Gods and Myths of Northern Europe

1. Odin, Lord of Hosts

Violence and battle were always close at hand in the lives of men of the heathen period in north-western Europe. It seems fitting then to begin our survey of the beliefs of the north by concentrating on the gods to whom they turned for help in the hazards and chances of warfare.

In the late heathen period there is no doubt as to the main figure who represented the God of Battle, for Odin appears continually as the lord of hosts and giver of victory. In Snorri’s account and in many poems he is shown welcoming to his abode courageous men who fell in battle. His creatures were the raven and the wolf who feast upon the slain, while his dwelling was the hall of the slain, Valhalla. In Norwegian court poetry of the tenth century, he is pictured choosing champions to fall in battle, so that after death they can be enrolled in his warrior band and help him to go out to the last battle of the gods with a magnificent following.

This impressive conception has caught the imagination of later writers, and it is sometimes assumed that all men hoped to go to Valhalla after death. The literature however gives us no real reason to assume that Valhalla was ever regarded as a paradise for all; it was peopled by the chosen ones, the aristocratic warriors who had worshipped the god on earth. Those who joined Odin in Valhalla were princely warriors, kings, and distinguished leaders and heroes who followed the god in life and pledged him their loyal service in return for his help. In the speech of the warrior Biarki, as quoted by Saxo,¹ it is clearly Odin who is referred to when he says:

War springs from the nobly born; famous pedigrees are the makers of War. For the perilous deeds which chiefs attempt are not to be done by the ventures of common men… No dim and lowly race, no low-born dead, no base souls are Pluto’s prey, but he weaves the dooms of the mighty, and fills Phlegethon with noble shapes.

Like any earthly ruler, Odin handed out weapons to his chosen followers, and once they had received them, they were bound to give him loyal service till death and beyond it. Thus Sigmund the Volsung received a splendid sword, which the god himself brought into the hall and thrust into the great tree supporting the roof. The sword was regarded both as a family heirloom and a gift from Odin, and when Sigmund’s time came to die, Odin appeared on the battlefield and shattered the blade with his spear. The pieces of the broken sword were reforged for Sigmund’s son, Sigurd, who also found favour with Odin, and was given a wonderful horse bred from Odin’s own steed, Sleipnir.

Not only treasures but valuable counsel might be given to chosen warriors. Odin taught Sigmund spells of battle, and he instructed Hadding, another of his heroes, how to draw up his forces in wedge formation. When Hadding profited by this advice, and led out his army, Odin himself in the form of an old man stood behind them, and shot so swiftly with his bow that ten arrows sped as one, while he drove away the storm clouds which the enemy had raised by magic. Similarly he gave advice to Harald Wartooth, king of the Danes, to whom he appeared as ‘an old man of great height, lacking one eye and clad in a hairy mantle’.² He promised Harald immunity from wounds, and in return Harald vowed to give him ‘all the souls which his sword cast out of their bodies’.³ Saxo has also preserved in the eighth book of his history the story of what happened to Harald when the god’s favour was withdrawn. First Odin roused up enmity between him and his great friend King Ring, and then he gave to Ring the cherished secret of wedge formation. As Harald drove out to meet Ring in battle, he suddenly recognized the god in the place of his own charioteer. He begged him for one more victory, swearing to dedicate to Odin all who fell in battle. But the driver was relentless, and even as Harald pleaded he flung him down from the chariot, and slew him with his own sword as he fell.

The bitterness against the god expressed in this story might be attributed to Saxo the Christian scholar if it stood alone, but it can be matched from many other sources. A fine tenth-century poem, Hakonarmal, composed at the death of Hakon the Good of Norway, describes him entering the courts of Odin. He is received with much honour, but his response is a cold one:

Surely we have deserved victory of the gods… Odin has shown great enmity towards us… We will keep our war-gear ready to hand.

The implication is clear: Odin cannot be trusted. This is expressed with even greater freedom in later poetry and by the prose writers:

You have never been able to order the course of war; often have you given victory to cowards who did not deserve it.

Lokasenna

Balder’s father has broken faith – it is unsafe to trust him. …

Ketils Saga H?ngs

I suspect indeed that it is Odin who comes against us here, the foul and untrue. …

Hrolfs Saga Kraka

Phrases such as this suggest widespread indignation against the treachery of the god. Perhaps it is not too fanciful to catch the same note in the protest of a high priest of the gods at the court of King Edwin of Northumbria in the seventh century, recorded by Bede in his Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation (11, 13) less than a century later. Coifi the priest declared that the old religion offered no reward for true and faithful service, and another unnamed speaker in the debate added that heathen men were left with nothing in which they could trust once their earthly life was over. It seems likely that Coifi the priest was the servant of the God of Battle, since his method of destroying and repudiating the temple of the gods was to hurl a spear at it and then to commit it to the flames. This is in accordance with what we know of the sacrificial rites associated with Odin himself.

In Old Norse literature the rites said to belong to Odin are dedication by a spear, hanging, and burning. Snorri tells us in Ynglinga Saga that marking with a spear at the time of death and burning of the dead were practices followed by the Swedish worshippers of Odin, and that they claimed to be following their god’s own example. According to the poem Havamal (Utterance of the High One), Odin himself recounts how he was pierced with a spear and hanged on a tree, a sacrifice for the attainment of wisdom (see pp. 143–4). We have independent evidence for the sacrifice of men and beasts by hanging as late as the eleventh century in Sweden. In his history of the Archbishops of Hamburg- Bremen,¹ Adam of Bremen gives a grim picture of the bodies of men and animals left hanging from trees round the great heathen temple at Uppsala, when a special festival to the gods was held every nine years. He gives as the source of his information a Christian friend of his, an old man of seventy-two, who had told him that he had seen these sacrifices hanging there. Whether this hanging was preceded by the stabbing of the victim with a spear we do not know. Captives in war were also liable to be put to death by hanging, presumably as a sacrifice to the war god. Procopius, writing in the early sixth century, says of the men of Thule, that is, of Norway and Sweden:

… the sacrifice most valued… is that of the first man which they capture in war. This sacrifice they offer to Ares, since they believe him to be the greatest of the gods. They sacrifice the prisoner not merely by slaughtering him, but by hanging him from a beam, or casting him among thorns, or putting him to death by other horrible methods.

Gothic War, 11, 15

Again in Beowulf it is noticeable that the king of the Swedes threatens to hang his enemies the Geats after the Battle of Ravenswood ‘some of them on the gallows-tree, as sport for the birds’ (2940–1).²

An account of a sacrifice to Odin by hanging is given in one of the late sagas, Gautreks Saga. This has so convincing a ring that in spite of its late date it may be based on memories of the traditional sacrificial cult of the god. According to this story, a Viking leader, King Vikar, prayed to Odin for a favourable wind, and when lots were drawn to decide who should be given to Odin in return for this, it fell upon the king himself. In this embarrassing situation his men decided to stage a mock sacrifice. Vikar was to stand on a tree-stump with a calf’s intestines looped round his neck and fastened to the tree above. Starkad, a famous hero and follower of Odin, was to stand beside him with a long rod in his hand. He thrust this rod at the king, uttering the words, ‘Now I give thee to Odin’. At this moment a deadly substitution took place, and the ritual became reality:

He let the fir bough go. The rod became a spear, and pierced the king through. The stump fell from under his feet, and the calf’s intestines became a strong rope, while the branch shot up and lifted the king among the boughs, and there he died.