The Norse Myths Read online

  About the Author

  Carolyne Larrington is Professor of Medieval European Literature, University of Oxford, and Official Fellow and Tutor, St John’s College. Her recent books include Winter is Coming: The Medieval World of Game of Thrones (2015), The Poetic Edda: Essays on Old Norse Mythology (with Paul Acker) and a revised and expanded translation of The Poetic Edda (2014). She wrote The Land of the Green Man: A Journey through the Supernatural Landscapes of the British Isles (2015) and presented BBC Radio 4’s accompanying series The Lore of the Land, exploring British folklore.

  Other titles of interest published by

  Thames & Hudson include:

  The Celtic Myths: A Guide to the Ancient Gods and Legends

  The Egyptian Myths: A Guide to the Ancient Gods and Legends

  The Greek and Roman Myths: A Guide to the Classical Stories

  See our websites

  www.thamesandhudson.com

  www.thamesandhudsonusa.com

  CONTENTS

  DEDICATION

  NOTE ON NAMES AND PRONUNCIATION

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  MAPS

  Introduction: Sources and Survivals

  1

  The Gods and Goddesses

  2

  Creating and Crafting the World

  3

  Opposing Powers

  4

  Fit for Valhöll: Human Heroes

  5

  Heroes of the Viking World

  6

  End Times – and Renewal

  FURTHER READING

  SOURCES OF QUOTATIONS

  SOURCES OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  INDEX

  COPYRIGHT

  For JJ, JQ, LA and HO’D

  NOTE ON NAMES AND PRONUNCIATION

  Old Norse names are cited in their Old Norse forms. This requires two unfamiliar letters (still used in modern Icelandic and Faroese), called ‘eth’ (ð / Ð) and ‘thorn’ (þ / Þ). The first of these is pronounced as the ‘th’ sound in ‘the’, for example in the name of the king of the gods, Óðinn (Odin). The second is pronounced as the ‘th’ sound in ‘thorn’, as in the name of Þórr (Thor).

  Scholars usually pronounce Old Norse words as if they were modern Icelandic. Stress falls on the first syllable. Most consonants are pronounced as in English (with ‘g’ always hard as in ‘gate’, but ‘j’ pronounced as ‘y’ as in ‘yes’). So: ‘Gerðr’ = ‘GAIR-ther’ (the capitals show the stress).

  Vowels are also pronounced as in English when short, though short ‘a’ is like ‘a’ of ‘father’, not as in ‘cat’. ‘y’ is the same as ‘i’: ‘Gylfi’ = ‘GIL-vee’. ‘ll’ is pronounced like ‘tl’: Valhöll = VAL-hertl.

  Long vowels (marked with an acute accent) are mostly just a longer version of the short ones, though ‘á’ is like ‘ow’ as in ‘how’. The goddesses are collectively called the Ásynjur = ‘OW-sin-yur’.

  Diphthongs are somewhat different: ‘ei’ or ‘ey’ is ‘ay’, as in ‘hay’, so Freyr = ‘FRAY-er; ‘au’ is a little like ‘oh’, but longer than in English. ‘draumar’ (dreams) = DROH-mar.

  ‘æ’ is pronounced ‘eye’, so the ‘Æsir’ (the main group of gods) = ‘EYE-seer’.

  ‘ö’ and ‘ø’ are like German ‘ö’: something like ‘er’. Thus ‘Jötunheimar’ (the lands of the giants) = ‘YER-tun-HAY-mar’.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I would like to thank Tim Bourns for many useful suggestions and for his work on the index. The four dedicatees have been instigators of, and companions on, many Norse adventures in many lands: til góðs vínar liggja gagnvegir, þótt hann sé firr farinn.

  Norse-speakers settled as far afield as Britain, Normandy, Iceland, Greenland and North America. They settled in Russia, and worked in Constantinople as the emperor’s Varangian Guard.

  The Old Norse mythological cosmos.

  INTRODUCTION

  SOURCES AND SURVIVALS

  Óðinn [Odin] was a man remarkable for his wisdom and in all accomplishments. His wife was called Frigida, and we call her Frigg. Óðinn had prophetic abilities and so did his wife, and from this knowledge he discovered that he would become extremely famous in the northern part of the world, and honoured above all kings. For this reason he was eager to journey away from Turkey, and he brought a great multitude of people with him, young and old, men and women, and they brought many precious things with them. But wherever they went in the continent, so many splendid things were said of them that they seemed more like gods than men.

  SNORRI STURLUSON, PROLOGUE, Prose Edda (c. 1230)

  SNORRI STURLUSON AND THE CLEVER ASIAN MIGRANTS

  Who were the Norse gods? Migrants from the Near East, journeying up through Germany to reach the promised Scandinavian homeland: humans like you and me, but smarter, handsomer, more civilized. Or so claimed one Christian writer, a medieval Icelander who recorded many of the myths and legends that have survived from the Scandinavian north. Medieval Christian scholars needed to explain why their ancestors worshipped false gods, and thus one widespread theory was that the pre-Christian gods were demons, wicked spirits sent by Satan to tempt humans into sin and error. But another very effective theory was the one put forward by Snorri Sturluson in the quotation above: the so-called gods were in fact exceptional humans, immigrants from Troy, an idea known as euhemerism. For Snorri Sturluson, the thirteenth-century Icelandic scholar, politician, poet and chieftain who left us the most complete and systematic account of the Norse pantheon, the idea that the Norse gods – the Æsir as they were called – must have been human beings was compelling. Descendants of the losing side in the Trojan War, they decided to migrate northwards, bringing their superior technology and wisdom to the natives of Germany and Scandinavia. The incomers’ culture overwhelmed that of the earlier inhabitants, who adopted the language of the new arrivals, and, after the death of the first immigrant generation, began to worship them as gods.

  Snorri’s explanation of how traditional Norse poetry worked in his Edda required a good deal of mythological background information, and so he created a framework that made clear that while no one now might worship the pagan gods – who were, anyway, nothing but a cunning tribe of Near Eastern migrants – the stories associated with them were both meaningful and entertaining. He therefore prefaced his treatise on poetics with a tale about King Gylfi of Sweden who was doubly beguiled; first by the goddess Gefjun, as related in Chapter 1, and a second time when Gylfi realized too late that he’d been tricked and set out for Ásgarðr, where he knew the Æsir lived. Gylfi intended to find out more about these deceivers; he was admitted to the king’s hall and there he met three figures called Hár, Jafnhár and Þriði (High, Just-as-High and Third). In a long question-and-answer session, Gylfi discovered a great deal about the gods, about the processes of the creation of the universe and of humanity, about the end of the world, ragnarök, in which the gods and giants would battle one another, and finally how the earth would be made anew. And, advising Gylfi to make good use of what he had heard, Hár and his two colleagues, the mighty hall and the imposing fortress, all vanished. Gylfi returned home to relay to others what he’d learned.

  The Icelandic Scholar, Snorri Sturluson

  Snorri Sturluson (1179–1241) belonged to a prominent Icelandic family and was deeply involved in the turbulent politics of Iceland and of Norway. He composed a treatise on poetics, known as the Prose Edda, which consists of four parts: a long poem illustrating various kinds of poetic metres called Háttatal (List of Metres); Skáldskaparmál (The Language of Poetry), an explanation of the metaphorical figures known as kennings (see page 15); a Prologue; and a section known as Gylfaginning (The Tricking of Gylfi). Snorri was murdered in a cellar at his home in Reykholt in Iceland by agents acting
for the Norwegian king: his last words were, ‘Don’t strike!’

  Statue of Snorri Sturluson, the thirteenth-century Icelandic scholar, politician and poet, at his home at Reykholt, Iceland.

  Snorri wrote a second important account of the Norse gods: Ynglinga saga (The Saga of the Ynglings), the first part of his history of the kings of Norway, known from its opening words as Heimskringla (The Disc of the World). Here he adopted the same euhemeristic explanation of the Æsir as he put forward in his Edda, but he added further details about their capabilities and made clear that they were the ancestors of the kings of both Sweden and Norway. Snorri’s mythological writings, rationalizing and systematizing though they are, give us crucial insight into narratives of the Norse gods and heroes. However, when reading Snorri’s works, we need to bear in mind always that he writes as a medieval Christian and shapes some of his material accordingly. Thus he introduces the idea of a primeval flood which drowns all but one of the frost-giants, an invention driven by the biblical Noah’s flood and the annihilation of the giants there. There’s no evidence for this story anywhere else in surviving Norse tradition. Although Snorri must have known quite a lot more about Norse myth than we do, sometimes he comes across concepts that he does not fully understand, and then he makes things up. We suspect too that Snorri knows of more stories than he relates – perhaps Óðinn’s sacrifice of ‘himself to himself’ on the great World-Tree Yggdrasill (see Chapter 1). This myth of the hanged sacrificial god probably clashed too uncomfortably with the story of Christ’s Crucifixion for a good Christian to be happy about recounting it.

  King Gylfi meets Hár, Jafnhár and Þriði, from an eighteenth-century Icelandic manuscript.

  TWO KINDS OF NORSE POETRY

  No one is sure exactly what the word edda signifies; the name is given to Snorri’s treatise in one of its earliest manuscripts. One meaning is ‘great-grandmother’; this may point to the idea of mythological knowledge as ancient and closely associated with women. In fourteenth-century Iceland the word was used to mean something like ‘poetics’. Old Norse poetry comes in two varieties. One kind is highly wrought: known as skaldic poetry, it employs a riddling metaphorical system known as the kenning. In their simplest form, kennings may be compounds, such as ‘thought-smith’ for ‘poet’ or ‘elf-ray’ for ‘sun’. Many kennings, however, are more complex and riddling; they depend upon knowledge of mythology for their decipherment. Thus, in order to understand who the farmr arma Gunnlaðar (burden of Gunnlöð’s arms) must be, we need to know that the god Óðinn once had occasion to seduce Gunnlöð, a giant’s daughter, in order to win the mead of poetry for gods and men (see Chapter 3). Describing Óðinn in these terms instead of, for example, ‘the hanged god’, sets up associations with the god as seducer, one who obtains culturally vital treasures for gods and men, rather than as the suffering figure who hangs himself on the World-Tree in order to win knowledge of the runes; sacrifice by hanging seems to be the best way of pleasing Óðinn. A very few mythological narratives, notably some adventures of Þórr (Thor) discussed in Chapter 3, are recorded in skaldic verse, but the main relevance of myth and legend to this kind of poetry is that they underpin the metaphors of the kenning system.

  The Codex Regius manuscript, from c. 1270, showing some verses from Völuspá (The Seeress’s Prophecy).

  The second kind of Old Norse poetry is called eddic poetry, and it shares its simpler alliterative form with the early verse composed in the related Germanic languages of Old English and Old High German. The term ‘eddic’ was applied to this form of poetry because many of the stories that it retells formed the basis of Snorri’s mythological account in his Edda. Much of the surviving poetry in this metre is preserved in a single manuscript, known officially as GKS 2365 4to, kept today in the Manuscript Institute in Reykjavík, the Stofnun Árna Magnússonar. An Icelandic bishop, Brynjólfur Sveinsson, presented this manuscript to the king of Denmark in 1662, and thus it has come to be known as the Codex Regius, the King’s Codex. Although the codex was written in Iceland around 1270, many of the poems and much of the information in it were already known to Snorri, writing forty or so years earlier. It seems likely that there were some pre-existing written collections of mythological and heroic poetry that Snorri drew upon. Almost all the poems quoted in this book are from this compilation, but there are a few other mythological eddic poems beyond those found in the Codex Regius. These include Baldrs Draumar (Baldr’s Dreams), foreshadowing the god Baldr’s death, Hyndluljóð (Hyndla’s Song), a poem that imparts lots of mythological information as a giantess lists the ancestors of one of the goddess Freyja’s favourite heroes, and Rígsþula (Rígr’s List), which relates how the social classes came into existence. Other eddic-style poems, many relating stories of ancient Scandinavian heroes, are to be found in prose tales (sagas) of Viking-Age heroes; these are known as fornaldarsögur (sagas of ancient times).

  SAXO: THE FIRST DANISH HISTORIAN

  Almost all the medieval accounts of Old Norse myth and legend originated in Iceland and in Icelandic. An important exception, however, is the History of the Danes, a massive account written in Latin by the Danish monk Saxo Grammaticus, who lived from around 1150 to 1220. Saxo’s nickname means ‘the learned’. In his Preface, Saxo tells us that, in the pre-Christian past, the Danes had ‘engraved the letters of their own language on rocks and stones to retell those feats of their ancestors which had been made popular in the songs of their mother tongue’. Saxo also mentions that contemporary Icelanders were excellent sources of traditional tales, and he uses their material for his book. Like Snorri, Saxo characterizes the gods and heroes whose stories he relates as humans, often ingenious and treacherous, who lived in Denmark’s prehistoric past. Óðinn is once again said to be an extremely clever human being, ‘a man … widely believed throughout Europe, though falsely, to be a god’. Despite Saxo’s sceptical tone, he records a great deal that supports the tales related elsewhere; he is particularly useful in giving further information on some of the more important Scandinavian heroes: Starkaðr and Ragnarr loðbrók (Shaggy-breeches), for example, whose stories are told in Chapter 5.

  A reconstructed medieval farm at Stöng in southern Iceland.

  Tales Told in Iceland

  Saxo’s claims about how Icelanders remembered and preserved heroic tradition are borne out by the fact that our two major sources for Norse myth and legend, the Prose and Poetic Eddas, were indeed written down on the North Atlantic island. Iceland was settled largely from Norway in the ninth century. The origin myth of the Icelanders claims that they were descended from free-born nobles who would not accept the tyranny of King Haraldr Fair-hair, so they emigrated. Other Scandinavians from the Anglo–Scandinavian colonies of the British Isles moved to the new settlement, and slaves were imported from Celtic regions. Ancient stories from the Scandinavian homelands must also have travelled to Iceland on the settlers’ longboats, to be recalled and performed in the little turf-roofed farmhouses where the households hunkered down during the long, dark winter nights, and so Iceland became, for centuries, the repository of knowledge about the pagan past.

  THE ORAL AND LITERARY

  Snorri may very well have had little manuscript collections of eddic poetry at his elbow when he was composing his Prose Edda. But it is easy to underestimate the enormous amount of material that medieval people could store in their memories. Snorri’s mind was no doubt stocked with a huge number of poems, both skaldic and eddic. From these works, and perhaps from prose retellings too, he drew the information that he needed to write his Edda. Snorri’s writing would, in effect, fix the forms of Old Norse myths for future generations – an inevitable outcome when protean, variable stories are locked up in written form. But there never is, and never was, an ‘original’ version of a myth; it’s impossible to establish who told the story first. Each individual retelling contributes to our overall understanding of the myth’s structure and meaning. Each new version offers insight into mythic thinking and the contexts
which make that myth relevant to the cultures that make use of it, whether in a whole poem, or a kenning, or an allusion, or in visual depictions on stone or wood carvings, or in paintings, textiles or ceramics.

  As we’ll see in Chapter 2, there’s more than one explanation for the creation of the world in Norse myth, but there is nothing to be gained from arguing that one or another is the ‘real’ or ‘original’ story. Just as versions of Egyptian myths vary considerably along the whole length of the River Nile, so the Old Norse myths were the cultural property of all Viking-descended folk, wherever they lived across the northern world. In what’s been called the Viking diaspora, Norse-speaking people emigrated from Scandinavia to parts of Britain and to Normandy, to the North Atlantic islands – to Iceland primarily, but also to the Faroes, Orkney and Shetland. Later they would colonize southern Greenland and even establish short-lived settlements in North America. Scandinavians sailed down the Dnieper River to the Black Sea and gained employment as the Emperor’s Varangian Guard in Constantinople, and they also founded the first Russian principalities.

  Riders, ships, and stylized trees on a Viking-Age tapestry from Överhogdal in Sweden.

  This geographical dispersion meant that there could be no uniformity, no dogmatic version of the myths which everyone had to accept. Dogma is, by and large, associated with religions of the Book: Judaism, Christianity and Islam, faiths in which the sacred writings evolve, become accepted as canonical and then harden into orthodoxy (even if there are differences of interpretation). Ranging from the Jutland peninsula in Denmark, north to the borders of Lapland, west as far as Viking-Age Dublin and even Greenland, south to Normandy, and east to Constantinople, each Norse-speaking community knew and used a varying set of myths to explain the big metaphysical questions which it is myth’s task to answer.