Jotunheim

Jotunheim is a 26th-century collection of poetry written by L. R. Goodnight, a pen name of author Hayden C. Clayborne. The volume's subjects have mainly to do with of farmers and their lives on dedicated, which were often treated as tertiary by the UNSC in terms of importance. While writing the poems, Clayborne spent two years working and traveling alone across the distant colony of in order to get a genuine understanding of life so far from the  where he was born. While many of the poems are idyllic portraits of the ag-world's rural beauty, some managed to drive at the rising problems of debt and poverty among the farming inhabitants, and the complex, unanswered questions that were behind the quickening spread of the.

In order to complete the semblance of the work being written by a colonial author, Clayborne published under the Goodnight pseudonym and had it released only on Harvest, as an experiment in the strength of his own work independent of his already-established name. To his surprise, it was picked up by spacer communities who ran freighters between ag-worlds and the colonies they supplied, and became a widely-disseminated and well-known work in its own, noted as an important piece of pre-Human-Covenant War 26th-century literature. Clayborne only revealed his being behind the book in his private memoirs, which were kept secret in accordance with his will.

Excerpts
From Challenging Atlas:
 * ''Upon the back of Atlas rests the Earth
 * ''But on a Jotun, so much more depends.
 * ''Its muddy, tiréd legs bear
 * ''burdens gods have never feared;
 * ''had they been mortal, would've caused their knees to bend.


 * ''Upon their shoulders, brutes of agriculture
 * ''yokes of loans and mortgage lie,
 * ''while in her cab, her source of life
 * ''has but three cares: tractor, child, and wife.
 * ''And which, do you suppose, upon the other one rely?

From The Days of True Knights:
 * ''What I would give to have back,
 * ''the days of true knights.
 * ''When the line twixt good and evil
 * ''was a simple dark and light.


 * ''And the men in shining armor
 * ''rescued every life to save,
 * ''without a cause for guilt
 * ''for sending dragons to their grave.


 * ''But now the armor's faded
 * ''to an ugly moral grey,
 * ''and all the wyrms have mouths to feed
 * ''and dues that they must pay.

Trivia

 * Gavin Dunn owned a weathered first-edition copy which he kept in his cabin aboard the Chancer V.