laugardagur, október 07, 2006

garðr

The arrangement of her keys on the keychain replicates the shape of the cosmos.

Let me explain; it may not be obvious to all how this could be so.

The keys are arranged as to correspond with concentric rings of familiarity. The innermost key opens the front door of her house. This is of course the center, the most familiar and hospitable (if a person's own house can be hospitable to the person in question) region. We could, if we were inclined to make such comparisons, think of it at Ásgarðr.

The next key, working outward, opens the door to her office. This is a less private place, though intended to be for her use alone. The ræstingarkonur do come through in the evenings to empty the trash, and she does not entirely command the room's contents. Let us think of it as Miðgarðr.

The third key opens certain shared or common areas in the workplace: the copy room, the lounge, the office. It may be unkind to think of these regions as Jötunheimr, but structurally that is what they are: an outermore because less familiar ring about the two inner ones.

Útgarðr is next, of course. The door to Útgarðr is opened by the next key, the one that opens the building within which both these common areas and her own office are located.

(It could be mentioned that there is another key, not on the keychain at all, and thus representing a yet outermore ring. It opens the door of an apartment on, appropriately, the thirteenth floor of a building nowhere near here. This place corresponds to the outer sea, far out in the sea about the world, past where whales live, where even jötnar do not willingly venture. Jörmundgandr is out there.)

There is another key on another keychain, though that keychain is looped through the first one. It is the ignition key to her car. It provides access to regions not on the horizontal plane at all but instead on the vertical axis piercing the center, Ásgarðr. Hazardous journeys to Svartálfheimr, Múspelheimr, and elsewhere are begun by turning this key.

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