knowledge in a letter of Sidonius, who describes the expert seamanship of the Saxons: they had no fear of shipwreck, he says, and rejoiced in storms because they gave them the chance to take their foes by surprise. He continues:
Moreover when the Saxons are setting sail from the continent and are about to drag their firm-holding anchors from an enemy shore, it is their usage thus homeward bound to abandon every tenth captive to the slow agony of a watery end, casting lots with perfect equity among the doomed crowd in execution of this iniquitous sentence of death. This custom is all the more deplorable in that it is prompted by honest superstition. These men are bound by vows which have to be paid in victims, they conceive it a religious act to perpetrate their horrible slaughter. This polluting sacrilege is in their eyes an absolving sacrifice.
Letters, VIII, 6 (Dalton’s translation)
An Old English poetic name for the sea, garsecg, means literally ‘spear-man’, and suggests the image of a fierce warrior, recalling Poseidon with his trident. The weapon of the Norse couple, Aegir and Ran, seems to have been a net, with which Ran would entrap seafarers. A folk-belief quoted in one of the Icelandic sagas is that when people were drowned they were thought to have gone to Ran, and if they appeared at their own funeral feasts, it was a sign that she had given them a good welcome. In a late saga, Fri?jofs Saga, it is said to have been a lucky thing to have gold on one’s person if lost at sea. The hero went so far as to distribute small pieces of gold among his men when they were caught in a storm, so that they should not go empty-handed into Ran’s hall if they were drowned. The idea of the hospitality of Aegir and Ran, who were so anxious to throng their underwater realm with the hosts of the dead, may be compared with that of the god of battle. It is by no means inconsistent with their power to destroy.
When however Egill refers to Aegir as the Ale-Brewer, and the poems make reference more than once to the gods gathering for a banquet in the halls of Aegir, we may discern a different aspect of the god of the sea. In Celtic mythology, cauldrons of plenty are sometimes represented as coming from the land-beneath-the-waves. The banquet at which Loki made his scandalous attacks on gods and goddesses in Lokasenna was in Aegir’s hall, and it was to obtain a suitable cauldron for the mead at another of Aegir’s feasts that Thor went down to the sea to visit Hymir. Snorri in Skaldskarmal identifies Aegir with Gymir and Hler who lived on Hlesey. Gymir, it may be noticed, is the name of the monstrous and terrible giant of the underworld, the father of the beautiful Gerd wooed by Freyr. Hymir, who seems to be a sea-giant, has also a link with the gods, for he is said in Hymiskvi?a to be the father of Tyr.
Aegir’s place indeed should perhaps be among the giants rather than the gods. He is said to have had nine daughters, and it is generally assumed that these are the waves of the sea. They are called by names such as Gjolp, ‘howler’, and Greip, ‘grasper’. These however are typical giantess names as well, and nine giantesses are said to have been the mothers of the god Heimdall, the most puzzling of the dwellers in Asgard. Certain passages in the poems seem to imply that Heimdall was born of the sea, and that these nine daughters of Aesir were his foster-mothers. We seem to have a link here with Celtic traditions. Jean Young has pointed out that there is a story in an Irish saga of nine giant maidens of the sea who mothered a boy between them.1 In the tale of Ruad, son of Rigdonn, Ruad was crossing the sea to Norway with three ships, when the vessels ceased to move. He dived down to find out the reason, and discovered nine giant women, three hanging on to each ship. They seized him, and carried him down into the sea. There he spent a night with each in turn, and then was allowed to continue his journey. They told him that one of them would bear him a child, and he promised to come back to them after he left Norway. But after a stay of seven years he broke his promise, and went straight back to Ireland. The nine women discovered this, took the child ‘that had been born among them’, and set off in pursuit, and when they could not overtake Ruad they cut off the child’s head and flung it after his father.
A giantess of a similar kind is found in medieval German tradition, and is called Vrou Wachilt. She is represented as the mother of the giant Wade, and grandmother of Weland the Smith. The story of the birth of Wade is told in a thirteenth-century saga, Pi?riks Saga, composed in Norway but containing much German material. A woman stopped King Vilcinus in a forest, and later appeared out of the sea, holding on to his ship in the same way as the giantesses in the Irish story, and she told him she was going to bear him a child. He took her home with him, but after Wade was born she disappeared. She must be the same woman who comes into a medieval German poem, Rabenschlacht. This tells how Wade’s grandson, Widia (or Wittich) was fleeing for his life when a ‘sea-woman’, said to be his ancestress Wachilt, came out of the sea, seized him and his horse, and bore him down to the sea-bottom to save him from his pursuers. Schneider1 accepted this genealogy of Wachilt, Wade, Weland, Widia as early Germanic tradition. Chambers, reviewing scattered references to Wade,2 came to the conclusion that he was originally a sea-giant from somewhere in the Baltic region, whose exploits were remembered in Britain because the early settlers knew tales about him. In England his name came to be linked with stone ruins and Roman roads, but in Denmark his connexion with the sea was remembered. An attractive story about him in Pi?riks Saga is how he carried his little son Weland on his shoulder as he waded over the deep Groenasund.3
These sea-women and their progeny remind us that there was a close link between the giant people of the sea deeps and those who dwelt in the depths of the earth and in caves of the mountains. Poseidon, the Greek god of the sea, to whom Aegir has been compared, was also known as the Earth-Shaker, and had power over the earthquake as well as the storm. The cauldrons associated with Aegir’s hall and the giantesses related to him offer us points of contact with Celtic myth, and it is indeed in the lore of the sea that connexions between Norse and Celtic tradition are most clearly perceived. This is not surprising when we remember how it was in their voyaging over the western ocean that the two people came into contact with one another.
The god Njord, father of Freyr and Freyja, had close associations with the sea. His dwelling is said in an Edda poem to be Noatun, ‘enclosure of ships’, and Snorri tells us that he controlled the winds and the sea, and brought wealth to those whom he helped in fishing and seafaring. Place-names called after him suggest that he was worshipped along the west coast of Norway. Other inland places called after him have an obvious connexion with water, for they are usually at the heads of fiords, by lakes or rivers, or on islands in lakes. Some of the names (those ending in -ey for instance) indicate cult centres on islands, like that of the goddess Nerthus in Tacitus’s account. The island now called Tysnesoen in Norway formerly bore the name Njar?arlog, ‘bath of Njord’. This is of special interest, suggesting that this island in a lake was once sacred to Njord together with the water surrounding it.1 We are told of Nerthus that her wagon was bathed every year in a sacred lake, and then kept on her island till the time came for it to be used again.
The connexion of ships with the Vanir has already been noted (see page 100). Freyr possessed a ship Ski?bla?nir, while other male figures who seem to be linked with Freyr came in a ship across the sea to rule over men, and returned again by ship when their period of earthly rule was over. There is no doubt, moreover, that the symbol of the ship was an important one in the north from the earliest times of which we have archaeological record. In the early rock carvings of the Bronze Age in Scandinavia, horse and ship are often found side by side, and sometimes the sun-wheel is placed with them, a suggestion that these symbols were already linked with the powers governing fertility. Model ships were given as offerings, and at one early site at Nors in Denmark a hundred small boats, each with a symbol depicted on its side, were packed inside one another and deposited in a clay jar. In the Iron Age it was possible for a real ship to be offered in sacrifice to some power. Such a sacrifice was found in a peat bog at Hjortspring in Denmark, with skeletons of horses and dogs under the large vessel which had been abandoned there.
By the early Iron Age, the ship was also in use as a funeral symbol. Graves in Gotland and elsewhere were carefully made in the shape of a boat, the outline marked out in stones around the burned or buried remains of the dead. By about A.D. 600, the dead were buried or burned inside real boats, or parts of boats. Sometimes in peaty soil the wood of the boats has survived, and in other cases rows of clinch-nails mark the lines of the planks, or these are found among the ashes of cremation burials. As far as our knowledge goes, this custom seems to have
