Joshua Gillingham, Author of The Gatewatch

The Gatewatch by Joshua Gillingham took me down memory lane and reminded me how much I love stories about friendship and epic adventures. It is my immense pleasure to have Josh on the blog today and quench my curiosity about the world of The Gatewatch. Josh is a Canadian author from Nanaimo, BC. There he enjoys life with his adventurous spouse and their two very unadventurous cats. The Gatewatch was born of his unremitted fascination with Norse Myths and Icelandic Sagas. 

It was wonderful to connect with him! Enjoy this detailed interview, and get some insights about the book, without any spoilers! You can click on my reading experience graphic below to check out my thoughts on the book. 🙂

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• The Gatewatch is inspired by Norse mythology. What is it like to model characters after well-known legends?

This is a great question because on one hand, personalities like Odin, Thor, and Loki, are well known; on the other, what people ‘know’ about them is typically informed not by the historical myths but by modern adaptations such as the Thor comics or the Marvel movies. While I enjoy these adaptations, particularly Taika Waititi’s hilarious Thor: Ragnarok, these personalities are far removed from their representations in the Norse Myths. So in this way, writing my book around these mythic figures will hopefully give readers a fresh and perhaps more accurate idea of Viking culture and their unique worldview.

From a creative perspective, it is also really nice to start with some kind of ‘frame’ or restriction to help direct or guide a story. Basing my three main characters, Torin, Grimsa, and Bryn, off of Odin, Thor, and Loki, gave me a foothold as I started exploring each of these characters and their world. If anyone is trying to write a story and feels like they are stuck (especially right at the beginning), I strongly suggest putting some restriction on the narrative for yourself. This might sound counterintuitive but is definitely a creative hack I use whenever I get stuck. For example, if I give you a piece of paper and tell you to write a story, any story you want, most people will freeze up. However, if I give you that same piece of paper and say write a story about a duck trying to get on the subway to visit his fiance in a pond in downtown Paris, most people would be able to get started right away because that description gives you a thread to start pulling on.

• Tell us more about trolls and why slaying trolls is such an important part of this story.

One of the main challenges I faced with this story was merging two related but quite distinctive parts of Scandanavian culture. The Norse Myths represent the historic world view of many people in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark during the Viking Age which, in my mind, begins at the raid on Lindisfarne (783 A.D.) and ends with the Battle of Hastings (1066 A.D.); this was a culture marked by a unique worldview and challenging living conditions at sea, in the fjords, and abroad. Folk culture in Scandinavia, which features such creatures as trolls, is much more modern in the sense that it is recognizably related to folk cultures in neighbouring countries (particularly Germany) and fully integrated with a Christian (rather than a pagan) worldview.

Bringing these two worlds together, the nine realms of the Norse Myths and the enchanted forests of Scandanavian folklore, was one of my central aims in writing the book.

In the world of The Gatewatch the trolls represent not only the wild, untamed danger of the wilderness but also the greed and violence inherent in the Viking Age. Torin Ten-Trees and the other troll hunters at Gatewatch are fighting a physical battle against these creatures of slime and mold, but in another sense they are also fighting against their own darker impulses. To let the trolls run rampant through the realm would wreak havoc and terror just as letting the self-serving side of human nature rule one’s mind leads to dark places. They must remain vigilant at all times if they hope to protect Noros, and indeed themselves, from such dangers.

• I loved the friendship and banter between Torin, Grimsa and Bryn. Is their friendship inspired by ones in your life?

Yes! When I was younger I had a really close knit group of male friends who bonded by weathering the storms of junior high school together. At the end of junior high I moved from the small town I had grown up to a large city. To be honest, I have never since experienced that sense of brotherhood and camaraderie. I have had many good friends that were male, but there is something special about a group of friends like that. Though it was not intentional on my part to write the friendship between Torin, Grimsa, and Bryn as an echo of those friendships I can feel in my readings of their dialogue a sort of longing to recapture that same feeling.

• I don’t think I have ever read a book with so many riddles! They work really well with the story and I enjoyed the challenge of them. Do you love riddles too, Josh? Is there a resource where the riddle lovers can find more riddles?

Yes, riddles! I do love riddles, as you can probably tell… to me they are like mental puzzles. My background is actually in mathematics and so the idea of riddles, a sort of mental maze through which you have to navigate illusions and multiple meanings, is quite attractive. I spent a fair bit of time crafting the riddles that appear in The Gatewatch and I can promise more riddles to come in the sequel!

Riddles were also important in Viking culture for two particular reasons. First, they were a show of mental prowess and no one boasts more boldy than Odin the All-Father. If any giant, dwarf, or human claimed to be exceptionally wise he or she could expect to be visited by a grey-cloaked stranger with one eye who would challenge them to a contest of wisdom. This was also an important narrative device for Viking skalds (poets) who would use such riddle duels, such as the encounter between Odin and the giant Vafthrudnir, to recite the origins of the Norse world. Questions like “How did the world begin?” and “How did the sun and moon come to be?” feature heavily in such exchanges and would have provided both entertainment and education to a skald’s eager listeners.

• Book 2 is already in the works. What kind of adventures can readers expect to see in that book?

The Gatewatch was inspired by a few stories in particular, specifically the Norse Myths Thor’s Journey to Utgard and The Forging of the Treasures of the Gods as well as the folktales of Askeladden (The Ash Lad or The Lazy Boy Who Sits by the Fire). In The Gatewatch Torin and his companions delve into the world of the nidavel, the dwarves who mine the deep places of the earth for her treasures and craft items with magical powers.

The Everspring (Book 2), continues the story of Torin and his friends but through the inspiration of different stories. The most influential are the heroic tale Beowulf (particularly Seamus Heaney’s translation), the Norse Myth The Lay of Vafthrudnir, and the legend of the semi-historical berserker Angantyr. I won’t give too much of the story away, but I will hint at their destination: The Everspring lies far to the north in the land of the jotur, ancient immortal frost giants.

• Can you tell us more about the different creatures in this world – madur, nidavel, skimsli, jotur?

Fantasy has evolved as a genre to include some fairly well entrenched tropes. I think the work of Tolkien was probably the most influential in establishing creature distinctions like dwarves, elves, goblins, and giants. Much of Tolkien’s work draws directly from the Norse Myths; for example, many names from the list of dwarves that show up in Bilbo’s house in The Hobbit are ripped right out of the beginning of the Prose Edda, a collection of stories about the Norse Myths curated (and perhaps, in some ways, concocted) by the Icelander Snorri Sturlurson around 1200 A.D.; however, many of the original ideas of what ‘dwarves’ or ‘elves’ are have evolved so that such creatures in modern fantasy share little in common with those in the Norse Myths.

With terms like madur, nidavel, and jotur, I wanted to challenge these modern tropes and present these creatures in a manner true to the original myths.

The madur are simply people; in the realm of Noros, as in the Viking Age, people sit quite near the bottom of the cosmic ordering as mortals with much courage but little magic. The nidavel are the dwarves. I used this term specifically so that I could recapture the idea of dwarves as they are presented in the Norse Myths without getting tangled up in modern tropes. Jotur are the ancient and immortal giants. Unlike giants in many folklore traditions, the giants of Norse Mythology are very wise and full of magic. In fact, giants often challenge the gods themselves to contests of strength, wisdom, or skill. Last, but not least, skrimsli is the Icelandic word for ‘monster’ and is akin to what you might imagine as a horrid tunnel-dwelling goblin.

• What are some fantasy series that inspired you to write this novel?

I have to admit at this point that I do not read a lot of fantasy. I do enjoy fantasy books, especially fantasy adventure books, and am indebted particularly to Tolkein and Lewis for their series. However, The Gatewatch draws much more directly from the Norse Myths and the Icelandic Sagas. While I do not read the myths in their original Old Norse, I have enjoyed the translation and interpretation provided by Dr. Kevin Crossley-Holland in his book The Norse Myths: Gods of the Vikings. And while I would love to provide a list of books which contained translations of the Icelandic Sagas, many were old editions from my university library which I have not been able to locate in other places (and not for lack of trying!). A few Icelandic sagas I really enjoyed were The Saga of Grettir the Strong, the Saga of Ref the Lucky, and the Vinland Sagas.

If you are interested in Viking fantasy I would recommend Ian Stuart Sharpe’s Vikingverse book series, The Allfather Paradox and Loki’s Wager, and the accompanying in-universe Jotunn War comic series. For Viking historical fiction, I recommend The Long Ships by Frans G. Bengtsson, The Half-Drowned King Series from Linnea Hartsuyker, and Hakon’s Saga from Eric Schumacher.

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Hope you enjoyed this interview and if you are curious about The Gatewatch, I hope you will check it out. Joshua Gillingham is a super friendly author and you can make his acquaintance on his website, Twitter and Goodreads.

** The Gatewatch is now out in stores so get a copy and let me know what you think! **
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Cover image: Photo by Scott Webb on Unsplash