Girdle of the Earth

The Girdle of the Earth is a dark, literary retelling of the Norse myth of Jörmungandr, told entirely from the serpent's perspective.Taken from his mysterious childhood home and thrown into the sea, the young creature grows into a being of unimaginable size, eventually encircling the world and holding his own tail in his jaws. Beneath the oceans, he becomes an unwilling witness to the history of humanity: shipwrecks, war, slavery, death, forgotten possessions, and the countless stories carried into the depths by the drowned.Rather than portraying Jörmungandr simply as a monster, the novel explores isolation, identity, memory, captivity, sacrifice, loneliness, and the complicated relationship between a creature and the world that fears and uses him. As centuries pass, Jörmungandr listens to humanity from beneath the waves while carrying a burden no one above the surface understands.The result is a haunting mythological meditation on what it means to be feared, misunderstood, remembered, and ultimately necessary to the world.