The Man Who Declined Valhalla - A Norse Mythology Literary Fantasy Novel

Sigrun of the Southern March died a hero's death and refused eternal glory. He asked the valkyrie about a second door. He told the All-Father a beautiful lie about wanting to honor the peasants. And for eleven years he counted the beans in his kitchen, tended a compost heap, and lived in the small quiet country of the retired dead - a farm, an alder-shaded field, and a goat named Bloodletter who used to be his war-axe. Then Loki took over Asgard. Under the new Interim Administration, every dawn brings a scroll to Sigrun's table with three options. Choose, or lose something. Choose interestingly, and be rewarded. Loki wants stories - big ones, small ones, silly ones, unpredictable ones. Sigrun wants nothing at all. He is, in the trickster god's own delighted words, *a new shape*: a warrior who found war *tedious*, a hero who wants to be furniture, a man so committed to insignificance that significance itself becomes the enemy. But Sigrun's careful anonymity is about to end. Astrid Eiriksdotter, sharp-eyed widow of a warrior killed at Stamford Bridge, has moved into the longhouse across the field. She reads Loki's letters better than Sigrun ever has. She keeps a private grief no god has ever seen. And when the long-hall of the village burns down overnight, and a very old man in a grey cloak begins whispering to the villagers about a coming change - when Sigrun and Astrid discover that Loki is not, as they had believed, the top of the pyramid - they will have to learn, together, what it means to correspond with a god who is himself being corresponded with. Told in the dry, precise, first-person voice of a warrior who would very much prefer to be counting beans, *The Man Who Declined Valhalla* is a novel about the quiet life chosen after death: the compost heap on the correct side of the yard, the widow east of the field, the small warm place at the back of a man's chest that must, over time, become a room large enough to hold another person. It is a story about retirement. About refusal. About what it means to become something new when you have already died.