found a resting-place for his remains in Durham. Paris and Hamburg had been plundered in 845; Cadiz and Seville suffered the same fate. In Ireland the wife of a Viking chief, a heathen seeress, spoke her prophecies from the holy altar of Clonmacnoise.
The Viking adventurers were indomitable. They reached the eastern shore of America; they pushed down the Dnieper to Byzantium, where the Christian emperor valued their physical prowess sufficiently to enrol them in his special Varangian guard. They refused to be intimidated by ghosts of the past or the proud civilization of the south, but had the effrontery to cut runic inscriptions on ancient tombs like Maeshowe in Orkney, and on classical monuments like the marble lion of the Piraeus. No haven seemed safe from their longships, and no coast town or village from their favourite weapons: the long sword, the axe, and the firebrand. By 870 they were masters of northern and eastern England. Only the resolution of one young prince, in indifferent health and without powerful allies, kept them from engulfing southern England also, and destroying what three centuries of Christian culture had built. It is hardly surprising that alone among English rulers that prince, Alfred, bears the title Great.
These are the people to whom we turn for our northern myths. They were a formidable body of men, all the more so because they cannot be condemned as a collection of rogues and sadists, blind to all but material values. Of course there were worthless rascals among them, and they could be brutal enough, as the monks at Lindisfarne knew; but their leaders were in many cases men of culture, discrimination, and wit, with love of a good story and a neat jest. They loved fine art and craftsmanship, and treasured their good ships and splendid swords for their beauty as well as their utility in war. A quick-witted poet could win his way in their world as well as a brilliant swordsman, and the man who was both at the same time, like Egill Skallagrimsson the Icelander, or Earl Ragnald of Orkney, had the world at his feet. They were shrewd traders too, with a wily instinct for commerce not unworthy of a modern business magnate. Not a few who sowed their wild oats and built up a promising little fortune a-viking in the western seas grew up to be wise rulers, fathers of fine families, and valuable members of the community; some even came to be saints. From such lively, alert minds one would expect a rich and vigorous mythology, and they do not disappoint us.
The Sources of our Knowledge
Northern heathenism, that is, the pre-Christian beliefs of the Germanic peoples and the Scandinavians, came to an end in the eleventh century. There were two periods when it presented a threat to Europe: the first was at the time of the fall of Rome, when the Germanic tribes were overrunning the west, and the second was in the ninth and tenth centuries, when the Vikings were a great power and a menace to Christian civilization. In each case Christianity triumphed, and the hostile bands of invaders were converted to the faith. Since they themselves had no desire to make converts, they were at a serious disadvantage, and it was only a matter of time before the new religion replaced the old.
Before this finally happened, however, there was a period of a thousand years in which the old gods were worshipped in the north. This is a long time, and the forms and practices of the heathen religion must have changed greatly during the course of it. We know that there was considerable variety among the religions of the different German tribes, who had no universal faith or church. Moreover there were outside influences to affect the heathen peoples: first from the pagan Mediterranean area, secondly from the East, and thirdly from the Christian Church We must avoid the common error of supposing that the myths which we possess grew out of a fixed and permanent heathen faith possessed by the whole Germanic world.
The heathens themselves left few written records. Such restless adventurers were not the kind of people to sit down and inscribe stories and poems on parchment, and indeed they did not know how to do so. A few wise men could carve runic letters on wood or stone or metal, but this process was not suitable for long and detailed records. The art of writing with a pen only reached the north with the Christian priests. Consequently, our written records from heathen times come either from outsiders, writing Greek or Latin, or from monks in Christian monasteries. One most valuable commentator from early times is the Roman historian Tacitus, living at the end of the first century after Christ, since he was deeply interested in the Germanic way of life, and believed Rome should learn from it. Our difficulty, however, is to decide how far he and many far less gifted recorders of heathen beliefs and practices can be relied upon for accurate first-hand reporting. As far as the poems, stories, spells, riddles, and chronicles written down in the monasteries are concerned, they may have been recorded as much as two or three hundred years after the conversion, and this allows the possibility of prejudice, misinterpretation, or deliberate editing when non-Christian beliefs are being dealt with.
Fortunately it seems that many monks rejoiced in the old stories and poems, and wished to preserve them. England has a great treasure in the form of the complete epic poem,
The fact must be faced at the outset then that our written sources on the subject of northern heathenism are comparatively late, fragmentary, and of uncertain reliability. In Eliade’s book,
with only a few fragments of the Gospels, a Catholic breviary, various ornaments (Byzantine icons, Baroque statues of the saints, the vestments, perhaps, of an Orthodox priest), but able, on the other hand, to study the religious life of some European village.
This is a salutary exercise, because the evidence connected with the religion of the heathen north is something of this kind, except that we are at a severe disadvantage in that the life of the village now only exists in ancient records of varying reliability. In such a case as Eliade imagines, the Buddhist would no doubt be struck by the wide divergence between the customs of the village and the material in the Gospels and breviary. Should he conclude that the naive superstitions and inarticulate responses of the villagers were nearer to the essentials of the Christian religion than, say, the opening chapters of St John’s Gospel, we know that he would be wrong. It is not that either is ‘truer’ Christianity than the other, but that the Christian faith exists at many different levels in different societies and in the minds of different men. We fall all too often into the same error when we approach one of the religions of the past. We must be prepared for the simple folk-beliefs of the less sophisticated to be found beside complex symbolism. The important thing is not to allow the crudity of the folk-beliefs to blind us to the depth and importance of the symbolism. Crude and childish ideas about the heathen gods will certainly be found in the myths, either because these satisfied ignorant folk, or because the use of symbols has been misunderstood by the recorder. But it does not follow that all who worshipped these gods were crude and childish in their religious outlook. Indeed the contention put forward in this book is that this was very far from the case.
New Light on the Myths
