***EDIT***

This piece won a judge's choice award at the Arisia 2008 Science Fiction and Fantasy Convention's art show last weekend!!

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This painting is pretty large, 2 and a half feet by one and a half feet, so it took some time to get all of it into photoshop to edit. I have to say that I'm pretty damn pleased with this painting, I've been working on it off and on for the last month and a half or so, and there were times when I wondered if it was really good enough to bother finishing.

Anyway, this is Surt, the Norse Badass Fire Giant of PAIN. When ragnarok rolls around, he takes that huge flaming sword and he totally pwns Frey. Don't feel too bad, though, it's Frey's own fault. He had an awesome magic sword of his own that could even fight by itself, but he gave it away to a giant so he could marry the giant's daughter. Odin was pretty pissed, because he'd foreseen that if Frey didn't have that sword, the forces of good would loose Ragnarok. So when that apocalypse finally gets here, you can just blame Frey and his obsession with Jotun chicks.

When he's not terrorizing the god of the harvest, Surt hangs out down in Muspelheim, which is either under the earth, or very far to the south, where everything is made of fire. He has like a whole kingdom of trolls and other flaming giants and stuff down there, apparently. Now, norse mythology does not tell us weather or not there are oceans of lava infested with serpents in Muspelheim, nor does it tell us if Surt sails these seas in a huge black ship. We must therefore assume that there are, and he does.

Surt has no connection to Loki, as far as I know. I'm not terribly surprised, though, because I've read in a few places that Loki was not originally associated with fire at all.

(the ship is NOT the ship of nails, as one commenter suggested. I wouldn't DARE paint him arriving on that ship, I might inadvertently summon him, thus causing the beginning of Ragnarok!!)