Ice Giants

The Ice Giants are giant snowmen who speak with a Scandinavian accent, and have been imprisoned under the Disc's hub by the gods. They ride out in Sourcery. They also may owe the gods the return of a borrowed lawnmower. It is possible that they are a form of troll, since water trolls are known.

Annotation

The reference is to Jotunheim*, the cold and frozen homeland of the Giants in Nordic myth. On the Ragnarok, the Giants will seek to extend their domain of ice and gloom over lands previously held by the Gods. (*Dubbed Sniffleheim by the Dean after he'd been at the sherry)

There is also an element of Hörbinger's "World-Ice" cosmology here. Hörbinger was a German theorist whose ideas were considered sound and Aryan by the Nazis. The concept that the world was an eternal struggle between ice and fire, as evidenced by on the one hand volcanoes and on the other glaciers, was considered to be a fine dramatic metaphor for the Master Race. (Hörbinger also thought we lived on the inside of a bubble in an infinity of solid rock. Because of this, some Nazis thought it was worthwhile to point their telescopes up and to the left a bit to see if they could pick up British ships in their home ports...)

"Whole vorld of ice. According to inevitability of history and triumph of thermo-dynamics" is straight out of Hörbinger's wacky theory...

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