Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

On a small whalebone box carved in Northumbria around the year 700—the treasure known as the Franks Casket—two scenes share a single panel with the serenity of a double altarpiece. On the right, the Magi bring their gifts to the Christ child. On the left, a smith stands at his anvil, and beneath the anvil lies a headless body, and in the smith's tongs is a cup that was lately a boy's skull, and a woman is being handed a drink she does not understand. The carver saw no contradiction; his world held both mysteries in one casket. For the figure at the anvil is Wayland the Smith — Völund to the Norse, Wieland to the Germans, Weland to the Anglo-Saxons—the supreme craftsman of the northern world: maker of the swords the epics swear by, prisoner of a greedy king, lamed so he could not flee, and author of the most terrible revenge in Germanic legend, from the wreckage of which he rose into the sky on wings of his own forging. He is the North's answer to Daedalus, and the answe...