Here noose and spear are used together in a ritual killing. Among the many titles of Odin, it is noticeable that we find Spear-Brandisher, and God of Hanged Men.
Snorri also emphasized the importance attributed to the burning of the dead among the followers of Odin. All objects burned on the pyre with their owners were deemed to pass with them to Valhalla, he tells us. The double ritual of hanging and stabbing is accompanied by burning in a tenth-century account of a sacrifice held on the Volga, among the Swedish settlers there. It was witnessed by Ibn Fadlan, an Arab traveller, who left a detailed account of what he saw,1 and he tells how a slave-girl was sacrificed at the funeral of her master. She was strangled and stabbed at the same time by an old woman called the Angel of Death and her helpers, and the girl’s body was then burned beside that of her master on a great pyre formed of a blazing ship. The importance of the burning is emphasized by the words of one of the bystanders, who as the flames mounted high declared that his lord had sent a wind to bear the dead man to paradise because of his love for him. This is fully in accord with what Snorri has to say concerning the funeral rites of Odin.
The words spoken by Starkad at the sacrifice of King Vikar, ‘Now I give thee to Odin’, are echoed elsewhere. They could be spoken over an enemy host dedicated to the god, as a spear was flung over them. In the Battle of Fyrisvellir, fought in 960 between the Swedish king Eric and Styrbiorn the Strong, Eric is said to have performed this rite and to have won the victory with the help of Odin. Styrbiorn, according to the story told in
Eric dedicated himself to him for victory, and offered to die at the end of ten years. He had already made many sacrifices, since he seemed likely to get the worst of it. Not long afterwards he saw a tall man with a hood over his face. He gave Eric a thin stick, and told him to shoot it over the host of Styrbiorn and to say, ‘Odin has you all’.
Now when he had shot it, it appeared to him like a javelin in the air, and it flew over Styrbiorn’s host. Immediately blindness fell upon Styrbiorn’s men and then upon Styrbiorn himself. Then a great wonder came to pass, for an avalanche broke loose on the mountain and fell upon Styrbiorn’s host, and all his people were slain.
This practice of hurling a spear was remembered by the composer of
May every field of battle be piled with your corpses,
And may Odin let the spear fly according to my words.
Here the flinging of a spear, like the marking with a spear at time of death, is attributed to Odin himself. Odin possessed the great spear Gungnir, and this was evidently used to stir up warfare in the world. In
2.
We have good reason to believe that Odin as god of war has developed out of earlier conceptions among the Germanic peoples on the Continent of the god who ruled over the battlefield. The god Wodan, or Wotan, had the same type of sacrifice associated with his name. The Heruli, for instance, worshippers of Wodan, practised a double ritual of stabbing and burning. Among them the victims were not necessarily captives taken in war, but those also who were on the point of death from illness or old age. According to Procopius, writing in the sixth century,1 they were accustomed to lay such men on the funeral pyre and to stab them to death before their bodies were burned.
We come across continual references to terrible sacrifices in honour of ‘Mars’ among the Germanic peoples. Jordanes, also in the sixth century,2 wrote of the worship which the Goths gave to the god of war, who, they believed, had been born among them:
They thought that he who is lord of war ought to be appeased by the shedding of human blood. To him they devoted the first share of the spoil, and in his honour arms stripped from the foe were suspended from trees.
Even more terrible rites were practised by the Cimbri, who may have been a Celtic tribe, but were certainly in close contact with the Germans. Strabo3 reported of them that they hanged their prisoners up over great bronze bowls; their priestesses, who were old women dressed in white, climbed a ladder and cut the throats of the hanging men so that their blood was received in the bowls below. Orosius, writing in the fifth century, gives a vivid account of the actions of these same Cimbri after they had won a great victory in 105 B.C.:
The enemy captured both camps and acquired an enormous quantity of booty. In accordance with a strange and unusual vow, they set about destroying everything which they had taken. Clothing was cut to pieces and cast away, gold and silver was thrown into the river, the breastplates of the men were hacked to pieces, the trappings of the horses were broken up, the horses themselves drowned in whirlpools, and men with nooses round their necks were hanged from trees. Thus there was no booty for the victors and no mercy for the vanquished.
This account of wholesale sacrifice both of living creatures and material things to the god of war may be compared with a description given by Tacitus of a battle between two Germanic tribes, the Hermundari and the Chatti, in the first century. They were fighting for possession of the river which flowed between their lands, which was particularly valuable because of the salt to be obtained there, and also because part of its course passed through what was accounted holy ground: ‘They cherished a superstition that the locality was specially near to heaven’ (
These isolated references to sacrificial practices among the Germanic peoples in heathen times suggest something of the terror associated in men’s minds with the god of battle. Discoveries made in the peat bogs of Denmark give us startling confirmation of the power which he once wielded. The peat soil has preserved piles of booty such as must represent the spoils of many battles, lying not at random, but as if arranged deliberately in some kind of order by the victors. At the four main finds, at Thorsbjerg, Vimose, Nydam, and Kragehul, there was an impressive amount of material, including weapons, armour, clothes, ornaments, tools, pottery, and animal bones. The largest collections must have been built up over a number of years, and the objects left in the holy places gradually sank into the marshy soil until they were hidden from view. Sometimes weapons were bent and broken and rendered useless before they were laid down. In 1950 a fifth discovery of this kind was made at Illerup,1 and careful excavation made it possible to reconstruct what had taken place. Here the equipment of about seventy warriors had been burned on a pyre, and the swords and shields collected from the ashes, deliberately bent and dented, and carried into the middle of the bog by means of planks laid down on the marshy ground. Some of the weapons were flung into a deep pool, and others left lying on the earth near by, in a spot still reputed to be haunted. In this case the spoil was probably that taken in one battle only, fought about A.D. 400.
We know that mailcoats and weapons were rare and costly treasures, and that the many swords sacrificed at Illerup represented much wealth. Yet men felt impelled to make these strange sacrifices in return for victory, and continued to do so in Denmark from the second to the sixth century after Christ. The explanation given in the literature is that they did this in order to placate the god of battle, perhaps like the Hermundari in the fulfilment of a vow once victory had been won. We do not know what happened to the owners of the swords and mailcoats, spears and horse-trappings preserved in the peat, but the implication is that if not already killed in battle they met
