All episodes of Season 1 of Jarnsaxa Rising are available for your Audio Drama Sunday listening pleasure. Listen now on iTunes, PocketCasts, or whatever your preferred purveyor of pod entertainment may be.
How many people work 9-5, Monday through Friday jobs? How many people see Sunday as the day of last-ditch effort, to get a few things accomplished for themselves, maybe stir their imagination a bit, before returning to the weekly grind?
Audio Drama lets you do both. Pop in your earbuds, or crank up the G-Boom, and you can have as much action, adventure, romance, comedy and joy as you can with hours of Netflix or Hulu, but without the sitting on your butt that can cause sciatica.
Thrym, King of Jotumheim, says that audio drama pairs well with knitting. Whatever you’re up to today, make it dramatic.
Jarnsaxa and Dr. Aspinall prepare the funeral pyre after the massacre. His desire to analyze this new world pushes against her desire to burn all Nine. Can they understand each other, and the power of science and sorcery, before Loki and Bachman return? And how does this relate to the ferry boat fire?
Jarnsaxa: MaryLynn Mennicke
Dr. Aspinall: John T. Zeiler
Agent Bachman: Katherine Kupiecki
Loki: Ethan Bjelland
Credits: Leslie Vincent
Written by Lindsay Harris Friel
Directed by Carin Bratlie Wethern
Sound design, engineering and music by Vincent Friel
Dramaturgy by Kit Gordon
This episode of Jarnsaxa Rising was sponsored by Jane and David Broude.
Subscribe, review and rate us on iTunes! We want to hear from you.
Sif and Loki. The Children of Odin, The Book of Northern Myths, by Wolly Pogany, 1917.
Loki takes Agent Bachman to Asgard, to avenge Jarnsaxa and Jotunheim. During the wedding feast of Thor and Sif, Loki seduces the bride. Bachman must teach Loki a lesson, and The Aesir must mete justice upon the remaining descendants of Jotunheim.
Jarnsaxa: MaryLynn Mennicke
Loki: Ethan Bjelland
Agent Bachman: Katherine Kupiecki
Dr. Aspinall: John T. Zeiler
Sif: Amy Pirkl
Balder: Shannon Troy Jones
Thor: Derek Meyer
Written by Lindsay Harris Friel
Directed by Carin Bratlie Wethern
Sound design, engineering and music by Vincent Friel
Dramaturgy by Kit Gordon
This episode of Jarnsaxa Rising was sponsored by Jane and David Broude.
Jarnsaxa takes Agent Bachman and Dr. Aspinall to her homeland, at the time when she knew only love and pride. But the burgeoning war between Asgard and Jotunheim threatens chaos. A bargain is struck, but treachery makes ancient grudges erupt.
Dr. Aspinall: John T. Zeiler
Agent Bachman: Katherine Kupiecki
Jarnsaxa: MaryLynn Mennicke
Loki: Ethan Bjelland
Vala: Delta Giordano
Balder: Shannon Troy Jones
Thor: Derek Meyer
Thrym: Himself
Featuring The Jotunheim Chorus
Written by Lindsay Harris Friel
Directed by Carin Bratlie Wethern
Sound design, engineering and music by Vincent Friel
Dramaturgy by Kit Gordon
This episode of Jarnsaxa Rising was sponsored by Sam Landman.
Subscribe, review and rate us on iTunes! We want to hear from you.
Agent Bachman interrogates Dr. Aspinall and The Mystery Woman, Dr. Aspinall deduces what the powerful contraption could be, and the woman offers them the chance to travel beyond reality. Will they take it? What will they find?
Dr. Aspinall: John T. Zeiler
Jarnsaxa: MaryLynn Mennicke
Agent Bachman: Katherine Kupiecki
Written by Lindsay Harris Friel
Directed by Carin Bratlie Wethern
Sound design, engineering and music by Vincent Friel
Dramaturgy by Kit Gordon
This episode of Jarnsaxa Rising was sponsored by Zoe Velonis.
Subscribe, review and rate us on iTunes! We want to hear from you.
iTunes has provided us with a URL, and we should appear in their searchable directory soon. If iTunes is your podcast purveyor of choice, you can subscribe here: Jarnsaxa Rising on iTunes.
You can also use our RSS feed link, if you use a podcast app that asks for them, such as Podcast Addict. http://jarnsaxarising.libsyn.com/rss
As Robin Williams once said about Jim Henson, “you can’t come up with this stuff on just plain air.” He meant something else in particular. My point is that no writer ever creates their work in a complete vacuum. When we set out to create Jarnsaxa Rising, not only did I do a lot of research, but a lot of inspirations appeared that fueled this story. Some of these, such as witch bottles, Viking party beverages, language and dialect, and aural inspirations, I’ll go into greater detail about later. For now, here are the story’s major sources.
When Carin gave me the first prompt that would become Jarnsaxa Rising, and I started writing notes, an outline and the first draft, the influence of Doctor Who hung over me. Both Carin and I are fans of Doctor Who, and this story’s blending of ancient wisdom with contemporary and future sensibilities inspired me. Unfortunately, it made me lazy as a writer. Audiences have decades of assumptions about The Doctor, so when he comes into a conflict, the writers have less work to do. As a nearly-thousand-year-old Time Lord who can regenerate, his stakes weren’t appropriate to our story. It did, however, provide the sense that the team must save each other, (as the Doctor tries to do for his companions) and unearth the deeper conflict which threatens a whole world.
Reading The Poetic Edda and The Prose Edda helped me with the stakes and conflicts of Old Norse mythology. Jarnsaxa isn’t mentioned much. I suppose that the Christianization of Europe made Sif a more popular female character. She’s mentioned in Godchecker, The Mythology Wiki, and captured imagination on Deviant Art and in An Archive Of Our Own.
On Coursera, a course about Old Norse culture, Sagas and Space, proved to be the most helpful. This University of Zurich course teaches how the Vikings thought about their land, their spiritual and social space, and how these elements tie together to create a cultural mind set. The course includes lectures by various experts from Europe and North America, and each gave me another point of entry to find new information.
In particular. Dr. Terry Gunnell’s work was the most inspiring. His area of expertise includes Old Norse folk beliefs, ritual, legends, and Scandinavian theatre, both medieval and modern. Toward the end of his video lecture in the Sagas and Space course, he describes the experience of being in a Viking hall, surrounded by smoke, rich odors, and masked revellers, hearing a story told in a heightened way, and how the listener is elevated to transcend reality. His articles helped me find the notion of the draugr, and the power of disguise traditions. Gunnell’s work is intoxicating and exciting.
Jarnsaxa Rising’s revenge tragedy structure came from my Dramatic Lit seminar class at Temple, and reading and re-reading The Spanish Tragedy and Hamlet. A really enjoyable part of immersing myself in revenge tragedy was the movie Revengers Tragedy, directed by Alex Cox, and starring Christopher Eccleston, Derek Jacobi, and Eddie Izzard. It’s a classic revenge tragedy, set in a sexy contemporary world, and I highly recommend it.
And so we come full circle; I started with Doctor Who on my mind, and ended with Christopher Eccleston in a Thomas Middleton drama.
But, of course, I had to push all these sources to the background, and just tell a good story. Hopefully, what you’ll get out of this is an exciting, deep, relevant tale. Which you should get to start listening to, in eight days.
Recording. L-R: John Zeiler, Carin Bratlie, Katherine Kupiecki, Vincent Friel, Delta Rae Giordano. Crashed out on bed at center: MaryLynn Mennicke (who should been exhausted by this point).
Howlround.com has published a blog post that I wrote for them about adjusting from writing for theater to writing for audio drama.
Vince and I are now back in Philadelphia. We have to get the house back in order and deprogram our pets, who seem to have been convinced we would never return. Soon I’ll post some more about the recording process and what we learned. Suffice it to say, the experience was amazing. The people who worked on this are the most positive, productive people I’ve ever met. But right now, I need to shut my eyes and meditate on this for a bit. We have our editing work cut out for us.
Odin arrives at Valhalla, riding his eight-legged horse, Slepnir. Photo by Berig. Image stone from from Tjängvide, Alskog Gotland (Go 110)This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International, 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license.
Jarnsaxa Rising’s Indiegogo campaign is complete. As I write this, we are in Minneapolis*. Tonight, we have our first table reading with the cast and director. As I’m writing this, Vince is taking a well-earned nap, for putting up with an over-excited playwright. I’m watching raindrops on maple leaves outside the window, and getting all my notes and administrative stuff in order.
Thank you to everyone who contributed, who passed along links to the campaign, who clicked “like” and “share” buttons, and who patted me on the back when I said, “crowdfunding is scary.” Thank you to everyone who made me explain my ideas so I could focus and clarify them, including my thirteen year old friend Archer, who, at one point, said, “Is this a comedy?”
Speaking of since fiction and comedy, we also have to thank the creative team behind The Hadron Gospel Hour. I started listening to their podcast a few months ago, and enjoyed it enough that Jarnsaxa has been taunting their characters on Twitter. They were kind enough to promote our Indiegogo campaign, and I didn’t even had to ask them. Like our characters, The Hadron Gospel Hour’s Dr. Oppenheimer and Mike travel through space and time trying to make things right. However, they’re less vengeful, and funnier.
Strength. An original card from the tarot deck of Jean Dodal of Lyon, a classic “Marseilles” deck. The deck dates from 1701-1715.There is no playbook for, “let’s travel halfway across the country to record a science fiction revenge tragedy audio drama serial,” and the risk has been nerve wracking at times. Having people say, “Of course this is a good idea,” gives us strength and courage.
Thank you again for helping us take risks and bring an unusual story to life.
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*If you’re saying to yourself, “Self, doesn’t that mean that their house is unguarded?” then you can guess again. If you’re casing out our house, you have probably already met our police-trained and extremely dangerous house-sitter. He waters plants, cuddles cats, and strikes without warning. Good luck with that.
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