Gods and Myths of Northern Europe

Fresh insistence by Odin, ‘Be not silent, volva’, prefaces each new question which he puts to the seeress. The poems Voluspa and the Shorter Vopluspa are set in the same pattern, and presented as replies made unwillingly to a persistent questioner. They could indeed be viewed as speeches made by a shaman on awakening from a trance, after a ritual ‘death’, or journey by the soul to the underworld to gain knowledge of secret things. Possibly there was at one time a connexion between the hanged victims and this power to learn what was hidden from men. Odin declares in Havamal that he knows spells which will make a hanged man walk and talk with him. He is represented as gaining knowledge of the future by consultation of the severed head of Mimir, the hostage said to have been killed by the Vanir. Another version of the story of his relations with Mimir is that he sacrificed one of his eyes so that Mimir, the giant guardian of the spring in the underworld, would permit him to drink from it, and so gain wisdom.

It may be noted that while the ravens, the birds of Odin, are closely connected with battle and the devouring of the slain, they have a different aspect in the poem Grimnismal. There the wolves of Odin are called Ravener and Greed, but the ravens have names of a different kind:

Huginn and Muninn, Thought and Memory,

fly over the world each day.

I fear for Thought, lest he come not back,

but I fear yet more for Memory.

The birds here are symbols of the mind of the seer or shaman, sent out over vast distances. It seems that the connexion between the god and his ravens is older than the Viking age. He is depicted on his horse with two birds flying above him on a seventh-century helmet from Vendel, Sweden. Possibly two birds on the lid of an early Anglo-Saxon cremation urn found at Newark have some connexion with the god of the dead. Evidence of this kind is admittedly slender, and yet sufficient of it exists to imply continuity between the heathen beliefs of the Dark Ages and those of Viking times. For instance, beside the figure of Odin on his horse shown on several memorial stones there is a kind of knot depicted, called the valknut, related to the triskele.¹ This is thought to symbolize the power of the god to bind and unbind, mentioned in the poems and elsewhere (page 59). Odin had the power to lay bonds upon the mind, so that men became helpless in battle, and he could also loosen the tensions of fear and strain by his gifts of battle-madness, intoxication, and inspiration. Symbols resembling this knot of Odin are found beside figures of the horse and the wolf on certain cremation urns from early heathen cemeteries in East Anglia. We know Odin’s connexion with cremation, and it does not seem unreasonable therefore to associate them with Woden, god of the dead in Anglo-Saxon England.

The picture of the god as the bringer of ecstasy is in keeping with the most acceptable interpretation of the Germanic name Wodan, that which relates it to wut, meaning high mental excitement, fury, intoxication, or possession. The Old Norse adjective o?r, from which O?inn, the later form of his name in Scandinavia, must be derived, bears a similar meaning: ‘raging, furious, intoxicated’, and can be used to signify poetic genius and inspiration. Such meanings are most appropriate for the name of a god who not only inspired the battle fury of the berserks, but also obtained the mead of inspiration for the Aesir, and is associated with the ecstatic trance of the seer.

The connexion of the god of death with inspiration and possession seems indeed to go back to the days of early Germanic heathenism, and it continued in the north until the end of the heathen period. The fury and ecstasy supposed to be bestowed upon men is the link between Wodan, worshipped on the Rhine in the first century A.D., and the Scandinavian Odin, god of poetry, magic, and the dead. The worship of Wodan is believed to have travelled northwards, perhaps along with the use of runic letters, with the tribe of the Heruli, and to have established itself at last in Denmark and Sweden beside the worship of the gods of fertility which already prevailed there. It must have reached the shores of the North Sea in the Migration period, and been carried over by some of the invading peoples into Britain. Place-names called after the god are of little help, for they are scattered and rare. It is possible that this gap is due to the fear of the name of the dread deity of death.

In later folk-beliefs Odin was associated with the ‘wild hunt’, the terrifying concourse of lost souls riding through the air led by a demonic leader on his great horse, which could be heard passing in the storm. Later still, the leader became the Christian Devil. There seems no real reason to assume from this that Wodan was ever a wind god, but it was natural that the ancient god of the dead who rode through the air should keep a place in this way in the memory of the people, and it reminds us of the terror which his name must once have inspired.¹ It has been suggested earlier (page 50) that there appears to have been a definite reaction against the cult of Odin at some time in the Viking age, on account of reiterated accusations of treachery and faithlessness made against him. A renewal of support for the gods of fertility might account for the gradual swing- over from cremation of the dead to inhumation, and for the development of the practice of ship-burial on a grand scale in royal cemeteries on both sides of the North Sea.

The shamanistic element in the worship of Odin can hardly be doubted, but it is not easy to decide how far new influences from the East, coming late to the north, have given a new twist to the cult of a god who already inspired his followers with ecstasy. Two important characteristics of the shamans of northern Europe and Asia, the use of the drum and the dance, do not seem to be included among the rites of Odin; and the power of healing does not appear to be associated with him in any way. Resemblances between the Odin traditions and the shamans might be due to certain tendencies once shared by the Germanic peoples with those of the steppes and the tundra, which died out in western Europe with the advent of Christianity. We have seen that there are certain marked shamanistic elements in the fertility cults of Scandinavia also. This raises the whole question of Eastern influences on Scandinavia in the Viking age, about which we know all too little.

3. The Realm of Odin

In Snorri’s account the warrior paradise of Odin, Valhalla, is given great prominence, but in fact there is little about it in the poetry, apart from Grimnismal. The hall is described as being filled with shields and mailcoats, haunted by wolf and eagle, and provided with hundreds of doors through which the warriors could pour out at any threat of attack. Within it they feasted on pork and mead, served by the maids of Odin. In this picture of Valhalla given by Snorri, two separate conceptions can be discerned. One is that of a life after death as the guest of Odin, god of battle, a life presumably limited to heroes of noble birth and members of royal families claiming descent from the god. The second is that of an unending battle, continuing for ever because those who fall each day are restored to life again in time for the feasting in the evening. We must consider these two conceptions in turn.

The idea of entering Odin’s hall after death is well supported by literary evidence. Those who died in the god’s service, undergoing a violent death either by battle or by sacrifice, had the entry into his realm. This conception is given vigorous expression in the death-song of Ragnar Lo?brok, probably composed no earlier than the twelfth century in its present form, but believed to be based on an earlier death-song containing heathen material. The end of the poem expresses a fierce, exultant belief in the approach of the hero to Odin’s hall, where he will be welcomed with feasting and hospitality because he died fearlessly:

It gladdens me to know that Balder’s father makes ready the benches for a banquet. Soon we shall be drinking ale from the curved horns. The champion who comes into Odin’s dwelling does not lament his death. I shall not enter his hall with words of fear upon my lips.

The Aesgir will welcome me. Death comes without lamenting. …

Eager am I to depart. The Disir summon me home, those whom Odin sends for me from the halls of the Lord of Hosts. Gladly shall I drink ale in the high-seat with the Aesir. The days of my life are ended. I laugh as I die.

The traditional account of Ragnar’s death was not of a death in battle. He is said to have been taken captive and then to have perished in a snake-pit. Whether this is to be taken literally or not, it suggests that we are to see his death as a sacrificial one, and that he is the assenting victim. The note of fierce joy which comes out in this passage is echoed elsewhere in connexion with death-rites in Odin’s honour. It is found for instance in the description of the burning of a chieftain on the Volga (p. 52), and is the more convincing because reported by an outsider, an Arab eye-witness, who watched the cremation and recorded the words of a man standing beside him: