Gods and Myths of Northern Europe

bring him back to the world of the gods. Balder was found in the hall of Hel, yet the plan for his resurrection failed utterly. He was never restored to life again, and evidence from the earlier poetry indicates that this omission is not due to Snorri. Balder was the son of Odin, and by a surprising twist, typically Icelandic in its irony, the god of the dead was himself defeated by the relentless law of mortality.

Chapter 7 - The Enigmatic Gods

… godlike Shapes, and Forms

Excelling human; princely Dignities,

And Powers that erst in Heaven sat on thrones,

Though of their names in Heavenly records now

Be no memorial.

Paradise Lost, 1

Looking back over the ground already traversed, we are aware of three great figures towering over the rest and dominating the northern heaven, those of the gods Odin, Thor, and Freyr. The mighty goddess Freyja stands beside her brother, with Frigg, Odin’s consort, as her shadowy and elusive companion. Fading further into the background can be discerned Njord, father of Freyr, and Tyr, once a god of war and ruler of the heavens. What we know of the heathen Germans leads us to believe that they worshipped a similar group of deities: Wodan, Donar, Nerthus, and Tiwaz.

But when we have mentioned the great gods, we realize that these do not by any means exhaust the inhabitants of Asgard, as Snorri presented them. Many so-called gods play a prominent part in the myths, and others are mentioned briefly by name, but we search in vain for any established cult connected with them in heathen times, while if we try to resolve the difficulty by defining them as literary creations they remain puzzling and contradictory. A number, as we have seen, appear to be associated with the cult of the Vanir, such as Ing and Scyld, Ull and Byggvir, and the goddesses Gefion and Skadi. Some may originally have been heroes who in course of time were promoted by antiquaries into heaven. Some may have begun as abstractions used by the poets, and have gradually developed a literary personality of their own. Some may have been imported into the north from foreign sources, and ultimately gained a place in Asgard through the poets and storytellers.

It is not proposed in this chapter to examine all the opposing theories which have grown up around the enigmatic figures of the lesser gods, nor even to attempt to discuss all the names on Snorri’s list. Some of the more interesting claimants to a place in Asgard will be dealt with briefly here and there will be fuller treatment of three outstanding figures who cannot be lightly passed over, Heimdall, Loki, and Balder.

1. Bragi and Idun

Bragi deserves mention, as Snorri calls him the god of poetry. In Lokasenna he is accused by Loki of avoiding battle and of skulking among the benches. This may be based on the part played by Bragi in tenth-century court poetry, where he is depicted helping to prepare Valhalla for fresh arrivals and welcoming the kings who have been slain in battle to the hall of Odin. On the other hand Loki also refers to Bragi slaying his wife’s brother, which means that he played a part in some story unknown to us.

There is record of a poet called Bragi Boddason who lived in the ninth century. It is hardly likely that he was turned into a mythological figure soon after his death, nor indeed that he was called after a god. It is possible that Bragi was a nickname; the word is used to mean poetry in general, and bragarmal is poetic diction, while Snorri declares that this meaning comes from the god’s name. The word however has another meaning, that of ‘leader’ or ‘foremost one’. When a dead king’s funeral feast was held, the cup from which men drank the funeral ale in his honour, and over which solemn oaths might be sworn, was called the bragarfull, or ‘cup of Bragi’. This means ‘the leader’s cup’, and it could have taken its name either from the chief who was dead or from Odin, foremost of the gods, who would be honoured at funerals in his capacity of god of the dead. Bragi himself is sometimes called the Long-bearded One, and this is one of the titles of Odin. It seems possible indeed that he is no more than a reflection of Odin, the god of poetry and inspiration, and that one of Odin’s many names has turned through a misunderstanding of the poets into a separate deity. The term bragarfull applied to the funeral drink could account for Bragi’s association with banquets in Valhalla, where he gradually developed into a prototype of the human poet in the king’s hall on earth.

Bragi’s wife was said to be the goddess Idun. It was she who guarded the apples of immortality which kept the gods for ever young. Snorri recounts how Loki was forced to steal Idun and her apples for the giant Thiazi, and then to recover them to save the gods from old age and death. Idun is a somewhat colourless figure (though, as her brother is mentioned in Lokasenna, presumably at least one more story about her was known) and she does not seem to be fully at home in the northern myths. It has been suggested that she is a literary borrowing, either from the Celtic west or classical sources, and that her golden apples are an imitation of those in the Garden of the Hesperides. Apples and nuts from the land of promise, renewing youth and freeing those who ate them from the tyranny of time, are a familiar feature in Irish sagas, and one that goes back to an early date. It may be noted that on one occasion Loki turned Idun and her apples into a nut, and escaped with it in his claws as he flew in the form of a bird (see p. 39). Here then we have the association between eternal youth and nuts and apples which is found in the Irish stories.

Conceivably however the association of fruit, and particularly the apple, with the gods was already present in Germanic heathenism. Fruit and nuts have been found in early graves, both in southern England and on the Continent, and may have had some symbolic meaning. Nuts are still a recognized symbol of fertility in south- western England. We know too that apples were connected with the Vanir, since it was golden apples which Skirnir offered to Gerd when he went to woo her for Freyr.¹ Again in the Volsung cycle, Frigg gave an apple to the king who sat upon a mound, when he prayed for a son. In an eleventh-century poem by Thorbiorn Brunarson we may note the strange expression ‘apples of Hel’. The poet says that his wife desires his death; she wants him to live under the earth and provides apples of death for him, and the implication here is that the apple was thought of by the poet as the food of the dead. Moreover, in the Roman period, the goddess Nehalennia, whose shrine stood on the Island of Walcheren, was depicted as a woman sitting in a chair with a bowl of what appear to be apples beside her. She, as we have seen, is linked with the Mothers, and with the goddesses of plenty, the Vanir.¹ Thus while the apple is found as a symbol of perpetual youth in both Old Norse and Irish tradition, we cannot necessarily assume it to be a case of late imitation of Celtic ideas by Scandinavian storytellers.

There is moreover one significant difference in the Norse story of the stealing of the apples and the incident of the fruit stolen from the tree in the Irish story of the Sons of Tuireann, from which it has been suggested that the Idun story has been derived. We are never told that Idun’s golden fruit grows upon a tree of the gods, but she seems to have them in a box or bowl, so that she and her treasures could be carried off together. The symbol of the apple of the gods is in any case an ancient one, which must have originated in the Near East, the area from which the cultivated apple-tree came. Its cultivation in northern Europe goes back at least to the time of the Romans, but in the north the native variety of the fruit is small and bitter. In the figure of Idun – given as wife to the god of inspiration and poetry – we must have a dim reflection of an old symbol: that of the guardian goddess of the life- giving fruit of the other world.

2. Mimir and Hoenir