The Wild Hunt (https://wildhunt.org/tag/retrospective)
Lyonel Perabo interviews Einar Selvik, the frontman of the Nordic folk band Wardruna and a composer for the soundtrack of the new video game, Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla.
Madame Death’s dressed all in black and seated next to a battered metal table…
I wrote those words five years ago this month, the opening line to my first column on The Wild Hunt. It’s a riff – I think – on William Earnest Henley’s poem Madam Life’s a Piece in Bloom, which I would have picked up from its use as an epigraph in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, but I don’t remember for certain. It is long enough ago that now I can read my own thoughts from then and not be quite sure whence they came; I was then a different person, and the world was a different world. The Wild Hunt itself has changed entirely, going from the herculean effort of one writer, the blessed Jason Pitzl-Waters, to a publication staffed by 20 writers, editors, and business managers. This morning I have been looking back through my archives of the past five years, in part to figure out an answer to a question I have asked myself over the years: what is this column about, anyway?