Don’t Know Much About® Mythology (43 page)

What mythology besides Celtic came storming out of northern Europe?

Maybe your first taste came from Looney Tunes, when Elmer Fudd put on a horned helmet and sang “Kill the Wabbit, Kill the Wabbit” to music from Wagner’s
Ring Cycle
. Or maybe it was the scene in
Apocalypse Now
, when American helicopters attacked a Vietnamese village as loudspeakers blared “The Ride of the Valkyries.” Perhaps the Marvel Comics character Thor was your introduction. Or the video loop of the burning “Yule log” shown on television every Christmas. Or the Minnesota football team called the Vikings. Or the magical world of giants, dwarves, runes, magical swords, and powerful rings created by John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892–1973) in
Lord of the Rings
.
*

Powerful and popular, all of these images are based on the Norse and German myths of the Vikings.

Think “Viking,” and perhaps you envision burly, bearded men with broadswords, horned helmets, and dragon boats, accompanied by out-sized women with names like Brunhilde. If so, you would be right. Each of these rich images represents the fierce Vikings, or Norsemen, who terrorized, raped, and pillaged their way across Europe for some three hundred years, from about 800 until 1100 CE, when they were Christianized and started to cut back on their hell-raising.

As we see from the English scholar Alcuin (above), who got his first taste of Viking handiwork when raiders sailed out of the fjords of Norway in June 793, the Norsemen were a force to be reckoned with. After looting a monastery off the northeastern coast of England, where monks had been serenely copying religious manuscripts on the island of Lindisfarne, the Viking raiders spent the next few centuries scorching other parts of England, Ireland, and Scotland. In 841, they established Dublin as a winter base and began to strike farther from home, looting and burning towns in France, Italy, and Spain, and spreading fear wherever they went.
†

If the Celts were frat-house boys gone bad, the Vikings were a gang of lawless bikers—“bad to the bone”—until they finally settled down and became the respectable, civilized Scandinavians they are today.

But was it all about pillage, rape, and destruction? Or was there a kinder, gentler Viking?

The answer is—not really. For most of their history, the Vikings were fierce pirates and warriors who descended from the Germanic peoples who had settled in northwestern Europe. Going as far back as 2000 BCE, some of these Germanic tribes had migrated to modern Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, where they put down roots as farmers and fishermen until overpopulation and a harsh northern environment led them to turn their considerable skills as oceangoing sailors to piracy and raiding. As early as the year 9 CE, Germanic tribes on the continent had destroyed and butchered more than 15,000 of Rome’s finest legionnaires in one of the worst military disasters in Roman history. These tribes eventually helped bring down the Roman Empire.

Although separate Norse groups developed throughout northern Europe, all Norsemen shared the same way of life. It was a harsh culture, in which women and slaves were second-class citizens and unwanted children were exposed to the elements and left to die. This brutal culture had a mythology to match—of fierce war gods, often demanding blood sacrifice. There are stories of a sacred site to the Norse gods in Uppsala, in Sweden, where sacrificed men hung in trees. One account of a Viking king’s burial includes the sacrifice of a slave concubine who is strangled and added to the funeral pyre after all of the dead king’s companions had sex with her. The Vikings believed that a warrior’s death ensured passage to a fighters’ paradise called Valhalla. There, in the great Hall of the Slain, the Norsemen thought they would live among the gods, fight by day and feast by night, until the world came to an end in one all-encompassing, apocalyptic Battle of the Gods.

But the fighting didn’t wait until after death for the Vikings. Known as “Danes,” “Norsemen,” or “Northmen,” they terrified most of Europe as they conquered or looted parts of France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. The “Northmen” became “Normans” when they established a base in France (Normandy) and then invaded England under William the Conqueror in 1066. The Swedish branch of the Viking family tree settled in eastern Europe and was called the Rus, and Russia was named for them. The name “Viking” probably came later from Vik, in southern Norway. The expression “to go a-viking” meant to head off to fight as a pirate.

But in spite of their well-deserved reputation for ferocity, the great majority of Norsemen were simple farmers who lived in villages. These villages comprised a society that was roughly divided into three social classes—nobles, freemen, and slaves—who had little upward mobility. The freemen included farmers, merchants, and traders, and the slaves were often those who had been captured in Viking raids and battles. All Vikings spoke a Germanic language with two major dialects that everyone understood. They also had an alphabet system called runes, a strange script that was used primarily by priests for secret ritual purposes. Like the Celts, the Vikings didn’t record any of their myths and legends until after they had been Christianized.

Even so, there is a vast body of Norse literature collected in two works called Eddas that were set down during the Christian era from an earlier oral tradition. The Poetic, or Elder, Edda is a collection of poems composed anonymously between 1000 and 1100 CE. Twenty-four of the thirty-eight poems in the Poetic Edda are heroic tales, many of which recount the exploits of the great hero and dragon slayer Sigurd (Siegfried in German; see below). The other fourteen poems include accounts of the creation and the end of the universe in a fiery conflagration known as Ragnarok, in which the gods die.

The second collection is the Prose, or Younger, Edda, written during the 1200s by Snorri Sturluson (1179–1241), an Icelandic poet, historian, and courtier. Sturluson’s Prose Edda was designed as a primer, or textbook, for other poets, and consists of a preface and three sections. The first of these sections tells about the Norse deities, while the second and third parts provide techniques for aspiring poets. Besides the Prose Edda, Sturluson also wrote a history of the kings of Norway stretching from early times to his own day. A wealthy and powerful man in Iceland, as well as a medieval Icelandic poet, Snorri Sturluson became involved in Norway’s court intrigues and was murdered in 1241, apparently on the orders of the Norwegian king.

A final source of Norse myths are the
Skald
(the Icelandic word for a type of minstrel or bard), a complex form of Icelandic poetry that survives from the period from 900 through the 1200s CE. Most court poets in Scandinavia came from Iceland, and hundreds of these poems—many of which deal with contemporary rather than mythic figures—are preserved in the Icelandic sagas of the 1100s and 1200s. However, the
Skald
were composed after the Scandinavian countries began the conversion to Christianity, and so, as with the Christian-era Celtic literature, many of these myths have been layered over with Christian traditions, symbolism, and interpretation.

How do a giant’s armpit and a cow help create the Norse world?

According to the Eddas, two places exist before the creation of life—Muspel (“world’s end”), a fiery region in the south, and Niflheim (“dark world”), a northern land of ice and freezing mists. Between them lies Ginnungagap—the “beguiling void”—a great emptiness where the two worlds of heat and ice collide, congeal, and all things are created. Out of the merging of these two places comes the first living thing, a primordial frost giant called Ymir, who is soon joined by a primeval cow named Audhumla, whose four streams of milk keep Ymir alive. In time, Ymir gives birth to three beings, born from the sweat of his armpits and from one of his legs. Meanwhile, a second giant, Buri, is released from the primordial salty ice blocks of Niflheim after the cow Audhumla licks him free. Buri creates a son named Bor, who marries the giantess Bestla, and they have three sons—Odin, Ve, and Vili—who begin the first race of gods.

In a story with echoes of the Greek Creation accounts, Odin grows to manhood, joins with his brothers, and kills Ymir. The incredible flow of the primal giant’s blood creates a great flood that kills all of the frost giants except for Bergelmir and his unnamed wife, who escape the deluge in a boat and re-create the race of ice giants. Although the gods defeat the giants in this Creation battle, the giants’ descendants plan revenge on their conquerors—an enmity between these two races that permeates all Norse myths. (It is not known if this Norse Flood story predates the Christian era, or is an example of a biblical influence on Norse traditions.)

Having dispatched Ymir, Odin becomes—like Zeus—supreme ruler of the world, and goes on to create the earth from Ymir’s body and the sky from his skull. The giant’s blood becomes the oceans, his ribs the mountains, and his flesh the earth. The gods then happen upon two logs lying on the beach and turn them into the first two humans, Ask (ash) and Embla (elm or vine).

Supporting the entire creation is a giant ash tree known as Yggdrasil, which has three roots. One root reaches into Niflheim, the world of ice. Another grows to Asgard, the realm of the gods. The third extends to Jotunheim, land of the giants. Three sisters called Norns live around the base of the tree, and control the past, present, and future, determining the fates of men. A giant serpent, Nidoggr, loyal to the defeated race of giants, lives near the root in Niflheim and continually gnaws at the root, attempting to bring down the tree, and the gods of Asgard with it.

After the world is created, Odin and his brothers construct their heavenly home in Asgard. Odin and the other gods of Asgard are called the Aesir (the sky gods), but there is another race of lesser gods called the Vanir (earth gods), most likely fertility gods who existed before the Vikings took control of the region, though little is known of their origins. A bridge called Bifrost—usually described as a rainbow but sometimes associated with the Milky Way—connects Asgard to the earth, or Midgard, where men live. Within the walls of Asgard, the gods build their palaces and halls, including Valhalla, the Hall of the Slain. Here the kings and heroes fallen in battle are brought by the Valkyries—” choosers of the slain”—to spend their time feasting and fighting, but always ready to defend Asgard against attack by the giants. That day will come in the fearsome, apocalyptic battle called Ragnarok, literally the “fate of the gods,” which is known in German as Götterdämmerung, or “the twilight of the gods.” Fans of Wagnerian opera are familiar with these places, which appear in the
Ring Cycle
.

Ragnarok is somewhat unique in mythology, as it gives a complete account of the end of the world—a great battle fought between the gods and goddesses of Asgard and the giants who wait to avenge the attack of Odin on their ancestors during the Creation. When Ragnarok comes, most of the gods, goddesses, and giants are killed, and the earth is destroyed by fire. After the battle, the god Balder and his wife are reborn and with several sons of dead gods they form a new race of deities. During Ragnarok, a man and a woman also take refuge in the World Tree, Yggdrasil, and sleep through the battle. After the earth again becomes fertile, the couple awakens and begins a new race of humanity.

WHO’S WHO OF THE NORSE GODS

Balder
Known as “the good” or “the beautiful,” Balder is the favorite son of the supreme god Odin and is famed for his good looks and wisdom. Eloquent and full of grace, he is otherwise an ineffectual god, whose death is the most important feature of his story. When Balder has troubling dreams, his mother, Frigg, sees he is fated to die and asks that every living thing and all other objects swear an oath not to harm her fair son. Knowing he is invulnerable, the other gods amuse themselves by hurling stones and other things at Balder, but he is unharmed. Envious of Balder’s invincibility, the Trickster Loki discovers that mistletoe—considered the “all-heal” by the Celtic Druids—has not sworn the oath to Frigg. So, Loki forms a dart from a sprig of the plant and gives it to Balder’s blind brother,
Hod
. As Loki guides Hod’s aim, the mistletoe dart hits Balder, killing him instantly. As the gods mourn Balder’s death, his wife,
Nanna
, instantly dies of grief and is burned with Balder on his funeral pyre. Hel, the goddess of the underworld, agrees to release Balder from death if every person and thing in the world weeps for him. But the malevolent Loki—now in the guise of an old giantess—refuses to cry and Balder remains in the underworld. It is said that when the world is made new after the Battle of Ragnarok, Balder—who fits the dying-and-reborn-god archetype—and Nanna will return to begin another golden age of the gods.