Gods and Myths of Northern Europe

a young child. The male gods are also associated with the sea, over which they come, and by which they sometimes return when their work is over. Freyr, Njord, Sceaf, Scyld, Ing, and Ull are all connected with it in some way. The gods sometimes marry the daughters of giants, like Gerd and Skadi. Finally they are associated with death and funeral rites. The body of the dead king is either placed in a mound or committed to the ocean, and it may be borne round among the people before the final resting-place is chosen for it.

This idea of death in connexion with the male deity brings in a new problem. In the Near East and the Mediterranean regions, we know that the dying gods of vegetation, Osiris, Tammuz, Adonis, and the rest, played a most important part in the religion of fertility. The god’s death typified the coming of winter to the world, and all lamented him; then he emerged again from the darkness of death to give new life and bring rejoicing in the spring. In The Golden Bough Frazer fitted Balder, the dying god of Asgard, into this death and resurrection pattern, so he too must be mentioned here, although he will be discussed in greater detail in a later chapter.

In the north there are some traces of a dismembered god whose body, like that of Osiris, was formed anew. The clearest resemblance to the myths of the Near East is apparent in the Finnish Kalevala, in the story of Lemminkainen, who was cut to pieces, thrown into a river, and resurrected when his mother found the remains of his body and pieced them together. On a more popular level, there are the legends of John Barleycorn, whose ‘passion’, the beating, soaking, and crushing of the barley grains for the making of ale, is celebrated in many folk-songs. In Asgard there is a minor figure called Byggvir (Barley) who appears in the Edda poem Lokasenna. Loki mocks at him because he is always chattering in the ear of Freyr, and he has a companion called Beyla, whose name Dumezil¹ ingeniously interprets as ‘bee’, symbolizing the other favourite drink, mead made from honey. Among the early ancestors of some Anglo- Saxon royal families there is a Beow or Beaw, whom some have taken to be a figure symbolizing barley. We have no real evidence however that he was ever worshipped as a fertility god, or regarded as a dying deity whose body grew with the year’s growth and was cut down with the harvest.

Balder, son of Odin, was remembered by Snorri for his beauty and his tragic death. Already in the Viking age the resemblance to Christ had been noticed, and in Voluspa the ending of the poem seems to imply that Balder represents Christ, coming to reign over a new heaven and earth. Balder in his death was mourned by all the world of nature, and in the same way in the most moving of Old English Christian poems, the Dream of the Rood, all creation is said to weep at the death of Christ, as he hung upon the cross. But while Balder’s death is deeply lamented, there is no indication in either Snorri’s or Saxo’s accounts that he was brought back to life to save the world from want. Nor are we told that the crops failed and famine overtook men when he went down into the world of the dead. Part of the essential pattern is missing, and Balder is not linked in any obvious way with the Vanir, the deities of fertility; he is associated rather with the heroes of Odin. On this subject more will be said later.

It seems probable, however, that Snorri’s impressive description of Balder’s death and the grief it caused owes something to the memory of a god slain for men’s preservation and for the fruitfulness of the earth. It may well be this which gives his account – significantly different from Saxo’s – its peculiar power, so that it is one of the best known and most loved of all the northern myths. It is hard to doubt that the story owes something to the cult of the Vanir, even if Balder himself were not a true member of that family. The male god of fertility is bound to die, and his death must be universally lamented, as was that of Balder. In lamenting it, we mourn for our own fate, for ‘the blight that man is born for’.

But the death of the god is only part of the pattern. New life and renewal of promise are brought in with the spring, and fulfilment with the harvest, and therefore the mourning must be followed by rejoicing. In some religions, this rebirth of hope was linked with a belief in immortality for men, but this does not seem to have been the case in northern Europe. We have the dead Freyr in his mound, the dead Frodi in his wagon. We have the early kings of the Swedes sent down to death in strange and violent forms. We have the body of Halfdan the Black, an early king of Norway, divided among his people, so that four different districts were each said to hold one portion of his dismembered body. No idea of a resurrection however has come down to us in the form in which we find it in the Osiris legend. Although in one sense Freyr returned to men with his priestess and his wagon every year and Nerthus similarly to the Danes in earlier times, both welcomed with universal rejoicing, there is no clear indication that this was a return from the land of the dead. In the same way, the idea of a triumphal return is wholly lacking in the story of Balder, although Hel had promised that universal lamentation would bring him back. Instead we find that the favourite pattern is that of the new, virile successor replacing the older god, or a divine child ruling men for a season and then departing to leave his work to a successor. In the memories of the old northern religion of fertility which are discernible in the literature, the emphasis appears to be on a series of divine rulers and upon a kind of rebirth rather than resurrection from the dead. It is possible here that we are misled because we are dealing with fragments, and with a confused mass of evidence from different periods, but on the whole this emphasis appears to be a consistent one.

It is the function of the male god of fertility to die for the land and for his people, while the goddess never dies. Her function is to weep over him, perhaps to help bring about his return, or to give birth to the divine child who is to take his place. The world first weeps with her and then rejoices at the renewed promise. This helps to make clear the part played by Frigg when she calls upon all things to weep for Balder, and again by the new sons of the gods who avenge their fathers and rule over a new Asgard when the first is destroyed. But the story of Balder does not fit wholly into the pattern. It may also be noted that Freyr leaves no son to avenge him; his descendants, like those of Frodi and Scyld, are the later kings of the land who follow him one by one into the land of the dead, some possibly by way of a sacrificial death. It remains to attempt to discover what was the part played by the goddesses of the north in the pattern of fertility.

4. The Mother Goddess

The usual pattern in early religions is that in which the goddess Mother Earth appears as the wife of the supreme sky god, since the earth is embraced and made fruitful by the god of the heavens. The image of the Earth Mother, from whom we spring, by whom we are nourished, and into which we return when we die, has remained a fundamental one. Tacitus tells us¹ that the goddess Nerthus, worshipped in Denmark in his day, was Tellus Mater, Mother Earth, but whether she was in fact regarded by her worshippers as the consort of Tiwaz, the sky god, remains a matter for conjecture.

Indeed any clear proof of the worship of the Earth Mother in heathen Scandinavia is hard to find. The mother of Thor, Fjorgynn, is little more than a name for us, although her name is used by poets as a synonym for earth. It exists also in the masculine form, Fjorgyn, and it may be that here we have one of the pairs of fertility deities mentioned in the last section. The only maternal figure surviving in Snorri’s Asgard however is the goddess Frigg, the wife of Odin and mother of Balder. Loki and Saxo accuse her of unfaithfulness to her husband Odin, but her essential function seems to be that of revered wife and mother, the consort of the high god, and queen of heaven. In her earlier Germanic form Frija, she gave her name to Friday, the day of Venus, throughout the Germanic world.

One of the few myths surviving about Frija is told by Paul the Deacon, the historian of the Lombards, writing in the eighth century. He took it from a still earlier work, part of which has survived, the Origo Gentis Langobardum. In this story Frija caused Wodan her husband to give a new name to the tribe of the Winniles and to grant them victory. She told the tribe to come to Wodan at sunrise, bringing their women with them with their long hair hanging over their faces. Then she turned round Wodan’s bed to face the east, so that when he awoke he was no longer facing the Vandals, whom he favoured, but the Winniles. His first words were: ‘Who are these Longbeards ?’ As he had now bestowed a name upon them, Frija told him, he must grant them the victory. The connexion between the goddess and name-giving is interesting, and we shall meet it again. It may be noted that in the prose introduction to Grimnismal Odin and Frigg are again supporting rival claimants, this time two brothers called Geirrod and Agnar. Frigg by a trick causes Geirrod to torture Odin when he comes to his hall, so that in the end Agnar receives the kingdom and Geirrod perishes by his own weapon.