Gods and Myths of Northern Europe

‘We burn them with fire in a twinkling, and they enter Paradise that very same hour.’ Then he laughed and said: ‘Out of love of him his Lord sent the wind to take him away.’

In spite of Snorri’s picture of an exclusively masculine Valhalla, there are grounds for believing that women too had the right of entry into Odin’s realm if they suffered a sacrificial death. They too could be strangled and stabbed and burned after death in the name of the god. There are a number of references to the death of a man’s wife or betrothed, so that she may be burned upon the funeral pyre with her husband. Balder’s wife Nanna is said to have died of grief and to have been laid on the pyre beside him. When Sigurd, king of Sweden, was sent out to sea in a burning ship, the body of a dead princess was placed beside him. When Sigurd the Volsung was slain, Brynhild had a huge pyre made ready and was by her own command burned upon it, so that she might join him as his wife in the other world although they had been kept apart in life. The slave-girl on the Volga was stabbed and strangled so that she too could be burned with her master; she consented to this some time before the funeral ceremony, and was treated with great honour – as though, in fact, she were a true wife – until the day of the burning of the body. A surprising passage in Flateyjarbok implies that the custom of suttee was practised in Sweden in honour of Odin until the tenth century. Sigrid the Proud, who afterwards became the wife of King Svein of Denmark, the conqueror of England, left her Swedish husband King Eric, and the reason given was that she wished to avoid being put to death with her husband:

Now at this time Sigrid the Proud had left King Eric, and people said that he felt disgraced by her behaviour. For it was in fact the law in Sweden that if a king died the queen should be laid in howe beside him; she knew that the king had vowed himself to Odin for victory when he fought with his kinsman Styrbiorn, and that he had not many years to live.

Flateyjarbok, 1, 63

There are so many references either to a deliberate act of suicide by a widow or to a sudden death ‘of grief’ at the funeral in the literary sources, that some vague memory of the custom of sacrifice of the wife at her husband’s funeral seems to have survived from heathen times. Of particular interest is Saxo’s account of the love of Signy and Hagbard. They were betrothed against the will of the girl’s father, and Hagbard was finally captured and condemned to death. He was to be hanged, and when Signy saw the signal which told her that the execution had taken place, she and her women set fire to the house and hanged themselves while it burned. Hagbard however had managed to delay his execution by a few minutes, as he wished to see whether Signy would be true to him. He saw the flames rising as he stood beside the gallows, and knowing that she must have fulfilled her vow to die with him, he uttered a song of triumph, in which there is a reference to the hope of immortality with his beloved:

Now… certain hope remains of renewed love, and death shall prove to have its own delights. Both worlds hold joy.

Gesta Danorum, VII, 237

Like Brynhild and the slave-girl on the Volga, Signy claimed in death the place and privilege of a wife which was not granted to her in life. ‘Now they shall enjoy in death what they could not have in life’, were the very words spoken in Orvar-Odds Saga when the news of the hero Hjalmar’s death was brought, and his betrothed fell back in her chair at the news and died. This indeed seems to be the idea behind such stories. It is implied that the entry into the realm of Odin was open to women as well as men, but a violent death was demanded as the price of entry.

Perhaps the picture given in Ynglinga Saga indicates a wider acceptance of Odin’s cult on easier terms. Snorri tells us here that all those burned after death went to be with Odin, who had himself established this rite, and that their possessions were burned on the pyre with them. He also mentions the marking with a spear as a sign of belonging to Odin. Snorri is hardly likely to have invented this statement, since it contradicts his own statement elsewhere that Valhalla was only for those killed in battle.

The second conception which forms part of the picture of Valhalla is that of the everlasting battle. This is given in the poem Vafpru?nismal, and Snorri seems to have taken it from here and added it to his account of life in Valhalla. The warriors fight all day long, and are restored to life in the evening so that they can feast with Odin and next morning fight anew. This somewhat macabre conception of the animated dead who cannot be laid low is found elsewhere in the literature, notably in tales of magic, but not linked specifically with Odin and Valhalla. It comes into the story of Hild, for instance, for which our earliest source is the poem Ragnarsdrapa. Hild was so distressed by the tragic conflict between her father and her lover that she raised those who fell in the fight back to life by her magic powers, and thus the battle never ended.

The true place for the conflict of dead warriors is surely neither in heaven nor on earth, but in the underworld. This is where Saxo’s hero Hadding watched the everlasting battle when he was conducted to the land of the dead. He saw two armies fighting, and was told:

These are they who, having been slain by the sword, declare the manner of their death by a continual rehearsal, and enact the deeds of their past life in a living spectacle.

Gesta Danorum, 1, 31

Another story, from Flateyjarbok (1, 206) sets such a conflict inside a burial mound. Here two companies, one in black and one in red, fight without ceasing. The hero Thorstein, a Christian, is the only one who can deal blows to them from which they cannot recover, so that they can rest at peace in the grave.

The hall of the slain, over which in Grimnismal Odin is said to rule, and from which Snorri took most of his account of Valhalla, seems indeed to be a picture of the grave itself. Similarly in Book VIII of Saxo’s history there is a long description of a gloomy, tomb-like dwelling, with a roof of spears (as in Valhalla), in which lie hosts of the dead. It is represented here as the hall of Geirrod the giant, reached by a long and perilous journey:

It was needful to sail over the Ocean that goes round the lands, to leave the sun and stars behind, to journey down into chaos, and at last to pass into a land where no light was and where darkness reigned eternally.

This can be no other than the underworld, the kingdom of the dead. Valhalla, instead of a bright warrior paradise, seems indeed to be a synonym for death and the grave, described imaginatively in the poems and partly rationalized by Snorri. This world Odin ruled as God of the Dead, as presumably did his predecessor Wodan. Since those who fell in battle came to be dedicated to him by his worshippers, the warrior aspect would naturally come to be emphasized. Possibly another picture was known to the poets, that of a fair dwelling of the gods where benches were made ready for dead kings and favoured mortals. This also belonged to Odin by virtue of his position as All- Father, the high god, which he appears to have usurped from Tiwaz. Such a picture at least is implied in skaldic poems of the tenth century like Eiriksmal and Hakonarmal, where the kings who die in battle are conducted to Odin’s hall by a band of noble Valkyries. The conjunction of these two images of Odin’s realm would explain the picture Snorri gives of Valhalla.

4. The Burial Mound

There are several links between Odin and the Vanir which at first sight seem puzzling, since the two cults were apparently opposed to one another. The goddess Skadi, wife of Njord, is said to have borne children to Odin. Odin and Freyja are often mentioned together, and we have the strange double of Odin, the god Od (O?r), who is said to have been Freyja’s husband, for whom she wept after he left her. We may partly account for such links when we remember that Odin and Freyr were worshipped side by side, and both honoured by the Swedish kings in the great temple at Uppsala. It is thus scarcely surprising if one cult influenced the other, especially in the last period of heathenism, when the powers of the old gods were waning, and distinctions between them became blurred. There is however another reason for a link between the two cults, and that is that the Vanir as well as Odin had undoubtedly power over the realm of the dead.

The Vanir are represented as having close connexions with life in the burial mound, with the symbol of the funeral ship, and with the conception of a journey to the land of the dead across the sea. We know that Freyr himself was said to have been laid in a mound, and to have rested there while offerings were made to him. There is mention of a door in the mound, so that men could enter it, and of wooden figures kept inside. The idea that the