A note from Bernd:
The first conversation with Johannes generated more mail than anything we’ve published on this site. Most of it was questions. Some of it was people telling us they went back and reread Episode 8 and couldn’t quite read it the same way again.
I want to be careful about how I introduce this second conversation, because I think the first one gave some readers the wrong impression — that Johannes has some kind of privileged access to what the series “really” means. He doesn’t, and he’d be the first to say so. What he has is forty years inside Germanic philology and comparative mythology, and a habit of noticing when a story leans on real scholarly ground without necessarily knowing it’s doing so. Sometimes that noticing turns up something. Sometimes it’s just pattern-matching where there’s nothing to find. He’s usually the one who says that second part out loud before I have to ask.
What follows is one scholar’s honest, uncertain attempt to hold his own field up against a story he’s become genuinely absorbed by. Take it as that. Nothing more is being claimed here, by anyone.
— Bernd
First interview: https://www.maier-files.com/johannes-brunn-conversation-01/
Bernd: Last time, someone asked whether Holle found Ulva or took her from somewhere. You didn’t answer it. Have you changed your mind?
Johannes: No, and I want to be honest about why — I don’t think I’m in a position to answer it at all. That’s not false modesty. I only know the text the same way any careful reader knows it. What I can offer is a way of looking at a detail that I noticed because of what I do for a living, not because I have some deeper line into the material. Whether it holds up is genuinely an open question, even to me.
Bernd: Go on anyway.
Johannes: Rihman’s line to her in Episode 11 — “the wolf in you is getting restless” — struck me because of how she introduces herself back in Episode 2. Unprompted, before Dieter even asks her name properly, she translates it for him: Ulva bedeutet Wolf. In my own field, when a character in a story keeps narrating their own name’s meaning without being asked, it’s usually because the writer wants the reader to notice the name is doing more work than a label. I don’t know if that’s what’s happening here. It might just be a striking bit of dialogue. But it’s the kind of detail my training makes me stop on, so I stopped on it.
Bernd: And your guess, if you had to make one?
Johannes: My honest guess — and I want to underline guess — is that it doesn’t matter as much as the question assumes whether Holle found her or took her. Both possibilities lead somewhere similarly uncomfortable if you sit with them, and I don’t think the text gives us enough to choose between them responsibly. I’d rather say what unsettles me about the character than pretend I’ve solved her.
Bernd: What unsettles you.
Johannes: The gap between how she talks about herself and how she behaves. She wants approval like a child — “aunty Holle, can you see?” — and then does things with a coldness that doesn’t match that at all. That gap is real, on the page, whatever’s causing it. I don’t have an explanation for it. I have a discomfort about it. Those aren’t the same thing, and I want to be careful not to dress the second one up as the first.
Bernd: Let’s move to what you actually came prepared to talk about today. You mentioned something about Tyr.
Johannes: This one I feel more confident holding up, because it’s mostly not about the Maier Files at all — it’s about my own field, and then a question of whether it happens to rhyme with something Pat wrote. Those are two different kinds of claim and I want to keep them separate for you.
The philology first, on its own terms: Tyr’s name — Tiwaz — is cognate with Zeus, with the Vedic Dyaus Pita, with the Latin word for god itself. That’s not speculative; it’s established comparative linguistics. Georges Dumézil spent much of his career arguing that early Indo-European religious structures split sovereignty into two functions — a binding, oath-breaking magician-king type, and a law-giving, oath-keeping type whose word cannot move once given. Among the continental Germanic peoples, before Odin’s cult became dominant, the philological evidence suggests Tiwaz occupied that oath-keeping seat more or less alone. The old sky-father. Guarantor of the given word.
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Bernd: And Odin came later.
Johannes: Later attested, later dominant — that much is fairly settled among people who work on this. What we can’t fully reconstruct, because the written sources come centuries after the fact through Christian hands, is exactly how that shift happened, or how conscious or violent it was in the imagination of the people telling these stories at the time. I don’t want to overstate the certainty there. But the fossil is real: an older god of fixed law quietly reduced to “the one who lost a hand,” and a newer wandering, identity-shedding, oath-breaking god taking the throne and keeping it.
Bernd: And this is where it touches the series.
Johannes: This is where I want to be most careful, because this next part is entirely my own reading, not a fact about the world — just something I noticed and can’t quite put down. Heinz, in the rose garden, tells Lena that Tyr sacrificed his hand “so he knows the price of order” — and in the very same breath, wearing the uniform, tells her that being no one but oneself is the hardest battle any individual can fight. I don’t know whether Pat intended those two things to sit that close together. I only know that when I read it with my own training switched on, I couldn’t stop noticing that one god of fixed, binding order and one doctrine of sovereign, unbound selfhood were occupying the same page, spoken by the same man, in the same breath. That might be nothing. It might be exactly the kind of thing a careful writer plants without fully naming it to himself. I genuinely don’t know which, and I’d rather say that plainly than dress up a hunch as a discovery.
Bernd: What’s the hunch, then, if you had to say it out loud?
Johannes: That the “sovereign individual” reading of this series — Otto, Gudrun, Heinz, standing against Ahriman’s machine as morning stars reclaiming their own light — might be one valid reading sitting right next to another one I can’t quite dismiss: that the wandering, ungoverned self is Odin’s version of the story, told by the party who benefited from displacing something older and more binding. A god who can’t be sworn to anything is very hard to hold accountable. That’s not a claim about what the Maier Files means. It’s a lens I happen to own, from my own field, that I tried holding up to the text — and I found I couldn’t set it back down afterward. Other readers might hold it up and see nothing at all. I wouldn’t argue with them.
Bernd: It also cuts against your own instincts, doesn’t it? You told me once you find the atomized, ungoverned path more appealing personally than any collective alternative.
Johannes: I do, and that’s exactly why I don’t fully trust my own hunch here. Liking a reading has never been evidence that it’s correct — if anything it should make me more suspicious of it, not less. I keep thinking about the line Ulva has in Episode 2, about how calling something a “conspiracy” gets it dismissed before it’s weighed. I think the reverse is just as true. “Sovereign individual” is a phrase that gets something believed before it’s weighed. I don’t know which of those two traps I’m more at risk of walking into with this theory. Possibly both.
Bernd: Do you ever wonder whether the writer actually intended any of this? Whether Pat sat down and meant Tyr to carry that weight?
Johannes: I used to think that question mattered more than it does. I’ve stopped needing to know. If I asked him and he said yes, I’d wonder whether he was just being generous to a reader who clearly wanted to hear it. If he said no, I wouldn’t believe him — not because I’d think he was lying, but because I don’t think a writer working from instinct, pulling from sources this old, always knows which doors he’s opened until someone else walks through one. So I’ve settled on not asking. It’s more honest, oddly, than getting an answer would be.
Bernd: That’s a strange kind of confidence.
Johannes: It’s not confidence. It’s the opposite. I don’t think the series is going to resolve which reading is correct — Tyr’s or Odin’s, bound law or the wandering self — and honestly, I’m not sure it should. A story that settled that question for its readers would be making an argument. This one, as far as I can tell, is just holding two old, real, unresolved things next to each other and letting whoever’s reading notice which one they were already rooting for.
Bernd: [pause] I came in today hoping for an answer about Ulva.
Johannes: I know. I don’t have one. I have a hand-wave in one direction and a real question in another, and I’d rather hand you both honestly than pretend the second one is actually the first.
A note from Bernd:
We talked longer than what’s above. Johannes wanted to bring up the ásmegin — the “god-might” that fades from even Thor as the world moves toward its end in later Norse tradition — and whether it rhymes at all with the vanishing figures in the Episode 13 rose garden ending. He was careful to say, again, that he wasn’t sure it did. I’ve kept that thread for whenever we sit down next.
Johannes Brunn is a German-born independent scholar working at the intersection of Germanic mythology, esoteric history and European literary tradition. He discovered the Maier Files three years ago. He is careful, in every conversation we’ve had, to distinguish what he can support from what he simply can’t stop wondering about — and he’d want that distinction printed here as clearly as anything else he said.
