The Norse Myths Page 14
Loki made good his escape from the furious gods, turning himself into a salmon and hiding in a waterfall. Snorri’s account of his capture elaborates on this. Loki built himself a house in the mountains near the waterfall and lurked underwater by day. One evening he began to speculate about how the Æsir might manage to catch him in his fish-form. Picking up some linen thread, he made a prototype fishing-net. Then, realizing that Óðinn had spotted him from his high seat Hliðskjálf, and that the gods were on their way to the hideout, he quickly threw the net in the fire and dived into the water. The wisest of the gods (named here as Kvasir, the one whose blood gave rise to the mead of poetry) saw the pattern the net made in the ashes and deduced what its purpose must be. The gods quickly replicated the device and, although salmon-Loki jumped over it, he was eventually captured in mid-leap by Þórr who had waded into the middle of the river. Though Loki slithered as fast as he could through Þórr’s hands, his tail caught in the god’s fist; this explains why salmon taper markedly towards the tail and why they leap out of the water when making their way upstream.
Loki now finds himself in peril; he has not surrendered to the gods under pre-arranged conditions, but rather he is their captive. The gods take three great flat rocks, set them edge upwards and make a hole in each slab. Loki’s sons are seized and transformed into wolves; Nari tears his brother Narfi into pieces, and the gods use Narfi’s guts to bind his father to the rock. The guts tighten magically into iron bonds; as a final flourish, Skaði hangs a poisonous serpent over Loki’s face, venom dripping from its fangs. And Sigyn, Loki’s wife, now stands by her husband holding a basin to catch the poison. Every now and then she must turn away to empty it, and when the venom falls onto Loki’s face, he writhes horribly in his bonds – the cause of earthquakes.
Loki’s wife Sigyn holds the bowl to catch the poison dripping from the serpent that Skaði has hung over him. Mårten Eskil Winge (1890).
Loki’s final break with the Æsir raises some interesting questions. His usual mode of operation has been as an ambivalent figure, siding inconsistently with the giants, but also helping the gods recover stolen items, and he has a particular role as Þórr’s sidekick. Why this, now? One suggestion links Loki’s behaviour to the various prophecies concerning ragnarök. Just as Fenrir must first be bound if he is to break his fetters and attack the gods on that final day, so Loki must also be confined if he is to sunder his bonds to lead the giants against his former companions. And thus he must provoke the gods into binding him, through the twin offences of bringing about Baldr’s death and by his bravura display of insults in Loki’s Quarrel. If Baldr’s death is a portent of ragnarök, then Baldr must die, and Loki must be bound. This assumes a chronological coherence to the tales surviving from what must have been a great corpus of varying myths originating in different parts of the Norse-speaking world. But even if the idea of Loki possessing a master-plan strains credulity, there’s certainly a strong sense that the fate of the gods is already determined, that, despite Óðinn’s efforts to see whether the prophesied future can be falsified or forestalled, the end is already written. Suggestive too, as noted above, is the fact that Snorri knows one of Loki’s sons (the brother-killing wolf) as Váli, sharing the name of Óðinn’s newly begotten son who kills his half-brother Höðr in vengeance for his other half-brother Baldr. Themes of fratricide, of vengeance, of those apocalyptic beasts, wolves and serpents, run through these two tales in a way that underlines the fundamental link between the two gods, Óðinn and Loki.
SIGNS OF THE LAST TIMES
First comes the Great Winter, the fimbulvetr. Three winters run into one another, with no intervening summers; snow drives from all directions with biting winds and sharp frost. Social dislocation follows:
Brother will fight brother and be his slayer,
sisters’ sons will violate the kinship-bond;
hard it is in the world, whoredom abounds,
axe-age, sword-age, shields are cleft asunder,
wind-age, wolf-age, before the world plunges headlong;
no man will spare another.
THE SEERESS’S PROPHECY, V. 45
Punishing Sinners – A Christian Concept?
Near a place called Corpse-strand, the seeress sees a cloudy and turbulent river where those who swear false oaths, murderers and seducers of other men’s wives are wading. Another river flows down from the east, called Fearful; it’s filled with axes and knives. That there are Other World punishments for human sinners is not an idea found elsewhere in Norse myth; the inclusion of these torments suggests Christian influence. Given that the version of the poem in the Codex Regius may have been composed around the time that Norway was converting to Christianity (1000 CE), this is not impossible.
The world drives forward into chaos. Before mankind falls into civil war, the seeress summons up other indications of the end times.
Deep in Gallows-wood a cock with sooty-red plumage crows. Another is heard in Ironwood where a trollwoman is nurturing Fenrir’s offspring: the wolves who pursue the sun and the moon. The uncannily discordant soundscape of the end is punctuated by the howling of the great hound Garmr (maybe a double of Fenrir, or a quite independent monstrous beast, a kind of hell or Hel-hound). Now comes the terrible moment when both the heavenly bodies are engulfed by the gaping jaws of the beasts who have so long pursued them and the world is plunged into darkness.
Now Yggdrasill catches fire. The great ash tree totters, and Heimdallr sounds the alarm by blowing his mighty Gjallar-horn. Óðinn takes emergency counsel with Mímir’s head, but it is too late to hope for advice from that quarter now. The mountains quake, driving the dwarfs outside where they stand groaning before their rocky doors. Trollwomen wander the roads; humans don’t know what to do. The Einherjar ride out to face the battle for which they’ve been training all these millennia, but – or so Fáfnir the dragon prophesied to Sigurðr in his dying moments – as they and the gods journey from Óskópnir (Not-yet-made), the island where the final battle takes place, the rainbow bridge Bifröst breaks and their horses founder in the river. Victory is snatched away from them.
The Great Wolf
There’s a terrifying description of the great wolf Managarm (Garmr or Hound of the Moon) in Alan Garner’s 1960 novel, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen. Garner makes use of quite a lot of Old Norse myth in the novel; at its culmination, a dark and terrible magic is unleashed:
Racing out of the north was a cloud, lower than any that hid the sun and black. Monstrous it was, and in shape a ravening wolf. Its loins fell below the horizon, and its lean body arched across the sky to pounding shoulders, and a head with jaws agape that even now was over the far end of the valley … All the sky to the north and east was wolf head. The mouth yawned wider, till there was nothing to be seen but the black, cavernous maw, rushing down to swallow hill and valley whole.
Alan Garner, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, London 2010, p. 283
Luckily the magic of the Weirdstone dispels the horror, and the world is saved.
The forces of terror are unleashed from each of the cardinal points. From the south comes the fire-giant Surtr, bearing an enormous sword from which the sun glances in dazzling brilliance. The sinister corpse-ship Naglfari, made of dead men’s nails, has set sail from the east with fire-giants as its crew; Loki is its steersman, bringing fiery destruction to the worlds of gods and men. Also advancing from the east comes Hrymr, another frost-giant leader, and in the ocean the huge coils of the Miðgarðs-serpent are thrashing. And Fenrir, finally, has snapped the silken fetter that has held him in thrall all these ages and is loping on the loose.
The gods prepare for ragnarök. Drawn by W. G. Collingwood (1908) in the style of a Viking-Age sculpture.
THE LAST BATTLE AND THE DEATHS OF THE GODS
Now the long-prophesied single combats come to pass. Óðinn walks boldly forward to face the wolf, but the god of the spear finds that Gungnir is of no help to him, and Fenrir swallows him in one mighty gulp. Frigg we
eps to see her husband die; ‘Frigg’s dear-beloved’, the poem calls him, comparing his death to that of Baldr, as ‘Frigg’s second sorrow’. The goddesses mourn on the sidelines as the gods shoulder their shields against their mortal foes. Next up is Þórr, encountering once again his old enemy, the Miðgarðs-serpent. The god brings the great snake down but, staggering only nine paces away from the corpse, he too falls, overcome by the serpent’s might and venomous breath.
Snorri adds some details which are not known from anywhere else; they may be traditional or may be the product of his own instinct for organization. Freyr goes against Surtr, and now, as Loki foretold, he must surely regret the lack of the sword he gave away for the giant-girl Gerðr. The great dog Garmr, whose terrible howling presaged ragnarök, brings down Týr; that god’s past history with Fenrir gives rise to the suspicion that Garmr and Fenrir are indeed the same, and that the wolf has unfinished business with the god whose hand he snapped off. Heimdallr and Loki contend against one another – not for the first time – and each slaughters the other.
Sleipnir stumbles as Fenrir leaps on Óðinn. Dorothy Hardy (1909).
The gods do make some headway against the monsters. Víðarr, Óðinn’s son, leaps into Fenrir’s maw; his feet are protected from the wolf’s fangs by the thick-soled shoes he wears. Every time sole-material is clipped from toes or heels, Snorri tells us in an aside, this contributes to Víðarr’s footwear. With one hand he reaches to the wolf’s upper jaw and tears him asunder. This image, the death of the father and the vengeance of the son, is a favourite of Viking-Age sculptors.
Heimdallr and Loki in Conflict
Tradition tells us that Heimdallr and Loki have met in combat before. On that occasion, they fought out in the sea on a skerry called Singasteinn, both adopting seal-form for the battle. The bone of contention was possession of the Brisinga men, Freyja’s great neck-ring, which had somehow come into Loki’s hands. Heimdallr wins the fight and restores the precious jewelry to the goddess; this is probably a version of the tale of Loki’s theft that was related in Chapter 2.
Víðarr steps into Fenrir’s maw on the early tenth-century Gosforth Cross, Cumbria.
Now the giant Surtr’s fire sets the whole world ablaze and the process by which the earth was made at the beginning of The Seeress’s Prophecy (as recounted in Chapter 2) is thrown into reverse:
The sun turns black, land sinks into the sea;
the bright stars vanish from the sky;
steam rises up in the conflagration,
hot flame plays high against heaven itself.
THE SEERESS’S PROPHECY, V. 57
A Volcanic Catastrophe?
Since The Seeress’s Prophecy has been dated to around the year 1000, well after the settlement of Iceland, it has been mooted that the description of ragnarök that it contains reflects the island’s volcanic nature. Certainly in the verse cited above, features of a volcanic eruption – flames shooting upwards, the darkness as the ash-cloud obscures the sun, the disappearance of the land under the red-hot lava flows, and the sizzle of the black molten rock meeting the sea – could all be read into the poem’s vision of the end of the world.
That the sun has already been swallowed up by the wolf that has pursued it for aeons shows how the poems and Snorri’s prose tradition seek to integrate different traditions into coherent narratives. Darkness, relieved only by the leaping flames, brings the end of the world.
REBIRTH
The end of the world, as the sea surges over the land and fiery destruction rains down on an earth where gods, men and even giants have all perished, marks the end of Time in Christian tradition. Not so in other mythologies, however; many systems imagine time and space as cyclical, and believe that, once the old, corrupt world has been swept away, a new one arises to take its place. For, although in eddic poetry the phrase ragnarök means ‘doom of the Powers’, Snorri uses a slightly different word, rökkr, which means something like ‘dusk’ or ‘glimmering’ – hence Wagner’s understanding of the end of his heroic world as ‘The Twilight of the Gods’. Rökkr could equally mean ‘half-light before dawn’ as well as ‘twilight’, and thus rökkr can usher in a new, brilliant day.
And this indeed is what we find, in the poetic tradition and in Snorri’s account, derived from it. For the seeress whose vision constitutes The Seeress’s Prophecy looks beyond the end of the world, and:
She sees, coming up a second time,
earth from the ocean, eternally green;
the waterfalls plunge, an eagle soars above them,
over the mountain, hunting fish.
The Æsir find one another on Iðavellir,
and they converse about the mighty Earth-Girdler,
and Fimbultýr’s ancient runes.
There will be found again in the grass
the wonderful golden chequers,
those which they possessed in the bygone days.
THE SEERESS’S PROPHECY, VV. 59–61
For some of the Æsir will return. Amazingly, Hœnir, that mysterious third who walked beside Óðinn in many important moments in the past, comes back. And so too, wonderfully, the unwitting slayer and the sacrificial victim, Höðr and Baldr, return from the other side of death (the secret that Óðinn whispers into his dead son’s ear on the pyre, we surmise). A new golden age is signalled: fields yield their crops without sowing, all harms are healed, and the golden chequers, so resonantly symbolic of the earlier age of innocence, are found once more on the plain. With the dazed air of survivors of a great catastrophe, the new Æsir reminisce about the Miðgarðs-serpent and the runes which Óðinn won for them.
The giant Vafþrúðnir too, in his wisdom contest with Óðinn, back in the old world, had foreseen the renewal that follows the cataclysm, revealing to the anxious god that some humans, with the promising names of Líf and Lífþrasir (Life and perhaps Life-thruster, male and female maybe) survive by hiding in Hoddmímir’s wood (perhaps Yggdrasill, given that great ash’s proximity to Mímir’s Well). The sun too, before she was swallowed by Fenrir, gave birth to a daughter who will travel on her mother’s paths. Vafþrúðnir identifies further Æsir who will form the new generation of gods: Víðarr, avenger of his father Óðinn; Váli, avenger of his brother Baldr; Móði and Magni, Þórr’s two sons, who will wield Mjöllnir, their father’s weapon. Vafþrúðnir’s vision is less optimistic than the vision of the seeress; the return of the sons of Óðinn and Þórr suggests the resumption of the old patterns of living, of vengeance and violence reasserting themselves. There’s none of the emphasis on reconciliation that we find in The Seeress’s Prophecy, no mention of the twin victims of Loki’s terrible malice, Höðr and Baldr, coming to terms, their brotherhood renewed.
After the earth is reborn, an eagle flies past a waterfall, hunting for fish. Emil Doepler (1905).
Even in the new world envisioned by the seeress, and despite the miraculous return of the lost golden chequers, there are signs that ineluctable systems are again at work, that the clock is ticking down to the next renewal. Once Hœnir has set up home in Óðinn’s former territory he begins to cut ‘wooden slips for prophecy’; fate is still operating. The very last thing that the seeress sees before she sinks down in her trance is the dragon Níðhöggr, the monstrous serpent who used to attack Yggdrasill, flying through the sky bearing corpses in his wings. This seems ominous. Some have suggested that this detail marks the seeress’s return to the ‘now’ of her vision, and that, as her prophecy draws to its close, she sees the flight of the dragon in the present. Others have wondered whether Níðhöggr has a positive role in the new world, and is clearing away the last vestiges of the final battle by carrying off the corpses. But there’s no compelling reason to think that the new world will not go the same way as the old, that evil and corruption will not manifest themselves once again (perhaps through a different vector from Loki and his giant allies), and that ragna rökkr, the dark before the dawn, will fall again – and again – through the cycle of the ages.
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The Jelling Stone, a tenth-century Danish picture-stone, commissioned by King Harald Bluetooth. It depicts the crucified Christ in traditional runestone style.
A New God?
A version of The Seeress’s Prophecy that was written down in the early fourteenth century contains an extra verse at the point where the new generation of gods has moved into the golden-roofed hall of Gimlé, when the world has begun anew.
Then comes the mighty one to the judgment of the Powers, full of strength, from above, he who rules over all.
Who can this mighty one be who comes to the reconstituted council of the gods? Is this Jesus, returned for the Last Judgment, ready to call time on the pagan pantheon, and to announce that the new religion is truly here to stay?
MYTHS LIVING ON
By the time that the ‘mighty one’ descended to take charge, in the early fourteenth century, Iceland had long been Christian. Yet the Old Norse myths and legends still had resonance. Some new poems were being composed around this time, incorporating mythological and legendary motifs into traditional forms, but telling fresh stories. In one fourteenth-century poem a hero is cursed by his wicked stepmother to woo the unattainable maiden Menglöð. Young Svipdagr first visits his dead mother’s grave-mound to obtain some protective spells and advice and then journeys to Menglöð’s castle. A hostile giant who guards it won’t let him in and the two embark on a long discussion of what tasks he must fulfil to gain entry. But these are impossibly circular; to complete the first task, Svipdagr would already have had to have performed the last. The situation is hopeless, unless – as his interlocutor explains – his name should happen to be Svipdagr! And immediately the gates swing open, the hero enters and the lovely Menglöð is taking him in her arms, demanding to know what took him so long.