One of the hardest things to do while writing an alternate history/time travel novel is to get into the mindset of a pre-modern or non-western thinker re: the nature of time.

e.g. did the Norse think of Ragnarok as a historical event that lay some definite length of time in the future? Or did they think of time in a less linear way, so that it was a larger truth about historical recurrence?

The idea of traveling back in time from the future seems to be a very recent thing, which makes me think that thinking of the future as "place" that you could theoretically "come back" from would be completely foreign to, say, medieval people

If you preclude the idea of time as a straight line from past to future, it becomes almost impossible to talk about "time travel" at all, because travel is a spatial concept

So the question is, if a person from the future showed up, what would such people make of him? Would they adopt a linear view of time, or would they explain the time traveler in some other way, consistent with their understanding?

I think this is a good point. We are obsessed with time in a way that earlier peoples were not, because of the dramatic changes we have seen/expect to see. https://twitter.com/gailfinke/status/1337839786657243145

Time travel only becomes relevant when the future is markedly different from the past. It's our longing to revisit a lost past or travel to an imagined future that makes time travel interesting/tantalizing to us.

Christianity postulates a divine plan of God working through history, so it makes sense that medieval Christians would see things this way. Not so sure about pagan people. https://twitter.com/gailfinke/status/1337840531343335429

And the other problem, of course, is that even if you *could*, as a writer, get into the head of a medieval pagan, his worldview would still be largely incomprehensible to modern readers. So you're screwed coming and going, as it were

I ran into this with the Indians in Iron Dragon 3. I tried to have an Indian character explain his concept of time, but it ends up just sounding like gibberish

Yes, the Norse had Jormundandr, the snake devouring its tail, but I'm not sure if there is any definite link to time or recurrence https://twitter.com/The_Petrichory/status/1337843705428934658

I use Jormundandr this way in the Iron Dragon series, but it's modern/future people repurposing they myth. Unclear if the Norse actually connected Jormungandr to the nature of time