weak hold on its own independence from neighboring countries. She is thrown into the mess of her country’s politics when it is discovered that she is the heir to the throne. She dodges assassination attempts, which push her into the arms of a warrior named Bren. She has to find a way to get out of marrying the son of her enemy, ensuring the continued freedom of her people. She comes up with a plan that pushes her enemy back into his own country, saving her home and allowing her to be with Bren.

In my example, the first sentence tells you who the main character is and gives you some background on the story.  The second, third, and fourth sentences describe the “three disasters” that push the story forward.  The last sentence describes the ending.

From this point, you can begin to really see the structure of your novel take shape.  Whether you continue to work The Snowflake Method, write an outline, make plot cards, or take the route of the “pantster,” it is up to you.  See what works best for you and stick with it!

Authors approach this topic from many different directions.  Some write volumes of pre-work before sitting down to pen their tales.  Others, lovingly known as “pansters,” simply sit down and start writing their hearts out.  Personally, I fall somewhere in between these two extremes, approaching my writing with some degree of organization and planning.

My own plotting methodology is a mixture of several other popular ones, chiefly The Snowflake Method, developed by Randy Ingermanson, and Holly Lisle’s How to Think Sideways.

The Snowflake Method is a method for “designing” a novel.  You start with some simple information and begin building your story, one layer at a time.  I highly recommend checking out Ingermanson’s website because he explains it much better than I can.  I also purchased his software, Snowflake Pro.  This program is not necessary to employ this method and is rather expensive.

How to Think Sideways is a complete writing course.  Author Holly Lisle walks you step-by-step through coming up with your idea, plotting, writing, revising, submitting, and marketing your book.  The class is excellent, with the information applying to more areas of life than just writing.  However, this class is long (6-month and 12-month plans) and a little on the expensive side.

When it comes to choosing your own plotting process, I suggest doing some reading, but focus on trying the different suggestions out.  Only you know what is going to work for you and you will only find out by experimenting.  Take the parts you like about each method and morph them into your own.  Tweak as needed to become a streamlined novel-writing machine.

By now, you probably have an idea of what you are going to write your novel about.  It may still be an incomplete idea that doesn’t sparkle like a Cullen vampire yet, but you believe it has potential.  So, where do you go from here?

To start, let’s write our idea down as one sentence (Step 1 if you are using The Snowflake Method or Holly Lisle’s “The Sentence” technique).

• This sentence should tell us who and what this story is about.
• It should be no more than 35 words, but 15 – 20 is better.
• Don’t use the character’s name.  Instead, be descriptive.  (Ex. unwed mother or dyslexic superhero).
• Take your time on this step.  Don’t throw the first thing that comes to mind on paper.
• It may not be perfect at first.  Go back and modify it as needed.

Here is what I came up with for my sentence while starting to plot my fantasy work in progress (WIP) from the 2010 NaNoWriMo,  The Lost Enchantress:

An orphaned girl comes to learn her true place and finds love while trying to save her country.

It is pretty vague and underwhelming, but it was a decent start.  It tells us that the main character is “an orphaned girl.”  By the end of the novel, this girl is going to save her country while learning the lesson of who she is and falling in love.  That is the big picture in the story.

Try your hand at coming up with a sentence for your own novel.  Feel free to post it here or in the Facebook group if you like.

Once we have it written, we will be ready to tackle the next layer of the story.

One last thing that I would like to touch on before ending this lesson is over-planning your novel – don’t do it!  This can kill your novel before you even start and in my case, promotes procrastination.  You want to be prepared enough to stay writing throughout the month, but not so prepared that you want to bang your head on the desk if you have to write your character’s name one more time (at least too early in the month).

In “No Plot? No Problem?,” NaNoWriMo founder Chris Baty added to the end of the first chapter a contract for all NaNo participants to sign. This Month-Long Novelist Agreement and Statement of Understanding is a way to officially pledge yourself to the contest. Post it on your FB wall or blog to let everyone else know what you are doing!

“I hereby pledge my intent to write a 50,000-word novel in one month’s time. By invoking this absurd, month-long deadline on such an enormous undertaking, I understand that notions of “craft,” “brilliance,” and “competency” are to be chucked right out the window, where they will remain, ignored, until they are retrieved for the editing process. I understand that I am a talented person, capable of heroic acts of creativity, and I will give myself enough time over the course of the next month to allow my innate gifts to come to the surface, unmolested by self-doubt, self-criticism, and other acts of self-bullying.”

“During the month ahead, I realize I will produce clunky dialogue, cliched characters, and deeply flawed plots. I agree that all of these things will be left in my rough draft, to be corrected and/or excised at a later point. I understand my right to withhold my manuscript from all readers until I deem it completed. I also acknowledge my right as author to substantially inflate both the quality of the rough draft and the rigors of the writing process should such inflammation prove useful in garnering me respect and attention, or freedom from participation in onerous household chores.”

“I acknowledge that the month-long, 50,000-word deadline I set for myself is absolute and unchangeable, and that any failure to meet the deadline, or any effort on my part to move the deadline once the adventure has begun will invite well-deserved mockery from friends and family. I also acknowledge that, upon successful completion of the stated noveling objective, I am entitled to a period of gleeful celebration and revelry, the duration and intensity of which may preclude me from participating fully in workplace activities for days, if not weeks, afterward.”

________________________________________
Signed

______________
Date

______________
Novel Start Date

______________
Novel Deadline

50,000 words is quite a daunting task. Thirty days doesn’t feel like very long. We will have to adjust our personal standards to make it to the finish line…

If you are anything like me (and for your sake, I hope not) the process of writing is very slow. Each word, sentence, and paragraph is checked by my Inner Critic to make sure it is perfect. He does not let me move on until it is, sending my Muse (that mythical creature in the back of your mind that gives you those wonderful ideas) to go pick flowers or get her hair done. By the time that I am able to correct the problem, my Muse is elsewhere, I’m annoyed, and the Inner Critic is rubbing his hands together like a comic book villain.

For the duration of NaNoWriMo you will need to write for quantity instead of quality.  Forget the spelling errors. Ignore the sentence fragments. Say “see ya” to the run-ons and passive sentences. Your job this coming month is to just get the words on the page!

Once the event is over, you can feel free to let your Inner Critic loose in your playground of mediocrity.

And for some people, having a deadline is not enough to keep them going when it comes to National Novel Writing Month. They need some human interaction to remind them that they are not crazy (or that crazy is more fun) and to be held accountable for meeting their quotas. For this lesson we are going to break the people participating in your writing process into two categories: The Pack and The Fans.

The Pack are other writers participating in NaNoWriMo. They too are on the prowl, looking for kindred spirits to cling to in the desolate novel-writing wasteland. You can find them online at the NaNoWriMo website, Twitter, Facebook, and in the PWC NaNoWriMo-ers Facebook group. You can also find them locally through the local NaNo meetups in your region, which you can find by joining your local region on the NaNoWriMo website.

The Fans are the non-writers around you, cheering you to the NaNoWriMo finish line. They are the friend posting on your Facebook wall to see if you have met your quota for the day. They are the parent, calling to make sure you are still alive and have been eating during the NaNo turmoil. They are the co-worker asking about your weekly word count in the hallways at the office. All you have to say is, “Hey! I’m writing a novel this month!!” That is when The Fans begin to mob you.  You might even be able to talk some of them into bringing you food while you write if you promise to list them in your novel dedication.

“If there’s a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” ~ Toni Morrison

Welcome to the first day of our preparation month for NaNoWriMo!  We will be posting some tips to help you prepare and get the most out of your experience every couple days.  If you are interested in getting more personal support during your NaNo journey, please check out our Facebook group.  Whether you are new to this event or a regular participant, I hope that this event will transform your life as much as it has mine.

To get started, let’s look at what National Novel Writing Month is and some of the history behind it…

NaNoWriMo is an intense novel-writing experience.  It is an opportunity to both push your boundaries and chase those dreams of writing a book.  It is a month to put your creative foot forward and leave everything else behind (including cleaning, laundry, and other non-artistic pursuits).

NaNoWriMo was founded in 1999 by Chris Baty.  He and 21 other fearless novelists of the San Francisco Bay Area began this phenomenon to make a statement (and because they had nothing better to do) in July of that year.  I believe that only six of the participants met their goal that year, but it was the beginning of an event that would span the world.

In the year 2009, 167,150 people participated in NaNoWriMo, 32,173 of which met their goal.  Collectively, we wrote 2,427,190,537 words.  The experience was amazing!

So, let’s move on to the rules of NaNoWriMo…

Like any other competition, National Novel Writing Month has rules. There are not many cute or clever things that I can write to make this one more interesting, so please bear with me.

As we are doing now, October is when NaNoWriMo preparation usually begins. The geniuses at NaNoWriMo.org wipe the forums clean of last year’s stats and forums, re-launching a bigger and more awesome website each year (October 10th is the date this year). This is when the NaNo Addicts start getting feisty and the NaNo Virgins start making their way towards becoming NaNo Junkies.

However, any serious plotting or other pre-work should not be started until the last week of October. This keeps you from over-preparing and burning out on your story before the actual writing commences.

You may not write the first word of your novel until 12:00 am on November 1st. You have until 11:59 pm on November 30th to get to 50,000 words with your novel. That works out to about 1,667 words per day for the entire month of November.

It is that simple – 50,000 words in 30 days! Or is it?

While the Norse had no afterlife, as such, they did have a belief in a soul. The Norse concept of a soul differs from the concept of a soul in other beliefs.

For the Norse, the soul only existed for as long as the person was alive. The soul had no part in life after death (i.e. draugr) nor did the Norse have a concept of a shadow soul that separates itself from the body after death [A belief found amongst the ancient Greeks]. Though interestingly enough, the Norse did have a concept of a soul detachable from the body [fylgja].

In Old Norse literature, the fylgja can only be seen in dreams – or by people capable seeing them via supernatural means. The fylgja can appear in the shape of animals and/or women. According to Rudolf Simek, the fylgja can act as a kind of doppelganger of the person and can act or appear as an ominous sign, usually at the point of death or during in a highly-traumatic moment. It is believed that the female form of the fylgja is the guardian spirit of an individual and/or clan. However, the fylgja is more than just a guardian spirit, as according to Rudolf Simek, it is bound up in the individual’s destiny and that “they stand in association to the personified luck of a person [hamingja]”.

As stated above, the fylgja is detachable from the physical body but it does die with the body. It is curious if the concept of shape-shifting into animals [as found in the sagas] could be seen as a belief in a soul. Either way, if the fylgja is fully seen and accepted as a belief in a soul, it is still a different concept to the idea of a soul as found in other traditions and shows how different Old Norse beliefs were before the Christianisation of the Nordic people.

Nico Davidson

Sources
Dictionary Of Northern Mythology [by Rudolf Simek]
Viking Answer Lady
The Icelandic Sagas

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Does this sound like a normal day to you?  If so, you may be a member of my family…or maybe you are just experiencing Mercury Retrograde with the rest of us.

“Retrograde” means relative to Earth, Mercury (planet ruling communication, information-processing, commerce, transportation, and thought) appears to be moving through the zodiac backwards for about three weeks, which happens about every fourth months.  The most recent Mercury Retrograde started August 3^rd and won’t end until the 26^th, and things won’t be back to relative normalcy until September 9^th. Fabulous.

My family started suffering the effects of this Retrograde…well, I’m not sure we ever stopped suffering from the one in April.  It’s like we’ve been carrying our personal time/space bubble of permanent Retrograde in our auras.  Eww, get it off me!  *shakes like a wet dog

A former friend of mine used to suffer just as badly from everything-and-its-mother-goes-nuts-during-Retrograde as we have been this year.  She had a friend who seemed to have no trouble at all during Retrograde, and came up with the theory that people with “low vibrations” had good Retrogrades and those of us working on our spiritual growth were the only ones that suffered.

I thought that was pretty judgmental and unfair, but didn’t have a better counter-theory.  Until now.

My theory is this: that Retrograde isn’t just a cosmic prank played on us puny mortals – it’s an opportunity to process issues and events of the past and apply the lessons to our present.  The problems that keep plaguing us over and over are messages showing us what we need to do in order to improve our lives.  The Universe gives us these weeks of potential chaos to make us more aware of what we say and how we say it, where we go and where we want to go, and how we spend our time and money.

Observing how this EPIC RETROGRADE OF DOOM has been affecting my family, I have noticed some patterns according to our specific struggles.  Keep in mind my expertise is in divination and creative writing, both which deal heavily in symbolism and communication.  I’ll just focus on my own experiences to illustrate my theory.

At the beginning of the April Retrograde, which was in Aries (sign of poke-you-til-you-slap-me, A.K.A. persistence,) I uncharacteristically had a screaming tantrum against my then-landlady.  I am usually a very quiet, patient, difficult to anger person, so me screaming at anyone, let alone slamming my door so hard the picture and nail on the adjacent wall flew out, came as a shock.  I knew then that I could not continue to reside in that toxic environment, and a week later, I moved out.

Then, my two-year-old son watered my phone, and I lost all the phone numbers of people for whom I didn’t have email addresses.  At first, it seemed like the end of the world, and I madly scrambled to find a way to retrieve all those numbers.  Two days later, my son watered my replacement phone.  I decided then that I didn’t need the remaining numbers, and my third phone has survived.

This retrograde started in Virgo, sign of analysis and introspection, and moved into Leo, sign of aspirations and extroversion. For me, it started with car issues – a lost GPS, a blown tire, three adults with three different things to do in one day with one car…but when I decided to spend more time at home with my son, the GPS was found and the two cars were fixed and remained problem-free.

Then, I had issues meeting my goals and connecting with a new client during a Skype tarot reading.  This really, REALLY bothered me, because I’ve never had problems like that before.  A mantra popped into my head, advising me to “Stay Connected.”  So, I started being really present in everything I did.  And guess what?  This past weekend, I gave 23 totally accurate readings with mostly new clients in 25 hours.  I’ve gotten more done in the last few days than in the previous month, and my son and I are both happier and more full of energy that we were before.

Do you see the pattern?

The first retrograde of 2011 showed me that I needed to cut ties with toxic people and places, and provided me with the connections I needed to do so.

The second, so far, has shown me that I need to keep focused and stay connected, enjoying the blessings of my life and the epic joy of raising my toddler, rather than trying to do a hundred things at once, with my son as baggage to drag from place to place or an obstacle in completing my to-do list.

Best of all, it’s shown me that if I “listen” to the problems, and solve them, I get to be one of those people having an easy retrograde.  And I get to help people get through their retrograde when they contact me for a reading.

I love my life.

So…what is retrograde trying to teach you this month?

–

Spirit Healer has studied astrology and many techniques of divination for over seventeen years. She teaches classes on divination, creative writing, chakra healing, and sacred sex ed for grownups, plus she blogs weekly when she’s not totally distracted by Facebook. She also just earned her MFA in Creative Writing, giving her license to totally make up words.

Image via Wikipedia

Disclaimer: The following article is based on my own research. I do not claim to be an academic expert on the matters of Norse belief as there are people more suited to been an expert on these matters. I don’t expect anyone with me nor my findings. The following article will be edited in the near future as I have some new information that needs to be added. Questions about the information in the article are welcome. 

Anyone familiar with Norse mythology will know of Valhalla; the glorious afterlife for warriors who die bravely in battle. But what is the real Norse afterlife?

The answer is simple. The old Nordic peoples did not believe in the concept of an afterlife as such. The grave was the end but the individual in the grave carried on being apart of the community and family. In order to understand this, one has to look at the evidence.

Hel originally meant the grave and that the concept of the goddess Hel is nothing more than a literary invention brought in via external influence [I will discuss this later in a separate article]. Now, this would also mean that Valhalla is a literary invention. Back to the point, since “Hel” is the grave, this would mean that “Hel” is the afterlife.

Now, why would the Norse afterlife be the grave? Simple. The Norse practiced ancestor worship. In fact, they revered their ancestors so much that they kept the grave mounds within the boundaries of the community because the dead were an extension of the family and the grave was an extension of the family hall/house. Norse society was more family and tribal orientated than what most people realise. Though ancestor worship isn’t just exclusive to the Norse and Germanic peoples, virtually all Indo-European cultures practiced ancestor worship at one point.

As I stated further above, in the grave, the individual carries on being a part of the community and family. Well, this goes beyond just ancestor worship. The old Norse people believed that the individual lived on in the grave. There is saga references to back this up. It is believed that this is why an individual’s personal belongings were buried with them, so that they might have them in the grave.

Archaeological evidence pointing to life outside of the grave is slim to none, depending how one looks at it. Though one must ask, if there is an afterlife outside the grave (i.e. Valhalla), why would anyone need to be buried with their belongings in the first place? Archaeological evidence also shows that the family grave mounds were used generation after generation – Literally generations of one family in one grave mound.

Like all beliefs and cultures, there has been an external influence on what has been written down about the old Norse beliefs. All written documentation of the old Norse beliefs were written after the conversion to Christianity, thus meaning there are some Christian elements in the sagas and Poetic Edda. There is also some Hellenic influence on the sagas and Poetic Edda as well – Though interesting enough, the poem “Havamal” mentions only one thing about life after death and that is that only one’s name lives on.

Let’s look at the three afterlife locations listed in the Poetic Edda: Valhalla, Helheim and Niflheim.

Valhalla is analogous to Elysium – The Greek afterlife for heroes.
Helheim is analogous to Hades – For the vast majority of the dead.
Niflheim is analogous to Tartarus – The place for the worse of the worse.

Even the idea of Asgard (The world where Valhalla is located) and Helheim being afterlives stem from para-and-post conversion eras, meaning that before the appearance of Christian missionaries and the sudden conversion of the Norse peoples, the grave was the afterlife. The concept of Valhalla as an afterlife location didn’t appear until poems such as Eiriksmal were written.

Even with the rising dual concept of Valhalla-Helheim, many Heathens expected a life in the grave. However, dying into the grave was not without reward or punishment. If one led a good life, then one’s name lived on and family status increased via ancestor veneration.

Finally, funerary practices. The most common way was obviously burial which has been proven via archaeological evidence, but William (Bil) Linzie theorises that cremation was favoured amongst the warrior class because it made it easier to carry the bones home for internment rather than carrying a whole putifying body. Many Heathens have suggested that since the old Norse have no afterlife, that the funerary practices were purely mnemonic.

In conclusion, the ideas of Valhalla and Helheim are either poetic/literary creations that occured after the conversion era or they were absorbed into old Norse belief via the Abrahamic concept of duality. Either way, the grave was the afterlife of the old Norse.

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