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It was the end of Winter, the Hungry Time.

Food was starting to run short, but Sugaring hadn't started up yet. So a hunter went out to see what he could track down.

He didn't come back and, although people went out to look for him, they mostly didn't have the strength to look very far.

Well, lots of things can happen in the woods in Winter, people said.

Next a young girl disappeared.

She'd gone down to the lake to get some water. They found the waterskin, empty, out on the ice near the hole that they always keep chopped open to draw their water from. (You always want to draw your water from where it's deep; it's cleaner there.) But the girl herself they never found.

What they did find were a set of tracks in the snow heading North, and those tracks were backward tracks.

So they knew they had a wendigo to deal with.

(Call them trolls or etins if you like; same difference.)

The elders sat down in council to try to figure out what to do next, but they talked around and around and couldn't come up with a workable plan. Finally young Weasel speaks up.

“I have an idea,” he says.

You can't flip someone off when you're wearing mittens.

Welcome to Minnesota.

Go ahead, laugh at my unfashionable hand-gear: see if I care. When the temperature gets down below zero, no gloves will ever keep your hands as warm as a good, well-knit pair of mittens.

Think of them as symbols of community. In mittens, the fingers keep each other warm.

“Hey, if they're good enough for Thor, they're good enough for me.”

This has been my quip this Winter ever since I finally caved and started leaving my fingered gloves at home. Everyone around here gets the allusion, though it's not, strictly speaking, mythologically correct.

You know the story. Thor and some friends are heading for Etinhame one night when, looking for a place to camp, they discover an oddly-shaped cave with a wide mouth and one strange little room off to the side.

Turns out, it's a giant's cast-off mitten.

Consider the implications: up here, even the frost-giants wear mittens.

Hand-shoes, the ancestors called them 1500 years ago, back in the old Hwiccan hunting-runs. In Beowulf, one of the men torn apart by the troll Grendel is named—for reasons we can only guess at—Hand-shoe.

Not even mittens can ward off every scathe.

If you've ever wondered what it would be like to have flippers instead of hands, come to Minnesota and find out.

Continuing the Novel Gnosis series, in which I tell you about my religious insights gained via writing a novel, we come to Jotunheim. That means the home of the Jotuns / Jotnar, aka giants.

Jotunheim is flat, but the only time in the story human characters were aware of its flatness was when Freya crossed dimensions with Ottar to bring him to see a wisewoman. Most of the time, humans journeying in Jotunheim experience it as if it were a three dimensional universe. (Most of the time, humans experience Asgard that way too, and other worlds.) When Thor and Loki visit Jotunheim, they usually arrive in an empty snowy field near their destination. Jotunheim also has forest and riparian habitat, and even city. It is always winter in Jotunheim. Some Jotnar manage to grow things anyway, variously by creating sheltered spaces, by staying close to the river, by using magic, or by choosing to grow evergreens and other permafrost adapted things.

[Today, we sit down for an interview Karoline Fritz. Here, she discusses how her spirituality influences her writing; her novels, The Victorian, and The Story of Arbux; and her future projects.]