The Norse Myths Read online

Fulla, Frigg’s handmaiden, wears her hair loose and has charge of the goddess’s shoe collection. Fulla is a very old goddess; she appears in a charm in Old High German, recorded in the tenth century.

  A Charm Used by the Gods

  In the so-called ‘Second Merseburg Charm’, Baldr, Woden, Friia (Frigg) and Volla (Fulla) are mentioned along with some other unidentified figures: Phol, Sinthgut and Sunna. Phol and Woden were riding to the woods when Baldr’s horse sprained its foot. The female deities and Woden conjured the foot to knit together: ‘bone to bone, blood to blood, joint to joint’. The limb was healed and, the spell suggests, the same incantation can be used for curing other creatures. This little story is a mythic memory, invoking the gods’ effective actions to bring about healing in the present.

  Frigg and her handmaidens, with Baldr and Óðinn, tend to Baldr’s injured horse. Emil Doepler (1905).

  Now that the gods and goddesses have been introduced, it’s time to look at the myths in which they appear. We begin at the very beginning of Time, with the origins of the gods and the creation of the world, in the next chapter.

  HOW TO MAKE A WORLD

  Early in time Ymir made his settlement,

  there was no sand nor sea nor cool waves;

  earth was nowhere nor the sky above,

  a void of yawning chaos, grass was there nowhere

  Before the sons of Burr brought up the land surface,

  those who shaped glorious Midgard.

  THE SEERESS’S PROPHECY, VV. 3–4

  Creating a universe where nothing exists but ginnunga gap, a gaping void, isn’t an easy task. Creator-gods need resourcefulness and planning to bring a world into existence, and they also need material from which to construct their creation. The Jewish–Christian God speaks creation into existence through the Word, the Logos. When he commands ‘Let there be light’, light springs into being and his words power the rest of the creation process. In other creation mythologies female figures give birth to the world; sky and earth lie together and all that is, is born of that union. Old Norse has at least three active creation myths; each tells us something different about the ways in which creation might be imagined as coming to pass. The version cited above suggests that the sons of Burr (Óðinn and his brothers Vili and Vé) summoned the land up from the ginnunga gap. In the lines which follow in Völuspá (The Seeress’s Prophecy), green leeks (a superior kind of grass) begin to grow on the rocky ground, and the task of world-shaping seems already to be complete.

  Offering his own elaboration, based on medieval scientific theory, Snorri explains creation as a synthesis of oppositions. Ginnunga gap, he tells us, is a place that lies in the north: an ice-filled chasm sprung from a river called Élivágar whose poisonous flow had solidified into frost and ice. The land of fire, Muspellsheimr, domain of the fire-giant Surtr, lies to the south. And when the sparks that flew up from Muspellsheimr landed upon the ice of Ginnunga gap, it began to melt, and life – generated from the union of the heat and dryness of fire and the cold and moistness of ice – was engendered in the shape of a man. He’s named both as Aurgelmir and as Ymir, the progenitor of the frost-giants. As Ymir slept, he sweated, and from under his armpits sprang up a male and a female. His two feet also produced a child with one another: these were the first giants.

  Whether the sons of Burr called the earth up from the depths, or dived down and fetched it up, is not clear from the account above. But Old Norse tradition offers a second creation method: one involving violence and dismemberment. The sons of Burr laid hands on the Ur-giant Ymir, killed him and used his body parts to form the different parts of the world, according to Grímnir’s Sayings:

  From Ymir’s flesh the earth was made,

  and from his blood, the sea,

  mountains from his bones, trees from his hair,

  and from his skull, the sky.

  And from his eyelashes the cheerful gods

  made Miðgarðr for men’s sons;

  and from his brain the hard-tempered clouds

  were all created.

  GRÍMNIR’S SAYINGS, VV. 40–41

  The sons of Burr create the world by lifting it up from the primeval chasm. Lorenz Frølich (1895).

  Auðhumla, the primeval cow, licks Burr out of the ice. From an eighteenth-century Icelandic manuscript.

  A Cosmic Cow

  A cosmic cow called Auðhumla appeared from the ice and she nourished Ymir with her milk. As she licked the salty rime-stone, the figure of a handsome and powerful man called Búri began to appear. Búri was the father of Borr (another name for Burr), and he fathered Óðinn and his brothers Vili and Vé. What happened to Auðhumla afterwards, we don’t know. Perhaps she wandered off to graze the new grass springing on the emerging earth. Auðhumla may have had some descendants, for later stories tell us about sacred cows who were important to pre-Christian kings.

  The world in which humans live (Miðgarðr, the ‘middle-place’), then, is constructed from the body of a murdered being, created through violence and savagery, in a creative act which is an all-male affair. The Old Norse myths are very much related from the point of view of the Æsir – that is, the male gods – and in the matter of creation they appropriate the powers of giving life, nurturing and fertility that are normally gendered female. Unlike women, the gods cannot make the material they need for creation from their own bodies and so they must take matter where they can find it. In weaving aggression into the very fabric of the universe, the gods incorporate and endorse violence among humans and gods. Whether this version of the creation myth is the more ancient, or whether it is a cultural product of the warring centuries of the early Iron Age or even the Viking Age, we cannot know. It may be significant that the more peaceable (if still exclusively male) creative act of bringing the land up out of the sea is recounted in The Seeress’s Prophecy, a poem now thought to have been composed around the year 1000, when Christian ideas were already strongly percolating through Nordic mythological thinking.

  SETTING UP TIME

  Once the world has been constituted and space has been defined and mapped out, the gods’ next move is to regulate the heavenly bodies. Sun, moon and stars already seem to exist, but they have no set course through the skies. The deities meet in solemn conclave and establish the subdivisions of time:

  to night and her children they gave names,

  morning they named and midday

  afternoon and evening, to reckon up in years.

  THE SEERESS’S PROPHECY, V. 6, LL. 5–10

  The sun and moon are imagined in different ways. One tradition says that they speed through the sky because devouring wolves are on their tracks; these wolves, probably avatars of the cosmic wolf Fenrir, will catch and consume them at ragnarök. Elsewhere the heavenly bodies are borne in chariots, driven by figures whose names are related to Day and Night and drawn by horses called Skínfaxi (Shining-mane) and Hrímfaxi (Frost-mane). Now that time has been established, the gods are liable for its unforeseen consequences. The emergence of past, present and future brings uncertainty and some loss of power. For the giants have longer and better memories of the past than those gods who represent the third and fourth generations of descendants from the Ur-giant, and they guard that knowledge jealously. Nor is the future perspicuous to the gods; prophetesses and certain giants have clearer knowledge of what is to come than most of the Æsir. Although the goddesses Gefjun and Frigg are said to know fate, they do not reveal what they know. The quest to discover the future, to find out the details of ragnarök and perhaps to discern whether it can be averted, is one of Óðinn’s abiding obsessions, as we’ll see in Chapter 6.

  Bronze-Age model of a sun-chariot, dated between 1800 and 1600 BCE, from Trundholm, Denmark.

  By evolving a time-system which operates within cycles (the recurrent cycles of days and years and the larger cycle of creation, ragnarök and rebirth), the gods have invited the emergence of fate: future events in the existence of individuals and social groups that may be foreseen, but ca
nnot be prevented. The gods themselves are subject to fate and must obey its laws.

  The Three Fate-Maidens

  Under Yggdrasill, the World-Tree, is a hall or a spring (or, conceivably, a hall by a spring). Here dwell the three fate-maidens, Urðr, Verðandi and Skuld; they are said to cut wooden slips on which individual destinies are incised. Urðr has an ancient name, related to wyrd, the Old English word for ‘destiny’ and the antecedent of modern English weird. Verðandi represents the present, for the form of her name is a present participle (Becoming) while Skuld (Must-be) seems to evoke the future. A stoical acceptance of how fate operates is crucial for the hero to fulfil his destiny, as we’ll see in Chapters 4 and 5.

  A rendering of the Norse mythic universe, with Yggdrasill growing up through Ásgarðr, and the worlds of men, giants and the dead clustered at its roots, in Bishop Percy’s Northern Antiquities (1847).

  THE MYTHIC LANDSCAPE

  Once space has been shaped and time established we are in a position to describe the geography of the Norse mythic universe. Central is Yggdrasill, the World-Tree, the great ash whose roots, usually three in number, define the different regions of the world.

  Three roots there grow in three directions

  under Yggdrasill’s ash;

  Hel lives under one, under the second, the frost-giants,

  under the third, humankind.

  GRÍMNIR’S SAYINGS, V. 31

  Heiðrún the goat stands on the roof of Valhöll, cropping the leaves of Yggdrasill. A vessel to hold the mead that flows from her udders is nearby. From an eighteenth-century Icelandic manuscript.

  Snorri agrees that the world of the dead, Niflheimr (Mist-world), ruled over by Loki’s daughter Hel, lies under one root and that the second descends into the former Ginnunga gap, the icy realm of the frost-giants, but he replaces the human world with the world of gods, Ásgarðr in his model. Miðgarðr is the world of men, a central space, echoed in the Old English term Middangeard, ‘earth’, imagined as lying between heaven and hell in the Christian world-view (compare J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth). Yet although the different worlds are said to lie below the place where the tree emerges from the ground, the neighbouring realms of gods and giants are also imagined as occupying a horizontal plane, with Jötunheimar (the Giantlands) lying in the mountainous east. Ásgarðr is envisaged as the centre of the cosmos; Óðinn’s huge hall, Valhöll, is situated within it, under Yggdrasill. A goat called Heiðrún stands on its roof and grazes on the ash-tree. From her udders comes the unending supply of mead which sustains Valhöll’s inhabitants, the Einherjar, the heroic human dead.

  The animals of Yggdrasill: the eagle and hawk perched at the top, the four stags along the sides, Ratatöskr the squirrel at bottom left and the dragon Níðhöggr gnawing the roots from beneath. From an eighteenth-century Icelandic manuscript.

  Heiðrún is not the only animal to be associated with Yggdrasill. The tree’s name means ‘Steed of the Terrible One’, an epithet which derives from the story of Óðinn’s sacrifice (see Chapter 1); in Germanic thinking, there’s a well-established metaphor that understands the gallows as the horse ridden by the criminal who is hanged from it. Up in the tree’s leafy crown, four stags browse on the young growth. Down below, serpents gnaw at the roots. An eagle roosts at the top of the tree, with a hawk perching between his eyes, and a squirrel with the wonderfully onomatopœic name of Ratatöskr runs up and down the trunk, bringing news from the worlds above and below. Among the serpents is the most dread creature of all, the dragon Níðhöggr (Hostile-hewer) who sometimes takes flight through the mythic world; he is a portent of horror. These creatures all take their toll on the tree, symbolizing the action of time as eroding its essence, eating into the symbolic axis of the world round which everything revolves. Though the stags are aristocratic in their associations and the goat is nurturing, they wear away at the tree just like the more obviously evil snakes.

  Yggdrasill also shelters under its canopy Mímir’s Well (see page 83, later in this chapter), and perhaps also the body of water by which the fates dwell. Shining white mud cascades down the tree, apparently onto Heimdallr, for Loki accuses him of having ‘a mucky back’. Also located in the Well, it’s said, are Heimdallr’s hearing and Óðinn’s eye, pledged in exchange for a drink from its waters. The two key organs sacrificed by the gods (the third, Týr’s hand, doubtless gulped down by Fenrir when he bit it off, is irrecoverable) remain close at hand, still perhaps wired into their former owners. For the logic of sacrificial exchange – that something given up is rewarded by a better, enhanced return – suggests that Heimdallr’s keen hearing and Óðinn’s insight, if not his literal sight, stem from the power of the Well’s living water.

  Supernatural Females: Norns and Dísir

  Several supernatural female figures are associated with fate. The norns have different functions; some are hostile, others help out with childbirth, others determine fate for a newborn child. Heroes often talk about ‘the judgment of the norns’ when at the point of death, realizing that their fatal hour has come. The dísir are a collective group of spirits, thought to be female ancestors, who bring death to kings and heroes. In one Icelandic tale a young man is warned not to step out into the farmyard one night, but he does so. In the sky he sees a group of nine dark-clad women and a group of nine white-clad women, symbolizing the old beliefs and the new Christian religion. Before the youth can go back into the farmhouse to report what he has seen, the dark-clad women attack him, and he dies after recounting his experience. A prophetic Norwegian identifies the dark women as dísir associated with the family and farm, who will abandon the lineage when Christianity comes.

  The three norns, fateful supernatural females, by the well beneath Yggdrasill. Lorenz Frølich (1895).

  Beyond Valhöll and its immediate surrounds, each deity has his or her own great hall, a place of authority and rulership, much like the chieftain-halls of the Viking Age excavated at Gamla Uppsala in Sweden, Lejre in Denmark or even the now-reconstructed hall of Eiríkr the Red at Brattahlíð in Greenland. Óðinn lists twelve such halls in the poem Grímnismál (Grímnir’s Sayings), each owned by a particular god. The names of these dwellings bespeak light, splendour, joyfulness, or particular attributes of the god, such as Yewdales where the archer-god Ullr lives; yew-wood was a prime choice for bow-making. Óðinn’s account evokes the gods’ activities when enthroned in their halls: drinking, making judgments and assuaging quarrels, riding horses, and – perhaps ominously – choosing the slain, the divine equivalent of recruiting new followers to the chieftain’s retinue.

  Reconstructed hall of Eiríkr the Red at Brattahlíð, Greenland. The Norse gods were thought to inhabit similar halls of their own.

  Out beyond where the giants live is the ocean. At its most distant edge, marking the boundary of the known world, lies the Miðgarðs-serpent, Jörmungandr, the Mighty Staff, awaiting its combat with Þórr. Below the ocean’s depths lives Ægir, lord of the sea, perhaps a giant, perhaps a god, with his wife Rán, whose name means ‘robbery’ (the first element of our word ‘ransack’). Rán seeks men’s lives, catching them in her net and dragging them down to the depths. Her daughters with Ægir are the waves, sometimes tossing their heads with calm and peaceful demeanours, sometimes towering dangerously over the boats they intend to smash to matchwood.

  That it is Ægir’s wife and daughters who threaten sailors, that death at sea is gendered female, aligns with a culture-wide perception that the valkyries, the dísir, the norns and Hel herself, ruler of the world of the dead, all embody Death as a desiring woman, one who intends to take the moribund man as her lover in the next world and who longs to hold him in her fatal embrace. Just as women give birth, so they stand at the end of life, waiting for the doomed man to come into their arms. The great tenth-century Icelandic poet Egill Skalla-Grímsson ends his tragic poem Sonatorrek (On the Loss of Sons) with this verse:

  Now it’s difficult for me;

  the sister of Óðinn’s enemy
[= Fenrir; Fenrir’s sister = Hel]

  stands on the headland;

  yet glad, with good will,

  and unafraid I shall wait

  for Hel.

  ON THE LOSS OF SONS, V. 25

  Rán, goddess of the sea, carved as the figurehead to the Jylland, a restored nineteenth-century Danish frigate.

  MAKING CULTURE

  We left the gods at the point when the world was all new and Day and Night had just embarked on their regulated routes through the heavens. There is still work to do to make the fresh, green world fit for gods to live in, and so they set to:

  The gods met on Idavoll Plain,

  high they built altars and temples;

  they set up their forges, smithed precious things,

  shaped tongs and made tools.

  THE SEERESS’S PROPHECY, V. 7

  Once the places where they will be worshipped are completed, they turn to manufacture, making use of the ample valuable metals available to them. Civilization is inaugurated, perhaps as in Viking-Age towns such as Birka in Sweden and Hedeby (now north Germany), with the building of cult centres and of workshops. The Æsir also make luxury goods for themselves. When their work is done, they relax:

  They played chequers in the meadow, they were merry,

  they did not lack for gold at all,

  until three ogre-girls came,

  all-powerful women, out of Giantlands.

  THE SEERESS’S PROPHECY, V. 8