Quest for the Mead of Poetry: Menstrual Symbolism in Icelandic Folk and Fairy Tales

Quest for the Mead of Poetry is a translation and interpretation of seven Icelandic tales. In search for the meaning of a dream in which she was given a silver necklace by a poet, the author happened upon the key to hidden layers of her ancestral heritage. That key was Brísingamen, a legendary necklace that belonged to Freyja, goddess of love and fertility. Freyja's necklace, she discovered, conceals in its name the union of the Sun and the Moon as seen in an eclipse, her red embers bleeding from under his coal black disk in a flaming necklace. It was a revelation that led her to understand that the tabooed menstrual flow of her ancestresses found expression in symbolic language.