These are notes from a presentation by Ada Palmer at Capricon 46. Any mistakes here are mine, not Professor Palmer’s. The room was crowded and I had to stand, limiting my note-taking ability. Here is the blurb from the convention program:
Why It’s So Easy To Be Wrong About Vikings. We recently realized Heimdall is a tree! A new lost Loki story was discovered on the Faroe islands! It turns out Hel isn’t black on one side after all, she’s blue! Mixing storytelling with the latest discoveries, Ada Palmer discusses recent advances in Norse myth research, both what we’ve found and why it took so long to find it, a history which involves not only the Medieval sources but the nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarly debates, feuds, mistakes, and corrections in this live and rapidly-changing field whose constant new discoveries mean every decade brings new material to draw on for our own Norse Myth fiction projects.
From Hilbert Space to Dilbert Space, and beyond 