When you read the word “well,” what do you see?
I suspect a lot of us immediately supply a structure, a depth, perhaps a rope and bucket. Change that word to “spring,” and the whole scene can move. There might be an opening in the ground, water running across stone, somewhere people gather with vessels.
That difference came up in a conversation about Mímir’s water and the sources behind Echoes of Asgard. Edward Pettit uses spring in the relevant passage of Völuspá, while giving well as an alternative in a footnote. The translator has left us something worth thinking about, rather than a simple contest with one English word declared the winner. Pettit’s 2023 dual-language edition.
A city needs to work
For me, the writing question is practical as well as mythological. How do people obtain water? Where do they go? What connects the places where they live?
In Echoes of Asgard, we are exploring springs, wells and channels as parts of the same inhabited city. That allows me to think about water as something people use, rather than only something attached to an important name or location.
A spring might feed a place accessed as a well. A channel might carry water towards another collection point. Those are creative possibilities. I cannot point to a single medieval word and say it proves the whole arrangement.
Knowing when I have started inventing
The same conversation raised Baldr’s death by a special sword in Saxo’s account and by mistletoe in Snorri’s. Those tellings draw my attention towards different human questions: who possesses the weapon, what a group believes is safe, and what everyone has underestimated.
I want to follow those questions without pretending my interpretation is the only meaning the story ever had.
That is an important part of the process for me. Research is not finished when I find a detail I can use. I need to understand what the source supports, what remains disputed and where I am making a decision for the novel.
I have put the fuller comparison, including the sword-origin theory and Pettit’s translation note, in the research article on Echoes of Asgard. This journal is where I can talk about what that work does to the writing.
What ordinary detail makes an imagined place feel inhabited to you? For this conversation, it is the water, and the people who need to collect it.
You can request the opening here or explore Volume I on Echoes of Asgard.