The Vikings (4 page)

On the other side of the Viking world from Oseberg and the Norwegian Vestfold and about a century later, the Arab diplomat and Islamic teacher Ibn Fadlan noted down his detailed description of the rites surrounding the cremation of a Viking chieftain on the banks of the Volga which he witnessed in 921. A slave girl had been chosen to join her master in his death:

They led the slave girl to a thing that they had made which resembled a doorframe. She placed her feet on the palms of the men and they raised her up to overlook this frame. She spoke some words and they lowered her again. A second time they raised her up and she did again what she had done; then they lowered her. They raised her a third time and she did as she had done the two times before. Then they brought her a hen; she cut off the head, which she threw away, and then they took the hen and put it in the ship. I asked the interpreter what she had done. He answered, ‘The first time they raised her she said, ‘Behold, I see my father and mother.’ The second time she said, ‘I see all my dead relatives seated.’ The third time she said, ‘I see my master seated in Paradise and Paradise is beautiful and green; with him are men and boy servants. He calls me. Take me to him.’
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Saxo Grammaticus in the
Gesta Danorum
described a similar use being made of a cockerel as a medium or spirit messenger during a journey through the kingdom of death undertaken by a hero named Hading with a female companion:

Moving on, they found barring their way a wall, difficult to approach and surmount. The woman tried to leap over it, but to no avail, for even her slender, wrinkled body was no advantage. She thereupon wrung off the head of a cock which she happened to be carrying and threw it over the enclosing barrier; immediately the bird, resurrected, gave proof by a loud crow that it had truly recovered its breathing.
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Was it the observed tendency of hens to run around in a wild parody of continued existence after decapitation that lay behind their role in such situations? Was something similar done in connection with the Oseberg burial? We can hardly know. Because Viking Age Scandinavians had only a rudimentary written culture, in the form of terse runic inscriptions on stones and sticks, and because knowledge of Heathen rites and beliefs was actively suppressed by the Church after the triumph of Christianity, our ignorance of what these people believed about first and last things, and of how these beliefs manifested themselves in practice, is considerable. Here at last, in the form of the Oseberg ship, was a time-capsule from the Viking Age, free from the taint of the ‘creative imagination’ of the novelists, dramatists, painters and composers who had previously tried to describe it. But how was its wealth of material to be interpreted? What did it all mean? Stones were piled on to the ship: was this to prevent the dead from walking again, or to sink the ship to a level at which the voyage to the next world might begin? And if the ship was to start out on such a voyage, why then anchor her by a doubled rope at the bow to a very large boulder? Who was to cast her off? Who was to sail her, and where to? Why were many of the oars on board bundled and unfinished? What logical or magical purpose was served by the decapitation of all fifteen horses that went into the grave? Why had a shaft been cut into the mound not long after it was closed? Was there in fact a ritual purpose behind the apparently haphazard disordering of the women’s bones that were found in the shaft? A disappointment for the first students of the Oseberg discovery was that only two samples of runic writing appeared among the artefacts. One was a faint label carved on the outside of a pinewood bucket that has been interpreted as meaning ‘Sigrid owns me.’ The other was on a cylindrical piece of wood, tentatively identified as part of an oar and inscribed
litiluism
, interpreted by some runologists as
litilvíss (er) ma
ð
r
or ‘man is little wise’.
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If correct, the interpretation is apt, for while the find conveyed an extraordinary amount of new information about the Vikings, the very richness of it took away the certainties of ignorance, and raised as many questions as it answered about the nature of Heathen spiritual beliefs and the larger culture of which they formed a part. Our task in the next chapter must be to try to reconstruct a general outline of this culture of northern Heathendom, which was in so many essentials distinct from the Christianity that had become, by the end of the eighth century, the dominant culture across mainland Europe.

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The culture of northern Heathendom

Our main sources of information for Viking Age Heathendom are the four poems of cosmological and mystical content known as ‘The Seeress’s Prophecy’, ‘The Sayings of the High One’, ‘Vafthrudnir’s Sayings’ and ‘Grimnir’s Sayings’, which form part of the collection called the
Poetic Edda
; and the use made of these as illustrative material by Snorri Sturluson in the
Prose Edda
, a manual for the understanding of poetry which he wrote in Iceland in about 1220. As a lover of literature and a man with a strong sense of the importance of maintaining a respectful relationship to his cultural tradition, Snorri had become concerned that, after 200 years of active suppression of Heathen culture by the Christian Church, the survival of the large body of Old Norse poetry known as skaldic verse was threatened. The understanding of it depended to such a high degree on a knowledge of the myths and legends of the Old Norse gods and heroes that, unless something were done about it, they would shortly become incomprehensible to future generations of Icelanders. The chief problem was the use made by skaldic poets of elaborate figures known as
kennings
, periphrases which used details from the mythological stories of the adventures of the Norse gods and heroes to create names for familiar places, objects and people from other contexts that pushed them three or four metaphorical steps away from the original referent. The greater the distance, the greater the skill of the poet. The game for the listener was to untangle this dense thicket in order to reach the meaning of the poem. Though wildly anachronistic, the adjective ‘baroque’ suitably conveys the degree of their complexity.

It was always recognized that Snorri must have worked from a specific collection of poems, and in 1643 a vellum manuscript containing what turned out to be this collection came into the hands of an Icelandic bishop and scholar named Brynjolfúr Sveinsson. Dating from about 1270, it was itself a copy of an original dating to the early years of the same century. A few years later the bishop presented the collection to the king of Denmark, apparently as a way of restoring his own reputation and that of an unmarried daughter who had severely embarrassed them both by getting pregnant by a young priest.
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Since that time the manuscript has been known as the
Codex Regius
. Many of Snorri’s references in the
Prose Edda
were to details of Old Norse cosmology and myths that had remained obscure for later scholars, and the emergence of the
Poetic Edda
proved the key to unlocking many of them. The cosmological poems are difficult to date. Unlike skaldic poetry, which is by named poets, their creators were unknown. The unhurried devotion of ‘Vafthrudnir’s Sayings’ might suggest that it was composed well before its author perceived any threat to Heathendom from Christianity, perhaps early in the tenth century, while the urgent intensity of ‘The Seeress’s Prophecy’ suggests it may have been composed as an act of liturgical defiance much later on in the same century, when the threat was more clearly perceived.

The
Prose Edda
opens with a section called
Gylfaginning
, or the ‘Beguiling of Gylfi’, that describes how a legendary Swedish King Gylfi visited three Heathen gods in order to question them about the origins of the world. Snorri uses the replies King Gylfi receives to lay out the creation myth and cosmological structure of northern Heathendom. Gylfi learns that everything began in an empty chaos that contained a world of heat and light called Muspelheim, and an opposing dim, dark and cold world called Nifelheim. The two worlds were separated by a chasm, Ginnungagap. In the extreme physical forces that operated across Ginnungagap a giant named Ymir came into being. He was nourished by milk from the udders of a primordial cow, Audhumla. Audhumla next licked the salty stones around her into the shape of another giant, Buri. By an unspecified process Buri fathered a son, Bur, who wed a giantess, Bestla. The couple produced three sons, one of whom was Odin. Odin and his brothers created the physical world by killing Ymir and, in an act of prodigious violence, tearing the body apart and flinging the pieces in all directions. The giant’s blood became the sea, his flesh the land, his bones the mountains and cliffs, his skull the vault of the heavens. Later, as Odin and his brothers were walking by the sea, two logs washed up on the sands, and from these the gods created the first human beings by breathing life and consciousness into them. They named the first man Ask and the first woman Embla. Ask means ‘ash’, the meaning of Embla remains obscure.

Snorri’s further history of earliest things proceeds in a detailed and poetic vein, and to a modern mind unfamiliar with his world and his mindset it rapidly becomes confusing. Our confusion is compounded by the fact that in the
Ynglingasaga
with which he opens
Heimskringla
he provides a completely different, euhemeristic account of the origins of Odin and the Aesir, as Odin’s family of gods was known, in which Odin features as the chieftain-priest of a tribe living in the area around the Black Sea in the days of the Roman empire. This tribe migrated northwards through Russia and finally settled near Uppsala, on the coast of south-central Sweden, where Odin rewarded his followers in the traditional way by dealing out land to them.
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Rather than attempt to resolve these paradoxes, our aim here will be simply to try to abstract from
Gylfaginning
and the cosmological poems a general outline of the world-view that underpinned Viking Age Heathendom.

The cosmological world was conceived of as a flat circle divided into three distinct regions, each with its own characteristic set of inhabitants, and sharing a common centre.
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The innermost world was Asgard, where the Aesir lived, each in his or her own home. Odin lived in Valhalla, Thor in Trudheim, Freyja in Folkvang. As the god of war and warriors, poetry and hanged men, Odin’s work was to inspire poets, wage war and give fighting men courage in battle. Thor was responsible for natural phenomena such as wind, rain, thunder and lightning. These two were the most important male gods. In general terms Odin was the aristocratic god, worshipped by the dedicated warrior and the poet, while Thor was the god of the farmer and common man, especially popular in Iceland, Norway and Denmark. The eddic poem ‘The Lay of Harbard’ summarizes the distinction thus:

Freyja was skilled in sorcery and was the embodiment of female sexual power. Her brother Frey was the god of male potency, good weather, good harvests and fertile beasts. The image of him that stood in the great Heathen temple in Uppsala sported a large, erect phallus, and the 7 cm-high bronze figurine found at Rällinge in Södermanland, priapic as he sits cross-legged and naked save for a pointed cap, one hand holding his braided beard in a gesture of self-control, is almost certainly a depiction of him. Another god that looms large in the myths and the eddic poems was Loki, a son of giants adopted into the family of the Aesir. He was also Odin’s troubled - and troubling - half-brother whose amoral and chaotic fickleness and lack of discipline introduced a dangerous unpredictability into many of the Aesir’s enterprises.

Beyond this inner region was Midgard, domain of the humans. The word meant ‘home or farm in the middle’ and conveyed clearly the humans’ sense of being located midway between the gods in Asgard and Utgard, or ‘the outer place’, the outer rim of the disc-world, a region inhabited by giants and other elemental beings associated with untamed chaos. Between Midgard and Utgard lay a sea, home to an enormous serpent which encircled the world and kept it bound together by biting on its own tail.

The vertical axis of the flat, round world was an ash-tree named Yggdrasil, connected to the sky at its crown, and at its roots penetrating to a subterranean realm that included a well, known as Urd’s Well, where the gods held their assembly meetings and where three females, known as Norns, spun out the destinies of humans and gods alike. The role of Yggdrasil in this cosmology was to assure the inhabitants of Midgard that there was a centre to the world, and that all things were connected, appearances to the contrary, despite the ceaseless struggle between a will to order, represented by the gods of Asgard, and the entropic lure of chaos, represented by the giants and creatures of Utgard. The tree symbolized the cycle of life, drawing water from the well at its roots and returning it to the world as nourishment in the form of dew.

Though Utgard was a threatening and frightening place to be, even for the gods, it was understood that in the chaos within its borders lay the raw materials necessary for the learning of new skills and the creation of valuable treasures that the Aesir could hand on to the humans of Midgard. The story of how Odin forced the secrets of the art of writing runes from the reluctant terrain of this mental region is a dramatic illustration of the view that learning, knowledge and progress had to be fought for and suffered for. In a famous interlude in the long wisdom poem ‘The Sayings of the High One’, Odin describes how he hung from the branches of Yggdrasil:

Despite his status as the god of Hanged Men, it may be that on this occasion he is to be imagined as dangling upside down by the foot, as the ‘Hanged Man’ of the medieval Tarot is depicted.
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This simplifies the logistics of the theft that follows: