Gods and Myths of Northern Europe

world¹ quotes the story of a Bouriat shamanka from central Asia. She was married to a human husband, but she had for her ‘second husband’ the ancestral spirit of a shaman. One of her husband’s mares gave birth to a foal with eight legs, and he cut off four of them. ‘Alas,’ cried his wife, ‘that was my little horse on which I ride as a shamanka,’ and after that she left him and disappeared from among men, becoming the protective spirit of her tribe.

Attempts have been made to account for the eight legs of Sleipnir by likening him to the hobby-horses and steeds with more than four feet which appear in carnivals and processions. A more fruitful resemblance seems to be to the bier on which a dead man is carried in the funeral procession by four bearers; borne along thus, he may be described as riding on a steed with eight legs. Confirmation of this is found in a funeral dirge recorded by Verrier Elwin among the Gonds in India.² It contains references to Bagri Maro, the horse with eight legs, and it is clear from the song that this is the dead man’s bier. The song is sung when a distinguished Muria dies. One verse of it runs:

What horse is this ?

It is the horse Bagri Maro.

What should we say of its legs ?

This horse has eight legs.

What should we say of its heads ?

This horse has four heads. …

Catch the bridle and mount the horse.

The representation of Odin’s eight-legged steed could arise naturally out of such an image, and this is in accordance with the picture of Sleipnir as a horse that could bear its rider to the land of the dead.

There is no doubt that the horse of Odin knew this road well. Saxo has the story of Hadding, who was carried by Odin on Sleipnir, covered with a mantle, over land and sea, until they came to the god’s dwelling. In the Edda poem Baldrs Draumar, Odin rode down the long road to the underworld on Sleipnir and braved the dog that guarded the threshold in order to consult a dead seeress. It was Sleipnir also who carried his rider down the dark and terrible road to Hel’s kingdom to seek for Balder, whether it was Odin himself who made the journey (as some have thought) or an emissary. Although we do not often find Odin acting as guide to the dead, the Valkyries, working under his command, performed just this function, and escorted dead kings and heroes to Valhalla. Nor was this characteristic of the god wholly forgotten in Norse literature. In Volsunga Saga Odin himself appears like Charon, to row the boat on which Sigmund’s dead son was laid. In another late saga, Egils Saga ok Asmundar, he appears as the Prince of Darkness who conducted a giantess down to the underworld.

In the poem Havamal Odin himself is described as hanging on the World Tree, the ash Yggdrasill, pierced with a spear. This recalls the grim record of victims stabbed in the name of Wodan or Odin, said to be left hanging from trees round the temple of the gods at Uppsala and elsewhere. The interpretation in Havamal however goes even further than this, for Odin is represented as speaking these words:

I know I hung

on the windswept Tree,

through nine days and nights.

I was stuck with a spear

and given to Odin,

myself given to myself. …

This is a voluntary sacrifice, and its purpose is the acquisition of secret, hidden knowledge, since the god is able to peer down from the tree and lift up the runes which represented magic lore. It was thought at one time that this image of the suffering god hanging from the tree must have been derived from the Christian Crucifixion. But despite certain resemblances, it would seem that here we have something whose roots go deep into heathen thought, and which is no late copy, conscious or unconscious, of the central mystery of the Christian faith. By hanging on a tree, Odin is not sharing in the suffering of the world or saving men from death, he is there to win the secret of the runes:

They helped me neither

by meat nor drink.

I peered downward,

I took up the runes,

screaming, I took them –

then I fell back.

Besides the sacrificial practices of hanging upon a tree, known to be associated with Wodan from early times, we have also significant parallels from shamanistic practice. There is much evidence from various parts of the world concerning the training of young men and women who become shamans, and Eliade has collected this in the study already mentioned. In the accounts of initiation ceremonies undergone by the novice, there are resemblances to this picture of the suffering god.

The World Tree is indeed the centre of the shaman’s cosmology, as it is in the world of the northern myths. The essential feature of the initiation ceremony, whether among the Eskimos, the American Indians, or the Siberian peoples, is the death and rebirth of the young shaman, and the torments and terrors which he has to undergo if he is to gain possession of the esoteric knowledge necessary to him in his new calling. Before he can attain ability to heal and to pass to the realms of gods and spirits, he has to undergo a ritual death. This may be experienced in dreams or visions, and the experience may be induced by means of meditation, fasting, or the use of drugs; in any case it causes the initiate terrible suffering. He may imagine himself devoured by birds, boiled in a cauldron, cut open so that serpents or sacred stones can be inserted into his body, or torn into small pieces. If however he is a true shaman, he will survive this mental torture, will be restored to life and wholeness, and will then be able to practise his calling in the community. The World Tree plays a considerable part in these dreams and visions of the young shaman, especially in northern Asia. The Yakuts believed that the soul of the shaman was carried off by the ‘Mother Bird of Prey’ and placed on a branch of a tree in the underworld, while his body was cut to pieces and devoured by the spirits of illness and death. In other regions it was thought that the new shaman made his drum from branches of the World Tree, while the Mongols believed that shamans tethered their horses to the Tree, as Odin is said to have tethered his horse Sleipnir to Yggdrasill.

The hanging of Odin on the World Tree seems indeed to have two main conceptions behind it. First, Odin is made into a sacrifice according to the accepted rites of the god of death, who is Odin himself. We know that victims were hung from trees before the Viking age, and the custom continued at Uppsala until the tenth century. Secondly, Odin is undergoing a ceremony of initiation, gaining his special knowledge of magic by means of a symbolic death.¹ In his Prose Edda Snorri has not shown much of this side of Odin’s character, for he has concentrated on showing the god as the All-father and ruler of Asgard. In Ynglinga Saga, however, Snorri gives us a somewhat different picture, emphasizing Odin’s skill in magic lore, and his power of shape-changing. Here he brings out the shamanistic characteristics of Odin, who like the shaman had the power not only to ride upon an animal but to send forth his spirit in animal forms:

Odin could change himself. His body then lay as if sleeping or dead, but he became a bird or a wild beast, a fish or a dragon, and journeyed in the twinkling of an eye to far-off lands, on his own errands or those of other men.

Like the shamans also, Odin seeks knowledge by communication with the dead. In Baldrs Draumar his approach to the dead is shown as it were in double symbolism: he rides down the road that leads to the underworld, and then he proceeds to call up a dead seeress from the grave until she replies to his questions. She is shown in the poem as being forced to answer him against her will:

Who is this man, unknown to me,

who drives me on down this weary path ?

Snowed on by snow, beaten by rain,

drenched with the dew, long I lay dead.

As a refrain throughout the poem we have her reiterated words:

I have spoken unwillingly;

now must I be silent.