About nineteen years ago I was an undergraduate student at Cal, buying books for a class in Scandinavian Mythology.  Having long had an interest in Norse myths, I was looking forward to the class, but a price tag stalled me.

Sixty-five dollars?  For one book?  I hadn’t paid prices that extortionate since I’d finished my science requirements.  Most texts in the Religious Studies major found a ceiling around forty dollars.  But here was one for sixty-five, and no used alternatives.

I plunked down the money and bought the book.  I don’t recall that we used it very much, but I know I at least had to refer to it a few times that semester.  It was a good class, taught by Professor John Lindow.  To give you some idea of what he was like as a professor, he had us use the Hollander translation of the Poetic Edda (about ten bucks), because he felt Hollander did the best job of capturing, in English, the poetry of the original.  I learned a lot from him.

At the end of the semester, short of money, I brought the sixty-five dollar book back to the bookstore.  They offered me the princely sum of one dollar for it.  Apparently the course was not being taught the next semester, and their standard offer for any such book is a token sum.

I declined.  I needed money, but I enjoyed Norse myth and that was an offensive offer.  The book stayed on my shelf, referred to on occasion in the intervening years, because my interest in Norse myth has not abated.  I have also learned that small press, scholarly works tend to run a little more expensive than their mass produced brethren.

And now yesterday I found myself pulling that book off its shelf to help me with an academic paper once more.  I am writing the final paper in my Directed Readings in Fantasy class, on the topic of gods as characters in fantasy fiction.  As part of my research, I was looking into Neil Gaiman’s description of a grizzly ancient sacrifice to Odin, and found the perfect reference in that old sixty-five dollar book.

I’ve heard it said that writers need to read everything, because you never know what will come in handy.  I’m starting to believe it.

The book, by the way, was Myth and Religion of the North, by E.O.G. Turville-Petre.

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