Jutting her head forward, Inga scalded out the words: “You mean. Just. Like. Gramma?”
I waited for Hnossi to deny the charge. Instead she maintained the killer frost of her glare.
“My mother, Hnossi Icegaard,” said Inga at last, “is the accidental feminist icon who secretly spent her career trying to keep women out of the F*O*O*J or from climbing the ranks and is maybe the most sexually repressed woman I’ve ever known.”
“Inka! You shut your mouse! You don’t know vut you’re talkink about!”
“And all of it,” said Inga, “because she’s disgusted by her own mother! Did you know her own father left them? She’s spent her whole life looking for a powerful man to pull her wagon. Why do you think she was so devastated when Hawk King died? But then, when whatever man she’d finally tricked into falling in love with her eventually, inevitably turned out not to be strong enough to reach her stratospheric standards—because, I mean, who could ever be as strong as the strongest woman in the world?—she’d crush him like a monk stomping grapes and then go on a bender with the wine. And that’s,” said Inga, “what she did to my dad!”
And so with Hnossi’s eyes spraying liquid nitrogen all over her daughter, Inga-Ilsabetta Icegaard revealed the neurotically distorted prunings of her family tree and hinted at how her mother’s problems with love resulted in a failed marriage, damaged children, and a terrible fate for her daughter that Hnossi did nothing to prevent.
Curdling the Milk of Human Kindness
From the contents of Hnossi’s F*O*O*J personnel file, and from my own observations of her and her daughter’s interaction, a three-dimensional image had begun to emerge: the Hnossi who stood beyond—or lies behind—the iconic warrior-goddess and the type A professor of Military History, Political Economy, and German and Scandinavian Literature.
Clearly, Hnossi Icegaard was a woman who’d been upset about many things for many centuries and was, no doubt, sexually repressed, quite likely in reaction to the extensive coitalambulation of her own mother, for as Inga/Syndi put it, “Gramma Freyja was a major ho.”
Content for millennia to be mistaken as the daughter of the Aesir goddess Frigg, wife of Odin and queen of Aesgard, Hnossi hid her shame at her true genealogy as the daughter to the Vanir goddess Freyja, who was commonly mistaken either for the regal Frigg, or for Idun, keeper of the Apple of Youth. History recorded Hnossi as having only one sister, Gersimi. But according to Inga, “Gramma” Freyja actually had nine hundred and ninety-nine daughters, all of whom she raised on Mount Snafulnir near the “party halls” of Folkvangar and Sessrumnir.
By all accounts, Hnossi’s mother, Freyja, was exceedingly beautiful; but her marriage to the god Odur ended when he “disappeared.” Distraught to the core, Freyja wandered Midgard in despair for him while crying tears of purest gold. Intensely vulnerable, Freyja engaged in tens of thousands of dalliances with gods, humans, elves, dwarves, giants, and sundry other magickal beings, all the while sinking into the disreputable practice of seidr magic.
Eternal scalawag and Ragnarokian rogue Loki went so far as to accuse Freyja of sleeping with every god in Aesgard, every elf in Alfheim, and even her own brother Freyr; although the trickster deity and storm giant was forced into a retraction and a sealed settlement in Aesgard’s Hall of Judgment, the victory was purely Pyrrhic for Freyja (“her only purity,” quipped Loki famously) since her own actions had already ruined her reputation.
But Freyja was also a goddess of combat and death whose lust for men was equaled only by her lust for war and gold. Possessing a feathered cloak that she used to transform herself into a falcon, and a chariot drawn by two iron cats, Freyja sometimes wandered the Earth at night disguised as a goat, and, when not transporting the souls of the slain to Valhalla, she was adding to her jewelry collection, as when she famously acquired the necklace Brisingamen as payment for sleeping with the four Brising dwarves.
Witnessing this sad, pathetic carnal crusade for love, and embittered by the booty of shame and humiliation she’d amassed as a result, young Hnossi sought recruitment into the sorority of battle-maiden Valkyries, clutching at the hope that by joining an organization she equated with purity, she could escape one aspect of her family history while embracing another.
Historical accounts list Hnossi as an unflinchingly brave warrioress who personally dispatched untold thousands of elves, dwarves, giants, and monsters back to the Niflheim damnation of the nethergoddess Hel; in the modern era, Iron Lass masterminded the Götterdämmerung, conceived its strategy, issued its battle cry, and even wrote its manifesto.
Having broken from what she saw as her own mother’s lack of control, Hnossi Icegaard became the quintessential controller, a strategist supreme of global affairs. But lacking a model for wife-and-motherhood, the control she so desperately wielded could not but cause chaos inside the family she was about to create.
As Inga/Syndi said, Hnossi—perhaps to replace the father whom she never knew and to repair the psychemotional damage caused by the mother she did—pursued extremely strong men. In the twentieth-century she fell in love with and married the human mortal Hector “Qetzalcoatl” El Santo, HKA Strong Man. Five months later, Inga-Ilsabetta El Santo y Icegaard was born, followed two years later in 1964 by younger brother “Lil Boulder” Baldur.
Strong Man was indeed a strong man. Having risen to prominence in the Mexican wrestling circuit, Strong Man claimed to have derived his powers by ingesting the miraculous “Maize of Chac Mol”; his strength increased with every year of his life until he could pick up entire oil tankers with his gloved hands.
But Strong Man’s powers weren’t limited to physical deeds; he invested his profits from wrestling and crimefighting back into Mexico’s wrestling and film industries. Capitalizing upon his own reputation
