The Norse Myths Read online

  Remember those chequers – they will turn out to be important later. The ‘until’ is both crucial and mysterious here, for in the wake of the ogre-girls’ arrival, the gods meet in what seems to be emergency session and decide to create the dwarfs, presumably to counteract the sudden shortage of gold. For dwarfs are underground creatures; it’s beneath the earth’s surface that they make the golden treasures which the gods covet – and are willing to pay for. How did the girls cause the loss of gold? Was it wagered away to them in a chequers game? Did someone overturn the board in a fit of fury and thus lose the pieces? When the giantess Skaði came marching into Ásgarðr she was seeking recompense for the killing of her father Þjazi. The ogre-girls might likewise be claiming a settlement for the death of their ancestor Ymir, but one thing is certain: with their arrival, the golden age is over.

  Tolkien’s Dwarf Names

  J. R. R. Tolkien took the names of most of his dwarfs in The Hobbit from the list in The Seeress’s Prophecy. Dvalinn, Óin and Glóin, Fíli and Kíli, Dori, Nori and Ori, Bifur, Bofur and Bombur all have counterparts among Bilbo the hobbit’s tea-party guests. Thorin Oakenshield, their leader, has two dwarf-names to his credit. Durinn and Thrain, also traditional Norse dwarf-names, are among the dwarfs’ ancestors. Gandálfr also appears as a dwarf-name in the poem, a name which means ‘Staff-elf’ and which works, as Tolkien perceived, much better as a wizard-name: Gandalf the Grey.

  The dwarfs forging Mjöllnir. Óðinn’s spear Gungnir, Gullin-bursti the boar, Skíðblaðnir the ship and the ring Draupnir are all visible in the foreground while Þórr looks on approvingly. Elmer Boyd Smith (1902).

  The dwarfs are swiftly created – Snorri tells us that they quickened in the earth like maggots in flesh, a horribly vivid image – and he draws on the catalogue of dwarf-names found in The Seeress’s Prophecy to list them all.

  The dwarfs live either underground or in the rocks and they work away at forging metal and crafting precious things. Some of the gods’ most important treasures are dwarf-made, such as Freyr’s folding ship Skíðblaðnir, the golden tresses of Sif, which replace the hair stolen by Loki, and Óðinn’s spear Gungnir. These were all manufactured by dwarf-brothers, the sons of Ívaldi. Another dwarf, Brokkr, wagered with Loki that he and his brother could make three equally good treasures; the stake was Loki’s head. This competition was a close-run thing, for Brokkr and his brother created the golden-bristled boar Gullinbursti, on which Freyr rides (thus taking care of Vanir interests), the golden ring Draupnir, which drops from itself eight equally heavy rings every ninth night (given to Óðinn) and Þórr’s great hammer, Mjöllnir. Loki tried hard to sabotage the process, by transforming himself into a buzzing horse-fly and stinging the craftsmen. They managed to ignore the persistent pest except during the final task: forging Mjöllnir. The momentary distraction was enough to cause the hammer’s handle to come out a bit short. Nonetheless, the jury of the gods agreed that Mjöllnir was so superior a giant-smashing treasure that Brokkr was the clear winner, and that Loki must yield up his head. The ingenious god wriggled out of his fate by stipulating that Brokkr might take his head, but not his neck, and since not even a dwarf was dexterous enough to accomplish this, Loki was spared. But Brokkr brought it about that Loki’s mouth was sewn up instead, so that he might not perform further verbal trickery, and thereafter the god has had a crooked mouth. And that’s an image that isn’t altogether inappropriate for someone known as rœgjandi goðanna (the bad-mouther of the gods).

  Carving of Loki’s face from Snaptun, Denmark (c. 1000). The marks of the stitches across the god’s mouth are plainly visible.

  Freyja finds the dwarfs forging the Brisinga men neck-ring. Louis Huard (1891).

  A very late tale, dating from the fourteenth century, one which also alleges that Freyja is Óðinn’s mistress, relates how that highly desirable treasure, the Brisinga men (neck-ring of the Brisings) came into the goddess’s possession. Freyja is walking one day past a rock where some dwarfs live, and, noticing the rock-door open, she goes inside. There she sees that four dwarfs, including Dvalinn (known from other sources), are crafting a wonderful golden neck-ring. ‘Freyja really liked the look of the neck-ring,’ says the tale-narrator, ‘and the dwarfs really liked the look of Freyja’. The goddess offers gold and silver in abundance in exchange for the Brisinga men, but the dwarfs are adamant about the price. Freyja must spend a night with each of them, and to this she reluctantly agrees. After four nights the neck-ring is hers.

  Óðinn demands that Loki steal the treasure for him, and he buzzes in fly-form into Freyja’s otherwise impenetrable chamber. She is sleeping with her new acquisition around her neck, lying on top of the clasp, and so Loki, transforming himself now into a flea, has to bite her very precisely in order to get her to turn over without waking up. Freyja stirs in her sleep, and the Brisinga men is soon in Loki’s hands – and subsequently Óðinn’s. When Freyja comes to Óðinn to complain of the theft and that her securely locked chamber (surely a sexual metaphor) has been violated, Óðinn agrees to return it to her on one condition: Freyja must set up the eternal conflict between two armies traditionally known as the Hjaðningavíg (the battle of the Hjaðnings), discussed in Chapter 5. Freyja agrees and the neck-ring is returned to her. This late tale incorporates two much older traditions – Loki’s theft of the Brisinga men and the Hjaðningavíg battle – in a new Christianized framework. The conflict is meant to last until ragnarök, thanks to the revivification of the dead every night by Hildr, a woman whose name means ‘Battle’; but in this version Óðinn foretells that it will last only until the great Christian king, Óláfr Tryggvason of Norway, comes to Orkney and puts an end to the strife.

  THE GREATEST SMITH OF ALL

  Skilful as the dwarfs are at making magical treasures for the gods to use, there’s another smith, not a dwarf, who is so famous for his craftsmanship that his name is known in Scandinavia, Britain and Germany. Völundr, Wayland the Smith in English, Wieland in German, is said, in the eddic poem which recounts his story, to have been a ‘prince of elves’. Völundr marries a swan-maiden, one of three sisters, and he forges a good number of rings. But after nine winters spent together, the swan-maiden bride flies away. Völundr goes out to search for her, and in his absence King Níðuðr’s men raid his home and steal one of the rings. On his return, Völundr counts his rings and believes his wife must have returned; lowering his guard he falls asleep and is easily captured by Níðuðr’s troops. Völundr is taken to the king, and the mistrustful queen, who doesn’t like the savage gleam in the captive’s eyes, orders: ‘Cut from him the might of his sinews / And afterwards put him in Sævarstaðr!’ (Völundr’s Poem, v. 17). So too, the highly allusive Old English version of the smith’s history, preserved in the poem Deor, tells us that:

  Weland, among serpents, got to know misery,

  the single-minded warrior experienced hardship,

  he had as companions sorrow and longing,

  winter-cold misery, often found woes

  after Niðhad laid on him in compulsion

  supple sinew-bonds on the better man.

  DEOR, V. 1

  Völundr is hamstrung, the tendons of his legs severed, and he is confined to an island where he is to slave for his captor, crafting treasures – jewelry, goblets, weapons. But Völundr turns the tables on Níðuðr. The king’s inquisitive sons make the short boat-trip over to the island to see the smith at work and to admire the treasure. Völundr tells them to come again, secretly; when they do, he murders them and transforms their body parts into adornments. The word used in Old Norse for ‘skulls’, skálar, puns on the word for ‘drinking-bowls’, and also the word for ‘Cheers!’ (skál) in modern Icelandic:

  He cut off the heads of those young cubs,

  and under the mud of the forge he laid their limbs;

  and their skulls, which were under their hair,

  he chased in silver, gave to Níðuðr.

  And the precious stones from their eyes, />
  he sent to Níðuðr’s cunning wife;

  and from the teeth of the two

  he struck round brooches; sent them to Böðvildr.

  VÖLUNDR’S POEM, VV. 24–25

  Böðvildr, the boys’ sister, also comes to visit Völundr, bringing his wife’s ring which she has broken. Völundr offers to mend it, but he also plies her with beer, rapes or seduces her (the text is unclear), and she leaves the island, weeping piteously. Somehow, possession of the ring enables Völundr to escape and he flies away, pausing only to confront Níðuðr and to reveal the terrible truth. In Old English, Beadohild (Böðvildr) is rather more traumatized by her pregnancy than by the death of her brothers:

  For Beadohild her brothers’ death

  was not so grievous to her spirit as her own plight,

  when she had clearly perceived

  that she was pregnant; she could never think

  resolutely about what should come of that.

  DEOR, V. 2

  The Franks Casket

  The eighth-century whalebone ivory casket known as the Franks Casket depicts scenes from this legend on its front. Framed with riddling runes referring to the material from which the box is made, a bearded Völundr with bent legs (from the hamstringing) offers the fateful beer to Böðvildr while her handmaid watches impassively. A dead body can be seen under the forge on which Völundr is shaping a treasure with his tongs. The activity of the man to the right of the scene, apparently strangling birds, is unclear as far as the English and eddic traditions are concerned. In a later Norse prose version, Þiðreks Saga (The Saga of Þiðrekr), the hero’s brother comes to his rescue and helps him to build a pair of wings like those made by the Greek craftsman Daedalus; this might explain Völundr’s suddenly acquired capacity to fly.

  The eddic poem ends with the sobbing Böðvildr explaining herself to her father; the later saga account tells how Völundr (here called Vélent) returns with an army, crushes Níðuðr and marries Böðvildr: their son turns out to be a well-known Germanic hero. As for the Old English tale, this concludes with the enigmatic refrain, þæs ofereode, þisses swa mæg (That passed by, so may this). The poet who calls himself ‘Deor’ (Dear One or Animal) draws comfort for his own unhappy plight by considering how past miseries have turned to later happiness.

  Weland (as he’s known in Old English) becomes a byword for skilled craftsmanship; in Beowulf the hero’s mailshirt is praised as Welandes geweorc (Weland’s work). In South Oxfordshire up on the Ridgeway is a Neolithic chamber-grave known as Wayland’s Smithy, and local tradition had it that if you left your horse there with a silver penny, Weland would shoe it for you.

  Völundr the smith, depicted on the eighth-century Anglo-Saxon Franks Casket. The bearded smith passes a cup of beer to Böðvildr. Beneath the forge is the corpse of one of her brothers.

  The so-called Wayland’s Smithy, a Neolithic long barrow and chamber tomb, just off the Ridgeway in Oxfordshire.

  WHY PEOPLE ARE TREES

  The gods preside over a world which they share with dwarfs, giants, elves (about whom very little is known) and a few monsters, the offspring of Loki and a giantess named Angrboða. So far, there are no humans, no one to sacrifice to or to venerate the deities. One day, three gods, Óðinn, Hœnir and Lóðurr, were out walking, perhaps on the seashore, when they found some wood, ‘capable of little / Askr and Embla, lacking in fate’. The three gods take it upon themselves to shape the ash-trunk and the other piece of timber (the meaning of Embla is not clear, though it has sometimes been connected with ‘elm’). The lifeless logs are endowed with what they need to become human:

  breath gave Óðinn, spirit gave Hœnir,

  blood gave Lóðurr, and fresh complexions.

  THE SEERESS’S PROPHECY, V. 18

  Lóðurr’s identity is unknown; this verse is the only place that he is mentioned. Snorri expands on the gifts which the three gods lavish on the proto-humans, but simply names the creators as sons of Burr:

  the first gave them breath and life, the second, wits and

  movement, the third, faces, speech, hearing and vision; they gave

  them names and clothes.

  THE TRICKING OF GYLFI, CH. 23

  Lóðurr has sometimes been identified with Loki, largely on the grounds of alliteration. Hœnir was traded to the Vanir as a hostage, but very little else is known about him. It’s surprising, perhaps, that such obscure figures should have a hand in shaping the first humans, but these gods belong to the first divine generation, it appears, and thus, like those Greek gods who preceded the Olympians, their characters and attributes may have faded over time. It is also the case that the surviving Norse myths are not particularly interested in human beings. The gods rarely encounter them, although Þórr acquires a couple of human servants. Only Óðinn, with his project of populating Valhöll with the Einherjar, the finest human heroes, to fight alongside the gods at ragnarök, interacts much with them. He appears in order to advise, warn and finally betray them in their last battles. As patron of wisdom Óðinn also journeys among mankind, acquiring different kinds of knowledge, collected up in the poem Sayings of the High One. In this poem Óðinn travels alone through the human world, learning such truths as the blessings of friendship and the importance of moderation in eating and drinking. His propensity to travel in disguise accounts for his role in later Christian stories as a tempter, visiting pious Norwegian kings in order to deceive them into behaving in an unchristian fashion.

  Humans do not forget that they were originally shaped from trees. This metaphorical understanding determines a number of skaldic kennings: men are habitually designated with variants of ‘tree of weapons’ or ‘tree of battle’. The valkyrie Sigrdrífa addresses the hero Sigurðr as ‘apple-tree of battle’ – quite apposite given that a magic apple was key to the conception of one of Sigurðr’s ancestors (see Chapter 4). Helgi, slayer of Hundingr, is, as a young prince, called ‘the splendidly-born elm’. Women too are ‘trees’ or ‘props of gold’ or ‘poles of drink’, referring to their role in providing hospitality. In skaldic poetry there are woman-kennings such as ‘the foremost birch of the fire of the sea’ (fire of the sea = gold) or ‘the wine-oak’. The shield-maiden Brynhildr is called a ‘neck-ring-tree’. In heroic poetry, Guðrún, Sigurðr’s wife, makes creative use of the trope to describe her misery at her husband’s murder: ‘I am as little as a leaf / among the bay-willows now my prince is dead’; later in her career she laments her loss of kinfolk:

  I have come to stand alone like an aspen in the forest,

  my kinsmen cut away like a fir’s branches,

  bereft of happiness, as a tree of its leaves,

  when the branch-breaker comes on a warm day.

  LAY OF HAMÐIR, V. 5

  Although trees cannot move, their strength and uprightness, their participation in annual cycles, and their longevity and eventual death, by disease, fire, or the woodsman’s axe, makes them powerful comparators for human existence. Trees represent what humans aspire to be: beautiful, dignified, strong and enduring. The fact that humans are also, in little, slips from the World-Tree, ash saplings of Yggdrasill, underlines the interconnectedness of mythic tree-concepts. The great tree, subject like the rest of us to time and mortality, nevertheless spreads its protecting branches over gods and men, while the smaller trees, like Guðrún above, lose their branches and finally fall.

  Óðinn the Tempter

  King Óláfr Tryggvason is staying at a hall in northern Norway just before Easter. A mysterious stranger appears at the hall and keeps the king up late into the night, telling stories about the kings and heroes of the past. The bishop suggests that it’s time for sleep, but the king wants to hear more. When he awakens, almost oversleeping and missing Mass, the stranger has vanished. But the king learns that, before he went, the stranger had been in the kitchens, made rude remarks about the quality of the meat intended for the Easter feast, and left a side of meat to be served up instead. Since the stranger had told a
tale of King Dixin, a ruler of the ancient past who had had a sacred cow and had been buried with it, the suggestion is that the meat comes from the 200-years-dead beast. Disgusting! The king realizes that the tempter and teller of old tales was none other than Óðinn, seeking to lead him astray, by inviting him to admire figures of the pagan past and by trying to make him miss Mass.

  THE ARRIVAL OF THE VANIR

  The gods are barely, it seems, settled in Ásgarðr when a new set of divinities appears on the scene: the Vanir. The Vanir may have been the original, local gods of Scandinavia and the Æsir the interlopers, arriving along with the Indo-Europeans during the Bronze Age, but we lack evidence to determine who had priority in the Norse cultic world. In our texts though, it’s very clear that the Æsir are the dominant group; the history of the gods is an Æsir-centric one.

  The impact of the Vanir is heralded by the appearance of Gullveig, a female figure who somehow falls foul of the Æsir. She is stuck with spears and consumed by fire:

  … in the High-One’s hall they burned her

  three times they burned her, three times she was reborn,

  over and over, and yet she lives still.

  THE SEERESS’S PROPHECY, V. 21

  Gullveig is stabbed with spears and three times set ablaze by the Æsir. Lorenz Frølich (1895).

  Gullveig (Gold-Liquor) is also known as ‘Bright One’ (Heiðr) and in this form she is said to visit houses and teach the magical practices of seiðr; she was always popular with wicked women for this reason, so The Seeress’s Prophecy tells us. Who is this unkillable woman? There’s no further information in other sources; our best guess is that she represents a version of Freyja. She is not one of the Æsir, she has the power of revivification, and she knows a forbidden form of magic: all this points to the chief goddess of the Vanir. So Snorri seems to conclude, for he characterizes Freyja in The Saga of the Ynglings as a sacrificial figure and as teaching the Æsir about seiðr, a kind of magic common among the Vanir. Soon after the contretemps with Gullveig, the Æsir are to be found in conclave, considering whether or not to share their sacrifices. The first war is inaugurated when they refuse, and Óðinn flings a spear over the Æsir forces, a gesture meant to make them invulnerable. But the Vanir, like Gullveig, prove impossible to kill and so the two parties enter into negotiations. Hostages are exchanged, and the three Vanir, Njörðr and his children, come to live permanently among the gods. Hœnir and Mímir are sent to Vanaheimr, but their sojourn is not a success. Mímir always spoke up in councils, whereas Hœnir would simply say, ‘Let others decide’, if his companion were not present. The Vanir decided that they had had the worst of the exchange, beheaded Mímir and sent Hœnir back to the Æsir with the head. Óðinn treated the head with herbs which prevented decay, and with magic; thus it was able to speak to him and tell him about hidden things.