The Viking Sagas

BBC4 showed a documentary tonight on the Viking Sagas. How I'd love to have been let loose on them to rewrite this most peculiar of Legend series.
As a kid in junior school at St Bede's, I was noted for bringing in all kinds of comics - more notably Spiderman, The Fantastic Four and Superman. I also brought in comics such as Thor and his magical hammer. The stories about Thor weren't that great in the mags (or comic books, as MG says they should be called!), but everyone read them, all the same. I remember when our tutor, Mrs Gardner, fell ill and the Head, Mr Hallas, took over our class for the run-up to the 11-plus exam. Picking up my Thor comic, he asked everyone who had read it to put their hands up. Most of the boys did, but none of the girls. Then he asked all of the boys to draw a picture of their own idea of Thor. My pic was useless, as I can't draw to save my life, but one of my mates was a guy called Andrew Keedy, who is now a noted local artist, and his pic was brilliant. He managed to capture the feeling of life in the time of the Vikings, which was a slightly different feeling to that of the image of Thor.
At St Joseph's, I found a book on the Viking Saga, and another on Nordic legends, and was extremely disappointed. They were written by someone who didn't have any feeling for the stuff he/she was writing about. I've read others, and the writers again seemed not to care too much as to whether their intended audience would like what they were reading. Maybe, I wonder, this is the reason why they have failed to take off.
Writing a comic book about Thor, Loki, Asgar and Valhalla is easy with titles like those. Translating them into film is not that difficult a step. Try using other names from the Norse legends and, in most parts of the world, you will turn people off. Therein lies the main problem: attraction. As much as I have read them in the past, I'm not deeply moved to read them again. I'll just get annoyed!
But still, I'd love to rewrite them. Maybe, if I never get published - a probability - I might just do it for my own pleasure, as they are great legends just poorly represented. You never know!