Stuck in the world of the mysterious Assalepson, Wolfcub has agreed to let the sorcerer extract her wild side. What she didn’t know was the he would use that wild side – a physical double of the little girl, filled with all her strength and aggressiveness – to attempt to retrieve a powerful relic ... from the realm of Fenrir the giant wolf! Meanwhile, back at the village, Aaricia must continue to deal with the villagers’ hostility ... and handsome Lundgren’s insistent seduction attempts.

Both halves of Wolfcub – her wild side, extracted by Assalepson, and her civilised side – are now in the Realm of Chaos, a land ruled by the monstrous wolf Fenrir, and they will have to cooperate to retrieve the severed hand of Tyr, return to their world, and be reunited into a single, whole person. Meanwhile, Aaricia, broken by the news of Thorgal’s death, is letting herself be seduced by the very man who arranged for that lie to reach her ...

Ever the wilful rebel, Wolfcub has decided to go all the way to Bag Dahd to find her father Thorgal, when an old friend of the family suddenly pays her a visit: Tjahzi the Dwarf, whose people have just been enslaved by the Dark Elves. Behind this war between the denizens of the other worlds hides a very real threat to humans, for it’s the entire celestial order that Lolth, the queen of the Dark Elves, wants to overthrow by going after the sacred tree Yggdrasil ...

The various Indo-European branches had a shared linguistic and cultural origin in prehistory, and this book sets out to overcome the difficulties about understanding the gods who were inherited by the later literate cultures from this early “silent” period by modelling the kind of society where the gods could have come into existence. It presents the theory that there were ten gods, who are conceived of as reflecting the actual human organization of the originating time. There are clues in the surviving written records which reveal a society that had its basis in the three concepts of the sacred, physical force, and fertility (as argued earlier by the French scholar, Georges Dumézil). These concepts are now seen as corresponding to the old men, young men, and mature men of an age-grade system, and each of the three concepts and life stages is seen to relate to an old and a young god. In addition to these six gods, and to two kings who relate in positive and negative ways to the totality, there is a primal goddess who has a daughter as well as sons. The gods, like the humans of the posited prehistoric society, are seen as forming a four-generation set originating in an ancestress, and the theogony is explored through stories found in the Germanic, Celtic, Indian, and Greek contexts. The sources are often familiar ones, such as the Edda, the Mabinogi, Hesiod’s Theogony, and the Rāmāyaṇa, but selected components are looked at from a fresh angle and, taken together with less familiar and sometimes fragmentary materials, yield fresh perspectives which allow us to place the Indo-European cosmology as one of the world’s indigenous religions. We can also gain a much livelier sense of the original culture of Europe before it was overlaid by influences from the Near East in the period of literacy. The gods themselves continue to exert their fascination, and are shown to reflect a balance between the genders, between the living and the ancestors, and between peaceful and warlike aspects expressed at the human level in alternate succession to the kingship.

Fragments of ancient belief mingle with folklore and Christian dogma until the original tenets are lost in the myths and psychologies of the intervening years. Hilda Ellis Davidson illustrates how pagan beliefs have been represented and misinterpreted by the Christian tradition, and throws light on the nature of pre-Christian beliefs and how they have been preserved. The Lost Beliefs of Northern Europe stresses both the possibilities and the difficulties of investigating the lost religious beliefs of Northern Europe.

The definitive study of magical trance and possession techniques. The author is inspired by the Nordic tradition of Seidr, said to have been taught to the human race by Odin.