friend of mine, while talking about books at the train club (hobbies within hobbies) to me how she’d liked the Mathematics of Magic series from back in her youth (her youth being a lot more recent than mine). Well, I did a little searching and found a copy of it up in a used bookstore in Jacksonville. Overjoyed, she ordered it, but when she read it, she was underjoyed. Turns out it wasn’t as good as she’d remembered. Yet, strangely, she decided that since she didn’t like it, she’d give it to me for a go. Kinda an anti-recommendation, sort of.

So in the first story of this series, The Roaring Trumpet, our sluff-off hero, Professor Harold Shea, realizes that maybe with the right equations, said in just the right way, he could transport himself to other lands for light-weight adventures. Aiming for olde Ireland, he finds himself in a windblown landscape where none of his carefully-assembled camping gear (including matches) work. Yes, instead of Ireland, he’s fallen into the mythical realm of the Norse Gods, with Odin and Thor, Loki and the rest, right before the coming of Ragnarok, when the trumpet sounds and the gods war and parish.

So it took a while to establish this. And really, this old 1941 story (imagine that – nearly a century old), penned (literally) by Sprangue De Camp and Fletcher Pratt, was okay (but you had to give it time to get started). The pacing was a bit different than tales we are more familiar with; you really had to work for this one, but overall it was fine.

But it’s funny, how stories we once loved do not age as we think they do.

I’ve recently learned this when I took a hard look at all the books I was holding on to.

Anyway, interesting take on the Norse gods. And interesting example of fantasy fiction from a century past.

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