Gods and Myths of Northern Europe

Thor does not seem to have been specially associated with the burial within a mound, as was Freyr. We have no traditions in the literature of his ‘death’, and his establishment of certain funeral rites, as in the case of Freyr and Odin. It is worth noting that the famous worshipper of Thor long remembered in Iceland, Thorolf of Most, was not thought to have remained in his mound after death. It was believed by his kindred that he had entered the mountains near his home, and that they would join him there. This is confirmed by the tale of a shepherd, recorded in Eyrbyggja Saga, who, after the death of Thorolf’s son by drowning, claimed to have seen the hill Holyfell standing open, and Thorstein and his crew being welcomed inside by Thorolf amid general rejoicing. In Landnamabok such a belief is mentioned regarding certain other mountains in Iceland. The people who are said to have believed that they would ‘die into the hills’ were all connexions of Thorolf by ties of kinship or marriage, so that it seems as if here we have a family belief, perhaps brought over from Norway by the pioneer Thorolf himself.¹

As well as building the temple to Thor when he arrived in Iceland, Thorolf also established the sanctity of the hill Holyfell standing behind Thor’s Ness. No man, he said, should look upon it unwashed, and no living thing should be killed on it. Evidently those who dwelled on the Ness and who were under Thor’s protection were to pass into this holy hill after death. Such a conception is closely linked with the importance of the family. Like the idea of the dwelling within the burial mound or the departure over the sea, it emphasizes the significance of man’s link with his ancestors, of the continuance of the family rather than the individual, and the importance of one particular sacred locality. The worship of Thor and Freyr is suited to life in a settled community, and in this differs from the cult of Odin, whose cremation pyres might be raised on battlefields far from home.

6. The Dragon and the Dead

No study of the conception of the dead in Germanic mythology would be complete without some mention of the powerful image of the fiery dragon. He was regarded as the guardian of the burial mound, and is so described in the Old English poem Beowulf:

Ancient in years, he mounts guard over the heathen gold; yet he is not one whit the better for it.

2276–7

In this poem we have an incomparable picture of the monster, brooding over his treasure in a megalithic stone chamber inside a burial mound. When one cup is removed from his hoard by an intruder, his rage is terrible, and he sallies forth on a punitive expedition, in the form of an incendiary raid against the inhabitants of the land:

Then did the visitant spit forth embers, and burn up the bright dwellings; the flaming ray wrought mischief to men, for the enemy flying through the air would leave nothing alive… He encompassed the people of the land with burning, with fire and flame.

2312–22

It was in a battle with this monster, to save his people, that the hero-king Beowulf lost his own life, although he killed the dragon before he himself died from the effects of its fiery breath and sharp teeth.

The vivid description of the dragon in the Anglo-Saxon poem is to some extent corroborated by the dragon set on the king’s great shield found in the Sutton Hoo ship-grave. The long teeth, folded wings, and pointed tail can be clearly made out in the stylized and yet powerful figure of the monster. According to the Anglo- Saxon Chronicle for the year 793, lights in the sky were described as fiery dragons, and taken for a portent of calamity. This was presumably a display of the aurora borealis, but identification with the northern lights does not explain why the dragon in particular was associated with fire, and also with the graves of the dead. It would however be a natural image for devouring death, and in particular for the greedy fire, swallowing up the dead man and his treasures. The evidence of the Asthall Barrow in Oxfordshire,¹ where, according to archaeological findings, an elaborate cremation burial was held as late as the seventh century, reminds us that the Anglo-Saxons as well as the Scandinavians had the opportunity to watch cremation rites and to hear descriptions of them well into the Christian period. Beowulf gives us the most vivid account in the early literature of the north of a great funeral pyre blazing after a battle:

The mightiest of bale-fires rolled up to the clouds, and roared before the mound. Heads melted; closed wounds, terrible gashes of the body, burst open when the blood spurted forth. Fire, greediest of spirits, devoured all those whom war had carried off from both peoples; their flower had perished.

1119–24

Even after cremation of the dead was given up, there is reason to believe that there was ritual burning of the dead within the grave. We have for instance evidence from Stapenhill in Staffordshire, a cemetery of early Anglo- Saxon date, where there were five normal cremation burials, and also a number of inhumation graves with clear signs of burning, encircled by charcoal and blackened earth.² Another Anglo-Saxon cemetery, at Kettering, had normal cremation burials together with inhumation burials enclosed between large stones, bearing marks of fire.³ Similar evidence has been discovered in cemeteries of the Germanic peoples on the Continent. Salin excavated Alamannic cemeteries in France, and found clear signs of burning and of ceremonial fires at Villey-Saint-Etienne and elsewhere.¹ Later this practice was continued and hallowed by the Church, for charcoal was placed in graves, sometimes mixed with incense, as a sign of purification. Whether the earlier use of fire in the grave was connected with the worship of Thunor or of Woden in Anglo-Saxon England our present knowledge is insufficient to decide, but there is no doubt that fire as a funeral symbol continued to be important even when cremation was no longer the accepted burial rite.

The fiery dragon plays no great part in Scandinavian mythology. When the dragon appears in Old Norse poetry and saga he is usually depicted as a serpent. We hear only occasionally of his wings and his power to breathe out fire. The image of the dragon who is the source of fire in Old English literature may be an instance of a mythical figure who has emerged as a result of ritual at the grave. In any case, he has been developed by poets and artists into a creature of such vigour that when we read his description in Beowulf it is as if we were given an eye-witness account of his appearance among men. Both in England and Scandinavia the dragon came to be regarded as the guardian of the grave mound, watching over its treasures. Sometimes it is implied that he is to be identified with the dead man buried in the mound, and in some of the late legendary sagas it is said that a man after death became a dragon and guarded the treasure which he had taken into the howe with him. The essential image however appears to be one of devouring death. At the Alamannic cemetery of Oberflacht, the tree coffins preserved by unusual soil conditions were carved with a serpent-dragon extended over the lid, triumphant over the dead within. In the poem Voluspa, there is mention of a flying dragon Ni?hoggr, ‘corpse-tearer’, who bore away the dead on his pinions, and there seems little doubt from his grim name that he was visualized as the devourer of corpses.

The conception of the flying dragon undoubtedly came from the East, and to some extent we can even trace the road by which he travelled, in the company of the Roman armies who carried the flying dragon as their banner and brought it into Roman Britain.¹ But the dragon would not have been welcomed and endowed with such vigorous life had he not fitted in with existing ritual concerning the dead. The serpent-dragon, of which the creature Fafnir, slain by Sigurd the Volsung, may be taken as a typical example, has left his mark in the serpentine ornament and the constantly reiterated snake-motif upon memorial stones raised over the dead. The snake as a symbol of the world of the dead is as recurrent in the art of the north as in its literature.

The dark underworld ruled by Hel as pictured by Snorri in the Prose Edda is very much a literary abstraction. But behind this there is a series of glimpses of the grave as the dark dwelling of corpses and serpents, a place of horror and bitter cold and stench and rotting treasures, preserved for us in the Edda poems and in Saxo. Sometimes these pictures are linked with the idea of punishment for sin, but they are sufficiently powerful in their own right to be accepted as something more than a reflection of Christian teaching about hell. The northern heathen was by no means immune from the fear of the devouring fire and the engulfing grave. The solutions offered by the great gods – temporary forgetfulness from Odin, belief in rebirth and continuation of the family from Freyr, protective strength and a sense of order provided by Thor – were not in themselves sufficient to silence the threat of the dragon and the monsters. This is made abundantly clear by the unforgettable picture of the gods themselves falling under the power of death, as in the tradition of Ragnarok and the death of Balder. When Balder died, the horse of Odin carried its rider down to the underworld to