achievements of the heroes and the mighty power of the gods, there was something yet more powerful, the law of implacable fate, leading to Ragnarok and beyond.
In spite of this awareness of fate, indeed perhaps because of it, the picture of man’s qualities which emerges from the myths is a noble one. The gods are heroic figures, men writ large, who led dangerous, individualistic lives, yet at the same time were part of a closely-knit small group, with a firm sense of values and certain intense loyalties. They would give up their lives rather than surrender these values, but they would fight on as long as they could, since life was well worth while. Men knew that the gods whom they served could not give them freedom from danger and calamity, and they did not demand that they should. We find in the myths no sense of bitterness at the harshness and unfairness of life, but rather a spirit of heroic resignation: humanity is born to trouble, but courage, adventure, and the wonders of life are matters for thankfulness, to be enjoyed while life is still granted to us. The great gifts of the gods were readiness to face the world as it was, the luck that sustains men in tight places, and the opportunity to win that glory which alone can outlive death.
This attitude is an adult one, far removed from that of a spoilt child. It explains why the myths have still a strong attraction for us, bred in so different a world from that of our fore fathers, cut off from them by barriers of new learning and knowledge. The dangers of this view of the world lay in a tendency towards lack of compassion for the weak, an over-emphasis on material success, and arrogant self-confidence: indeed the heroic literature contains frank warning against such errors. It is easy to see how such a conception of life fitted in with the worship of the northern gods. To live fully and richly, a man needed boldness and wisdom, and these Odin could grant him. He must be a loyal member of his family and community, and in this Thor would give him support. He needed to win the struggle with the earth and make it fertile, and to beget male children, so that his family might continue after him, and for this he depended on the blessing of the Vanir. It is sometimes assumed that this heathen religion was essentially a man’s one, but we have seen that women had their place in it also. Indeed in view of the part which women play in the heroic legends and the sagas, we can scarcely doubt it. The early priestesses of the north, the women who were prepared to die by sacrificial rites, and the seeresses who helped to link men with the gods, all contributed something of great importance to the heathen faith. There was a place for woman’s gifts of divination and wise counsel, as well as that other side emphasized in the rites of the fertility cult.
The weaknesses of the heathen religion when it came into contact with Christianity were largely practical ones. There was no real central authority, no recognized body of doctrine to which to appeal, few deep certainties for which men were prepared to die. The worship of the old gods was a very individual affair, suiting the independent people who practised it. A man usually chose one of the deities for his special friend and protector, with whom he entered into a kind of partnership, and this did not prevent him from acknowledging the existence of the rest, or from taking part in communal ceremonies in which they were worshipped. The images of several gods stood side by side in the little local temples and in the great temple at Uppsala, even though there might from time to time be rivalry between the cults of the battle and fertility deities. When in the seventh century King Redwald of East Anglia provided one altar in his church to sacrifice to Christ, and another small one to offer victims to devils,1 he was not behaving childishly, or cunningly hoping to get the best of both worlds, but merely acting according to normal heathen custom, since acceptance of one god did not mean that one wholly rejected one’s neighbour’s deity. This indeed must have been one of the most difficult lessons for the new converts to Christianity to learn, and while they gained in single-mindedness, it is to be feared that they lost much of their old spirit of tolerance.
The upkeep of a temple was in general the business either of the ruler or of a family, and in the latter case the man who built the shrine and his descendants would act as its priests. Something of the nature of communities or colleges of priests must presumably have existed in the early days of heathenism, but we hear little of them in the sources which remain to us. In any case, the power of priesthood in the last resort depended largely on the approval of the king. Once he was converted to Christianity, the main prop of the old faith disappeared, and in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, according to Bede’s detailed records of conversion, there appears to have been very little genuine opposition to the new faith.
The believer in the old religion would find a great deal in Christianity which would seem to him familiar and right. The idea of a dying god was already known to him from the fertility cults, and the lament for Christ’s death on Good Friday followed by rejoicing in the Resurrection on Easter Day would follow a familiar pattern of death and renewal. The cycle of the Christian year was something to which he was already accustomed. Even the idea of God himself hanging upon a tree as a sacrifice was foreshadowed in the image of Odin upon Yggdrasill. Welcome also must have been the teaching that his new god would speak to him ‘as a man speaks with his friend’, for he had grown up with the idea that it was natural to seek counsel from Thor or Freyr, to visit the seeress who spoke out of a trance, uttering words of wisdom from the great powers to guide his steps in life. The idea of direct guidance in the early Church, often by men who act as ‘angels’ of God, is very marked in the pages of Bede. The Christian teaching concerning creation and doomsday moreover echoed ideas to which men had grown accustomed in their days of heathenism, and which were firmly established in their poetic tradition. The new faith was presented to them as a fighting one, and this they saw as natural and desirable. The picture of Christ as a warrior, combating the forces of evil, was a development and a reflection of their vague ideas about their Sky God. We can assume from the choice of carvings on the Gosforth Cross, where the fight with the monsters is placed alongside the Crucifixion, that this parallel was recognized by their teachers in the Christian faith. We see it too in the fine imaginative poem
At the same time the new faith was strong just where the old one had been weak. When in 625 King Edwin of Northumbria asked his nobles to tell him their reactions to the proposal that they should accept the Christian faith for their kingdom, one of them, according to Bede’s account,1 spoke of the brevity and uncertainty of life on earth, comparing it with the flight of a sparrow through the king’s hall on a winter afternoon:
For a short time he is safe from the wintry storm, but after a little space he vanishes from your sight, back into the dark winter from which he came.
Such, he said, was man’s life here on earth, a short space in the warmth and light between the darkness that preceded his birth and the unknown into which he passed at death:
Of what went before and of what is to follow, we are utterly ignorant. If therefore this new faith can give us some greater certainty, it justly deserves that we should follow it.
Whether these words were in truth spoken in Edwin’s hall in Northumbria does not greatly matter. Here Bede has caught the authentic voice of the heathen Northumbrian, faced with a cold and hostile world, and has put into memorable words his urgent questionings. In the seventh century in northern England, it must indeed have seemed that light and joy were momentary things, and that men were under the constant threat of violence and a return to chaos. Not long after the meeting in the hall, the hopeful kingdom of King Edwin, won with such determination and courage from his enemies after years of exile, was to be shattered by invasion from heathen Mercia. There was a deep longing among thinking people for a clearer message and for a greater authority than the old religion could give them, for an answer to the question ‘Why are we here ?’, for something which would endure in spite of threats of disintegration and loss of all the material goods for which they struggled so hard and, it often seemed, so unavailingly.
The power of the Christian religion lay also in the welding together of the different aspects of the heathen faith into one united whole, with a God who was the father of all men, not the fickle All-Father of Asgard, and with Christ as their heroic leader. The new heroism of the cloister and the wilderness and the missionary journey – with martyrdom, perhaps, at the end – was open to those who could find no full satisfaction in the life of a warrior. There had been a striving in the old religion to find a link between heaven and earth, through the shaman who could travel between the worlds, but now men were given a new link in the incarnation of Christ, something for which the ancient faith had no parallel. All this must have been profoundly exciting and satisfying for the thinking convert. As for the unthinking, of whom there were many, it was largely a matter of new ceremonies replacing the old. ‘They have taken away the ancient rites and customs, and how the new ones are to be attended to, nobody knows,’ was the lament of the country people against the monks, recorded in Bede’s
