Gods and Myths of Northern Europe

dead men rested inside his grave mound as in a dwelling is one found repeatedly in the Icelandic sagas. Sometimes it is crudely and childishly expressed, as when a dead Christian hermit appears in a dream to rebuke a herd-girl for wiping her muddy feet on his house, or a man is buried in a high place, so that he may ‘look out over the whole district’. Sometimes we find the pleasant idea of friends buried in neighbouring mounds conversing with one another. Again there are terrifying tales of the doings of the draugr, the dead man out of the mound, a vampire-like creature who left his grave to attack man and beast and wreak havoc in the neighbourhood. One of the finest imaginative pictures of the dead man resting in his mound is that of Gunnar in Njals Saga. He had died by violence, and at the time of the dream described had not yet been avenged, yet the picture is a serene and beautiful one:

It seemed to them that the howe was open, and that Gunnar had turned himself in the howe, and looked up at the moon. They thought that they saw four lights burning in the howe, but no shadow anywhere. They saw that Gunnar was merry, with a joyful face.

Brennu-Njals Saga, 78

The relationship of the dead towards the living might be a hostile one, and the terror of the dead and of their destructive power can be sensed in many stories of hauntings in Iceland. A different relationship however is brought out in the story of an early king in Norway, called Olaf Geirsta?aalfr, ‘elf of Geirstad’. We are told in Flateyjarbok that in time of famine men sacrificed to him in his howe for plenty, even as they were said to have done to Freyr. When Olaf the Holy was born, he was named after this earlier Olaf, his ancestor, and was given his sword and ring, said to have been taken out of the burial mound to be presented to the child at his birth. Consequently men believed that the second Olaf was the first reborn, although the Christian king sternly contradicted such rumours:

Olaf rode with his bodyguard past the howe of Olaf, Elf of Geirstad,… ‘Tell me, lord… were you buried here ?’ The king replied: ‘My soul has never had two bodies, it cannot have them, either now or on the Resurrection Day. If I spoke otherwise, there would be no common truth or honesty in me.’ Then the man said: ‘They say that when you came to this place before, you said – “Here we were once, and here we fare now.” ’ ‘I have never said that,’ said the king, ‘and never will I say it.’ And the king was much moved, and clapped spurs to his horse immediately, and fled from the place as swiftly as he might.

Flateyjarbok, 11, 106

Brogger¹ put forward the suggestion that it was this earlier Olaf, whom men worshipped after death, who was the occupant of the Gokstad ship-grave, one of the great ship-burials of heathen Norway. This would be another argument for linking Olaf with the cult of the Vanir, in addition to the emphasis on fertility in the story of the sacrifices made to him. The element of ancestor worship implied in this story is indeed what we should expect to find in the cult of Freyr. In the fertility religion, the emphasis is not so much on a world of the gods to which man attains after death if he fulfils certain conditions as on the importance of the veneration of dead ancestors, and the need for the living to remember them at various feasts and festivals, to visit their graves, and perhaps to sit on their burial mounds for wisdom and inspiration. Legends of the peace kings coming over the sea and bequeathing their rule after a while to a successor play a significant part, as we saw earlier, among the traditions associated with the Vanir. Such legends emphasize the importance of rebirth rather than resurrection or life in a realm of the gods away from the earth.

The title of ‘elf’ borne by Olaf may be significant. An ancestor of his, Halfdan Whiteleg, had the same title, and is called Brynalfr in the poem Ynglingatal, which recounts the places where a number of early kings were buried. Regular ceremonies connected with the elves continued in Sweden into the late Viking age. Sigvat the poet, a Christian who served under King Olaf the Holy, has described in one of his verses a journey made for the king in Sweden in 1018. He states in it that he could not find lodging in Gautland because in the late autumn all the people of the district were sacrificing to the elves. In one of the sagas of Iceland, Kormaks Saga, a sacrifice to the elves is described. A woman said to have the powers of a volva told a man who came to her to be healed of wounds to take a bull which had been sacrificed to a mound

… in which dwell elves… and redden the outside of the mound with bull’s blood, and make the elves a feast with the flesh; and you will be healed.

Kormaks Saga, 12

The sacrifice of an ox said to be made to the god Freyr in Gisla Saga and Viga-Glums Saga may be remembered in connexion with this passage. Freyr himself is said to dwell in Alfheim, and both he and the elves are connected with the sun. Cup-marks on rocks and stone tombs in Sweden are found in association with the sun-wheel on very early monuments, and offerings of milk for the elves have been poured into such cups by Swedish country folk up to our own day. The link between the elves and the dead in the mounds is also in accordance with what we know of Freyr and the Vanir.

An Old English charm against a sudden stitch refers to a pain caused by the shot of either gods, witches, or elves. This charm emphasizes the power of the elves to harm, but the purpose of alfablot as referred to in the sagas was to gain their help, and there are indications in the literature that the dwellers in the mounds could give healing, and also help with the birth of children. This last point is well illustrated by the story of the birth of Olaf the Holy. The condition of his mother caused great anxiety because the birth was long delayed, but when a belt taken from the burial mound of Olaf of Geirstad was fastened round the mother, and the sword from it presented to the child who was to be born, all went well, and the baby boy who was to be the future Christian king of Norway was successfully delivered.

Men turned also to the dwellers in the mounds for inspiration. There is a story in Flateyjarbok¹ of a man who was able to compose poetry after sleeping on the mound of a dead poet. The inhabitant of the mound appeared to him in a dream and taught him a verse, and after that he also possessed the gift of poetry. This gift did not come from Odin, although he was the god of learning and inspiration, but from the powers under the earth, who came under the sway of the Vanir. We may remember incidentally that Odin did not possess the mead of inspiration until he had stolen it from the giants, and that its making had as much to do with the Vanir as with the Aesir (see pp. 40–1). The practice of a king sitting on the mound of some dead ancestor, mentioned more than once in sagas and poems, may be seen, as an extension of this idea, for from the mound he could obtain wisdom and counsel from those within the earth.²

Perhaps we should regard stories of the living being shut inside the mounds of the dead as something connected with memories of the Vanir rather than as part of the cult of Odin. The most vivid of such accounts is found in the poem Helgakvi?a, where the princess Sigrun joyfully enters the mound of her dead husband, and clasps him again in death. Notes which accompany the poem state that the lovers Helgi and Sigrun were believed to have been reborn, and to have lived more than once in the world. Here we have the idea of a wife dying with her husband which appears to differ from the traditions of suttee which we have associated with the cult of Odin. In these the wife died usually by strangling before her body was burned, and she was not said to be reborn into this world, but to join her husband or lover in the realm of the gods. Such a distinction may explain the strange words spoken of Brynhild in the Poetic Edda, when she was determined to be burned along with the dead Sigurd:

Delay her not longer from dying,

that born again she may never be.

5. Thor and the Dead

So far no mention has been made of the god Thor in connexion with the dead. Yet we know the extent of his worship in the north, and the mark of the swastika or hammer on cremation urns and memorial stones suggests that he afforded his protection to his worshippers in the realm of death as in life. It seems as if both cremation and inhumation were associated with Thor. He had special links with fire, on account of his command over lightning, but in the later Viking age, when his worship still flourished, most of his worshippers were buried in the earth. Cremation lingered on for the most part in Sweden as the rite of the followers of Odin.