Introduction
The Norse World
Cosmology
The Pantheon
Sources
The Literary Structure of the Myths
Approach
THE MYTHS
1 The Creation
2 The War of the Aesir and Vanir
3 The Building of Asgard’s Wall
4 Lord of the Gallows
5 The Song of Rig
6 The Mead of Poetry
7 Loki’s Children and the Binding of Fenrir
8 The Theft of Idun’s Apples
9 The Marriage of Njord and Skadi
10 The Treasures of the Gods
11 Skirnir’s Journey
12 The Lay of Grimnir
13 The Necklace of the Brisings
14 The Lay of Thrym
15 The Lay of Vafthrudnir
16 Thor’s Journey to Utgard
17 The Lay of Hymir
18 Hyndla’s Poem
19 Thor’s Duel with Hrungnir
20 Odin and Billing’s Daughter
21 Gylfi and Gefion
22 The Lay of Harbard
23 The Ballad of Svipdag
24 Thor and Geirrod
25 The Lay of Loddfafnir
26 Otter’s Ransom
27 The Lay of Alvis
28 Balder’s Dreams
29 The Death of Balder
30 Loki’s Flyting
31 The Binding of Loki
32 Ragnarok
Notes
Bibliography
Glossary
Acknowledgments
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PENGUIN BOOKS
Kevin Crossley-Holland was educated at Bryanston School and St Edmund Hall, Oxford. He was Gregory Fellow in Poetry at the University of Leeds from 1969 to 1971, editorial director of Victor Gollancz (1972–7) and Lecturer in Anglo-Saxon Literature and Culture for the Tufts University London program, from its inception in 1967 until 1978. He has recently returned from Minnesota, where he was Fulbright Visiting Scholar at St Olaf College (1990) and Endowed Chair in the Humanities and Fine Arts at the University of St Thomas (1991–5).
His translations of Old English poetry are brought together in The Anglo-Saxon World (1982), and he has also translated The Exeter Book Riddles for Penguin Classics (revised edition, 1993). His publications include six volumes of poetry, the most recent being The Language of Yes (1996), and two anthologies: The Oxford Book of Travel Verse (1986) and Folk Tales of the British Isles (1986). His books for children include Beowulf (1982), British Folk Tales (1987) and Storm, which was awarded the Carnegie Medal for 1985. Crossley-Holland has collaborated with a number of composers, including Sir Arthur Bliss, William Mathias and Nicola LeFanu, with whom he has written two operas, The Green Children and The Wildman.
Kevin Crossley-Holland has two adult sons and two young daughters, and he lives in Norfolk.
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First published by André Deutsch Ltd 1980
Published in Penguin Books as The Norse Myths 1982
Copyright © Kevin Crossley-Holland, 1980
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-0-141-93741-0
Fearlessness is better than a faint-heart for any man who puts his nose out of doors. The length of my life and the day of my death were fated long ago.
Anonymous lines from For Scirnis
They say miracles are past, and we have our philosophical persons, to make modern and familiar, things supernatural and causeless. Hence is it, that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge, when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear.
William Shakespeare,
All’s Well That Ends Well, II, iii, 1–6
I think Scandinavian Paganism, to us here, is more interesting than any other. It is, for one thing, the latest; it continued in these regions of Europe till the eleventh century; 800 years ago the Norwegians were still worshippers of Odin. It is interesting also as the creed of our fathers; the men whose blood still runs in our veins, whom doubtless we still resemble in so many ways.
Thomas Carlyle
for my mother
What We Write is partly chosen for us, partly of our own choosing; and however rapidly it may be committed to paper, a book may be a very long time in the making. My interest in myth, legend and folktale was first whetted by the stream of stories that I heard, night after night, from my parents, and then by the way in which they encouraged an awareness of religious beliefs past and present. I began to be specifically interested in Germanic tradition after my father played and recorded the first reconstruction of the Sutton Hoo harp, and after inheriting an Anglo-Saxon burial urn from my grandfather. Later, at Oxford, I started to translate Old English poetry and in this was given great encouragement and assistance by my tutor at St Edmund Hall, and later my collaborator, Bruce Mitchell. Anglo-Saxon studies lead naturally to a curiosity about the whole jigsaw of contemporary North West European culture, and the invitation of Phyllis Hunt at Faber and Faber to edit The Faber Book of Northern Legends stimulated me to read all the more widely in the three great bodies of early Germanic literature – Norse myths, Icelandic sagas and Germanic heroic poems. These seem to be the stepping stones that led to the writing of this book and, in making acknowledgments, it seems right to begin by offering my thanks to the people associated with them.
During the last three years I have received a great deal of literary, scholarly, practical and personal help. First, I must renew my thanks to my father for working through almost all the typescript with minute attention and making a substantial number of valuable critical suggestions. This was not the work of one morning and I am fortunate that my sternest and best critic is also so generous with his time. I must also thank Valerie and Adrian Kwaan for their most useful and supportive comments on early versions of the myths, and for helping me over the hurdle of finding a distinctive tone for my retellings. My two sons, Kieran and Dominic, have also read most of the myths; I have made use of their written and spoken commentaries and want them to know, too, that their unusual patience and understanding when I preferred work to play was a real contribution to the writing of this book.
Hermann Pálsson was kind enough to provide me with a copy of Sorla Thattr (Myth 13) when I had difficulty in tracking it down. Alan and Anne-Marie Caiger-Smith and Susan Stern drew my attention to, and lent me, pertinent material. Peter Redgrove and Penelope Shuttle, authors of The Wise Wound, went to considerable lengths to elucidate a feature of Myth 24; I am most grateful to them for permission to quote from their personal letter to me. Susanne Kurz generously helped me with the translation of a passage by Georges Dumézil. Barbara Leonie Picard did her utmost to track down the origin of the story ‘How Loki Outwitted a Giant’ that forms part of her Tales of the Norse Gods and Heroes (pp. 120–5), written nearly thirty years ago; neither she nor I have had any luck and I will be indebted to any reader who can let me know the source of this myth.
It would have been impossible to write the introduction and notes without drawing on some of the ideas and words of others far more deeply-versed in the Norse world than I, and I have made specific acknowledgments within the text. I have used copyright material from the following books and am most grateful to the authors and publishers in question: The Poetic Edda translated by Henry Adams Bellows (The American–Scandinavian Foundation); The Vikings by Johannes Brondsted, translated by Kalle Skov (Penguin Books); Mythes et Dieux des Germains by Georges Dumézil (Librairie Ernest Leroux); Myth and Reality by Mircea Eliade (Allen and Unwin); Gods and Myths of Northern Europe by H. R. Ellis Davidson (Penguin Books); The Skalds by Lee M. Hollander (University of Michigan Press); A History of the Vikings by Gwyn Jones (Oxford University Press); H. Mattingly’s translation of Tacitus on Britain and Germany (Penguin Books); Hermann Pálsson’s translation of the Eyrbyggja Saga (Southside Publishers); E. O. G. Turville-Petre’s Myth and Religion of the North (Weidenfeld and Nicolson); Dorothy Whitelock’s translation (with David C. Douglas and Susie I. Tucker) of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (Eyre and Spottiswoode); and The Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson, translated by Jean I. Young (University of California Press). I have lifted a few lines from my short history of the Anglo-Saxons, Green Blades Rising (André Deutsch); I have also quoted from my own translation of Beowulf (D. S. Brewer). I have had constant recourse to the translations of the Elder Edda and Prose Edda listed in the bibliography and, in writing my retellings, may have unconsciously lifted a phrase from them here and there.
The Arts Council of Great Britain have generously supported the writing of this book with grants in 1976 and 1978; I am especially grateful to Charles Osborne, Jacqueline Falk and Alan Brownjohn in this connexion. I have also received financial assistance from Icelandair and from Regent Holidays, where I must thank Mr H. Sigurdsson and Mr J. Noel Cairns respectively for their good offices; between them, they helped to make it possible for me, in the company of my two sons, to have a long look at the island where most of the myths were finally recorded, and I must also thank my mother for giving such a generous contribution of money, time and energy to this cause. In Deborah Rogers in London and Betty Anne Clarke in New York, I have two agents outstanding in their warmth and professionalism; I am grateful to them both for their judicious mixture of care, chivvying and confidence! I am indebted to my two sympathetic English editors, Diana Athill and Esther Whitby, for offering both the clearest understanding of my aims (and hopes!) and the most meticulous attention to detail. I should also like to thank the staffs of the British Library and the London Library for their knowledgeable and patient help. The preparation of the typescript involved a considerable amount of work; I am most grateful to Rosemary Crossley-Holland for accomplishing it all with such accuracy, speed and good humour, and trust that our association has strengthened rather than strained a family link.
That leaves me with two people to whom I owe a special debt. My American editor, Wendy Wolf, has gone far beyond the call of duty in furbishing me with detailed criticism of the draft of the typescript. Her wide-ranging knowledge of the subject, sensitivity in mixing criticism and praise and, not least, speed, are what any author should hope for and – writing as an ex-publisher – I am aware how lucky I am to have found them.
Since our first meeting in Iceland some two years ago, Hildegund Kübler has offered me immeasurable support. We have regularly discussed this book’s structure and style and, above all, the meaning of the myths. Her personal understanding and practical help enabled me to press on when it would otherwise have been impossible; I am sincerely grateful to her.
The Dramatic Entry in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 793 reads:
In this year dire portents appeared over Northumbria and sorely frightened the people. They consisted of immense whirlwinds and flashes of lightning, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the air. A great famine immediately followed those signs, and a little after that in the same year, on 8 June, the ravages of heathen men miserably destroyed God’s church on Lindisfarne, with plunder and slaughter.
These heathen men were Vikings, and with the destruction of the great monastery at Lindisfarne – an act which shook Christendom – they made their first substantial impact on the occident. For almost the next three hundred years, the Vikings were the most exciting and influential force in Europe and beyond; wherever they went, they took their beliefs in the old gods and it was their poets who forged the myths in the earliest versions that have come down to us.
The word Viking, meaning ‘bay-men’ or ‘fighting men’ or ‘settling men’, refers collectively to the Danes, Norwegians and Swedes, and the ‘Viking Age’ describes the period 780–1070 during which the Norsemen made a remarkable three-prong thrust south, east and west. There were two major reasons for this expansion: Scandinavia was overpopulated and the system of primogeniture forced younger sons into trying their fortunes overseas; and expanding trade routes (for example the development of Frisian trade and the increasing use of the Rhine) attracted Viking merchants and pirates. But one feels that the natural disposition of the Vikings, adventurous and aggressive and scornful of death, must have given added momentum to the impulse to raid and trade, conquer and colonise.
Sea power was crucial to the success of Viking enterprise. The Vikings depended on navigational skills and superb ships – ships which were one of the great practical and artistic achievements of pre-Conquest Europe. Clinker-built (with iron rivets linking the overlapping planks) on a keel plank that swept up into a stem at either end, they were both beautiful in line and very pliable in rough waters. They were propelled by oarsmen, perhaps fifteen or sixteen on either side in a fighting ship sitting in an enclosed deck, and by a square sail. The elaborately carved prows were decorated with a figurehead, more often than not a dragon’s head, and the warriors’ coloured shields hung in a row over the railings.
Sailing south, the Vikings raided and then colonised Scotland, Ireland and half of England where they had the misfortune to run into one of the most remarkable men in world history and the only king whom the English have called Great, Alfred of Wessex. They overran and settled Friesland and France as far south as the Loire; they attacked and captured Lisbon, Cadiz and Seville; for a while they commandeeṙed the Camargue and, moving east, left their mark on the north of Italy and sacked Pisa; and some Vikings, previously settled in Normandy, pushed on to Sicily where there are still a number of men and women with the fair skin and fair reddish hair of the Norsemen.
Heading east from the Baltic, the Vikings sailed up the River Volkhov to Novgorod. From there they humped their boats overland on pine rollers to the source of the Dnieper and so made their way to Kiev, the Black Sea and Constantinople, where the Emperor’s own guard consisted entirely of Vikings. Others worked their way from Novgorod to the Volga and sailed south to the Caspian Sea and Baghdad, carrying with them, in the words of Mohammed Mugaddosi, an Arab geographer writing in about 985, ‘sables, squirrel, ermine, black and white foxes, marten, beaver, arrows and swords, wax and birch bark, fish teeth and fish lime, amber, honey, goat skins and horse hides, hawks, acorns, hazel nuts, cattle and Slavonic slaves’. An Arab diplomat and diarist, Ibn Fadlan, described the Vikings he encountered on the Volga in 922:
I saw the Rus when they arrived on their trading mission and anchored at the River Atul [Volga]. Never had I seen people of more perfect physique; they are tall as date-palms, and reddish in colour. They wear neither coat nor mantle, but each man carries a cape which covers one half of his body, leaving one hand free … Each woman carries on her bosom a container made of iron, silver, copper or gold – its size and substance depending on her man’s wealth.
The ‘Rus’ or Swedish Vikings to whom Ibn Fadlan refers gave their name to Russia.
Sailing west, the Vikings (mainly west Norwegians) colonised Iceland in the late ninth and early tenth centuries. The manner in which a Viking decided where to settle is described on p. xxxv. From Iceland, the Vikings pushed west to Greenland which was only called ‘Green’ by its discoverer, Eric the Red, who founded a colony at Brattahlid, in order to entice others to follow him. And from there, they intrepidly sailed still further west. That Leif Ericsson reached Newfoundland and New England in the United States, and found ‘fields of wild wheat growing there, and vines’, and that his discovery quickly led to further exploration and short-lived colonisation, is not a matter of mere speculation. The Vinland Sagas and archaeological discoveries (notably at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland) have conclusively established the existence of Norse settlements there around the year 1000 – some five centuries before Columbus set sail from Portugal and ‘discovered’ America.
The Norsemen cut such a dash as gangers and, indeed, gangsters that it would be easy to get them out of focus. The truth is that most of them lived peaceful lives, hunting, fishing, and above all farming, for most of the time. Both in Scandinavia and wherever they settled, their society was based on a very clear social structure with three strata: earls or warriors, peasants, and serfs. ‘The Song of Rig’ (Myth 5) tells how Heimdall created the races of men and provides a good deal of information about their respective life styles.
As the eddaic poem Rigsthula shows, the serfs had a bad time of it. They were manual labourers and they were never free. Thrall and his wife Thir and their nineteen children would have lived in a single stinking hut, made with timber or with turf and clay, shared with such animals as they possessed – cattle certainly, perhaps sheep or goats or pigs, and maybe a cat or a dog. No patron god guarded the lives of these most luckless members of the community.
The great majority of the Norsemen, however, undoubtedly belonged to the peasant class whose patron was Thor. They were smallholders and freemen. Archaeological evidence shows that, at least towards the end of the Viking period, they lived in two or more buildings – a pair of parallel long-houses sometimes supplemented by a barn or two, making a three- or even four-sided complex with a courtyard in the middle.
The picture in Rigsthula of the peasant’s staple diet can be supplemented from references in the sagas and archaeological discoveries. Johannes Brøndsted has written:
It is fair to surmise that the Vikings’ daily diet included wholemeal bread made of rye; oat and barley porridge; fish (especially herrings); the meat of sheep, lamb, goat, horse, ox, calf, and pig; cheese, butter, and cream; and for drink, beer, mead, and (among the wealthy) wine. Whale meat, seal meat, and the meat of the polar bear were important foods particularly in Norway and Iceland. Boiled meat seems to have been preferred to roasted … Broths made from the various meats must have been a familiar dish; and the Vikings were also practised in the methods of drying meat and fish. Gamebirds, too, were an extra item in the Viking diet. The most common vegetables were cabbages and onions; and apples, berries, and hazelnuts were abundant. Honey was much in use, largely as the basis for the manufacture of sweet fermented mead … In those countries remote from the sea but well forested, much of the Viking sustenance came from hunting e lk, deer, wild boar, and bear. Hares, geese, and chickens were other popular items on the menu and, in the far north, reindeer and bison.
Food was preserved for winter consumption with ice, with whey, and with salt either taken from saltpans or extracted from kelp.
Rigsthula gives an elaborate picture of the fine halls, refined lives and sophisticated activities of the aristocratic third class, the earls or warriors whose patron was Odin. They are above all distinguished by their wealth, expressed in terms of followers, treasure, ships, and estates that passed from eldest son to eldest son. Like their inferiors in the social system, the warriors were as a rule devoted and responsible family men and customarily spent the long winters at home; the attention paid in the myths to feasting in Valhalla doubtless reflects the time given over to feasting in the halls of warriors. But it was these same men who, in the summer, assembled crews bent on exploration, trade or piracy, and they who were celebrated by the scaldic poets. The immense significance of the poet, the carrier of tradition, in an oral culture, is discussed in Note 6 and elsewhere.
When the Germanic tribesmen first migrated to Europe and north into Scandinavia, they chose their leaders, according to Tacitus, for their valour and noble birth. The man who could claim divine descent made a powerful contender, and it is this kind of power struggle that underlies ‘Hyndla’s Poem’ (Myth 18) in which the goddess Freyja assists her human lover, Ottar, to establish his lineage. It was only as the monarchy accrued greater power and significance that it became hereditary (though Iceland spurned kingship altogether and was ruled from the first by a union of chieftains); ‘The Lay of Grimnir’ (Myth 12) exemplifies this more orderly tradition.
We glimpse in the myths, as in the sagas, the isolated, physically demanding lives experienced by most Norsemen. One farm was often a hard day’s ride from the next, as suggested by ‘The Theft of Idun’s Apples’, ‘Thor’s Journey to Utgard’ and ‘Otter’s Ransom’; a traveller was less likely to meet other humans than some of the birds and animals that abound in the myths – a deer, an otter, a wild boar, a wolf, or at least a squirrel, an eagle, a raven. Conditions on the road were frequently demanding, taking the traveller over fells, round a glacier, or across a wilderness – journeys made all the more hazardous by the chance of prolonged violent snowstorms in the mountains and dust storms in the desert; for half the year, moreover, the light only lasted for a few hours each day.
Such cloistered circumstances strengthened the importance of the family unit. A family needed to be self-reliant and its members rallied to one another’s support in times of trouble. If a man was slighted or, worse, injured or killed, the offender (as the sagas so graphically describe) could not hope to get away with it. Tacitus attributed very similar principles to Germanic tribesmen in the first century:
A man is bound to take up the feuds as well as the friendships of father or kinsmen. But feuds do not continue unreconciled. Even homicide can be atoned for by a fixed number of cattle or sheep, and the satisfaction is received by the whole family. This is much to the advantage of the community, for private feuds are peculiarly dangerous side by side with liberty.
If, however, feuding families could not settle a dispute between themselves, it was brought before a court. An ordeal might be used to determine guilt and punishment consisted either of compensatory payment or, in the case of very substantial crime, outlawry or death.
Tacitus’s reference to friendship is pertinent too. A judicious Norse family cultivated friendships both for their own sake and because a large group of people loyal to one another was less vulnerable than a small one. One special relationship existed within the family itself: a maternal uncle was especially responsible for the welfare of his nephew. This bond is discussed in Note 4 and may explain why Odin learned the nine magic songs that enabled him to secure the divine mead of poetry from his uncle, the son of Bolthor.
Both within the family and in the eyes of the law, a man and a woman had equal rights, and the outspoken woman, rather more determined than the menfolk surrounding her, is a striking and familiar character in the sagas. The woman is also prominent as volva or shamaness, able to go into a trance, send her spirit on a journey to obtain hidden knowledge, and answer the practical questions about social welfare and marriage prospects of the community gathered to listen to her. Freyja in her role as shamaness, going from hall to hall teaching witchcraft to the Aesir (Myth and Note 2), clearly reflects these practices.
This superstitious, family-oriented existence is the background to ‘The Lay of Loddfafnir’ and the whole of Havamal (Myth and Note 25). This great compendium of aphorisms and advice on right conduct offers a commonsensical and sober (though sometimes witty) picture of the day to day life of the Norsemen, and it is a far cry from the heady image of Vikings on the rampage. Value life itself; censure naïveté; cherish and celebrate friendships; beware of treachery; practise moderation; be hospitable (but not too hospitable); try to win the fame and good name that will outlive you: these are the leitmotifs of Havamal.
One stanza in that poem reads: ‘Cattle die, kinsmen die, I myself shall die, but there is one thing I know never dies: the reputation we leave behind at our death.’ A desire for fame, limited though it may be, was of crucial importance to the Norseman. In the absence of beliefs about a timeless afterlife, it represented his only hope of immortality. No Viking believed he could change his destiny, ordained as it was by the Norns who wove the fates of gods and men alike (Note 4) but, for all that, the way in which he lived his life was up to him. This sentiment is perfectly expressed by Skirnir in ‘Skirnir’s Journey’: ‘Fearlessness is better than a faint heart for any man who puts his nose out of doors. The length of my life and the day of my death were fated long ago.’
Since men who become embittered never win respect or admiration, those who sought fame did not rail at the undoubted hardship of their lives and the inevitability of death. Rather, they endured it or, even better, laughed at it. This accounts for the ironic tone in the fabric of the myths and explains, for example, the reaction of the gods when Tyr sacrificed his hand (Myth 7) in the interests of binding the wolf Fenrir. Men and women expected their share of trouble and the best of them attempted to use it, to rise above it and carve out a name for themselves through bravery and loyalty and generosity.
This fatalism, so fundamental to the Norsemen, is reflected in the myths. It was in the power of Odin and the Valkyries, not of men, to decide which slain warriors would be taken to Valhalla; the gold that Loki extracts from Andvari carries a curse with it; Odin knows that Balder’s death is fated and can do nothing to avert it; and Ragnarok itself, ‘the Destruction of the Powers’, is inescapable. The time must come when all creation will be destroyed by fire and flood.
Yet, in H. R. Ellis Davidson’s wise words:
In spite of this awareness of fate, or 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.
Reading the myths, we can identify the Norseman’s spirit and confidence, his boundless curiosity, extreme bravery, clannish loyalty, generosity and discipline; we can also detect his arrogance and lack of compassion, his cunning if not treachery (amply reflected in the figure of Loki), his ruthlessness and his cruelty.
The elaborate and intricately structured Norse cosmology starts with the very moment of creation. Ice from Niflheim in the north and fire from Muspellheim in the south meet in the vast chasm of Ginnungagap, and their fusion engenders life. The first two beings are a frost giant, Ymir, and a cow, Audumla. The cow licks a man out of the ice and his three grandsons are the gods Odin, Vili and Ve. As the first myth in the cycle tells, these three brothers kill the giant Ymir and from his body create nine worlds.
The Norsemen visualised the universe as a tricentric structure – like three plates set one above another with a space between each. On the top level was Asgard, the realm of the Aesir or warrior gods. This is where the gods and goddesses had their halls, situated within a mighty citadel the walls of which were built by a giant mason as part of a wager (Myth 3). This, too, is where Valhalla was situated, the huge hall that housed all the Einherjar, the dead warriors who fought each day and feasted each evening, awaiting Ragnarok, the battle at the end of time between gods and men, giants and monsters; and this was the site of that all-consuming battle, a vast plain called Vigrid that stretched one hundred and twenty leagues in every direction. But the Aesir were not the only inhabitants of this highest realm. On this level also lay Vanaheim, where the Vanir or fertility gods lived until they fought and then united with the Aesir (Myth 2); and Alfheim, the land of the light elves, was here too.
The second level was Midgard, the middle world inhabited by men. It was surrounded by an ocean so vast that, as our most important source, the thirteenth-century Icelander Snorri Sturluson says, ‘to cross it would strike most men as impossible’. Jormungand, the terrifying world serpent, lay in this ocean; he was so long that he encircled Midgard and bit on his own tail. The world of the giants, Jotunheim, lay either within Midgard (in the mountainous eastern part along the coast) as indicated on the map (see page xxi), or across the ocean; sources do not agree on this point. The giants’ citadel was called Utgard, the outer world. This is where Thor and his companions were taken for a ride by the magical and evil giant king, Utgard-Loki (Myth 16).
At this level, too, in the north of Midgard, there were dwarfs; they lived in Nidavellir (Dark Home) in caves and potholes, while somewhere below was Svartalfheim (Land of the Dark Elves). No valid distinction though can be drawn between the dwarfs and dark elves; they appear to have been interchangeable.
Asgard and Midgard were connected by a flaming rainbow bridge called Bifrost (Trembling Roadway). Snorri Sturluson wrote in ‘Gylfaginning’, which is a part of the Prose Edda: ‘You will have seen it but maybe you call it the rainbow. It has three colours and is very strong, and made with more skill and cunning than other structures.’ We know from the eddaic poem Vafthrudnismal that the River Iving, which never iced over, constituted the boundary between Asgard, the world of the gods and Jotunheim, the world of the giants; in a number of myths, moreover, gods and giants made an overland journey direct from Asgard to Jotunheim without passing through Midgard. How can they have done so? It would seem physically impossible unless we tilt the Asgard- and Midgard-levels so that, at one point, they actually touch each other! This kind of problem demonstrates the limitations of logic in trying to define precisely where the worlds stood in relation to one another. It is best simply to bear in mind that the structure of the universe was basically tricentric and assume that the Norsemen themselves were rather vague and unconcerned about more exact geography.
On the third level lay Niflheim, the world of the dead, nine days’ ride northwards and downwards from Midgard. Niflheim was a place of bitter cold and unending night; its citadel was Hel, a place with towering walls and forbidding gates presided over by the hideous female monster, half white and half black, of the same name. She is described in detail by Snorri Sturluson (see Myth 7 and passim). The Norsemen may have distinguished between the worlds of Hel and Niflheim; in Vafthrudnismal, it seems that evil men passed through Hel to die again in the world of Niflhel or Niflheim (Misty Hel).
The nine worlds were, then, Asgard, Vanaheim and Alfheim; Midgard, Jotunheim, Nidavellir and Svartalfheim; and Hel and Niflheim. If Hel and Niflheim comprised one world, however, the ninth world may have been Muspellheim, the land of fire. This region had no place in the tricentric structure of the universe and we can do no better than quote Snorri Sturluson:
The first world to exist, however, was Muspell in the southern hemisphere; it is light and hot and that region flames and burns so that those who do not belong to it and whose native land it is not, cannot endure it. The one who sits there at land’s end to guard it is called Surt; he has a flaming sword, and at the end of the world he will come and harry and will vanquish all the gods and burn the whole world with fire.
At Ragnarok, Surt is accompanied by the sons of Muspell; Snorri says that they ‘will form a host in themselves and that a very bright one’; but we do not hear about these fiery inhabitants of Muspellheim on any other occasion.
The axis of the three levels and nine worlds was the mighty ash tree, Yggdrasill (the meaning of the name is discussed in Note 4). This timeless tree, which seems to have had no known origin and which will survive Ragnarok, is so vast that, as Snorri says, ‘its branches spread out over the whole world and reach up over heaven’. Yggdrasill had three roots. One sunk into Asgard; under this root was the Well of Urd (Fate) guarded by the three Norns or goddesses of destiny, and this is where the gods gathered each day in council. The second root delved into Jotunheim; under this root was the Spring of Mimir (see Note 2), and its waters were a source of wisdom. Odin sacrificed one eye to drink from it and Heimdall, watchman of the gods, is said to have left his horn there until he needed it at Ragnarok. The third root plunged into Niflheim; under this root was the Spring of Hvergelmir. This was the source of eleven rivers and, near by, the dragon Nidhogg and other unnamed serpents gnawed at the root of the ash Yggdrasill.
Usually known as a Guardian Tree, Yggdrasill nourishes, and suffers from, the animals that inhabit it, feed on it and attack it. While the dragon Nidhogg gnaws the roots, deer and goats leap along the branches and tear off the new shoots; and a squirrel runs up and down the trunk, carrying insults from Nidhogg to an eagle who sits in the topmost branches, with a hawk perched between its eyes. The tree, moreover, drips dew so sweet that bees use it for the making of honey.
Yggdrasill does not only sustain animals. A stanza in the eddaic poem Svipdagsmal (Myth 23) mentions that the cooked fruit of Yggdrasill ensures safe childbirth. When Ragnarok draws near, it is said the ash tree will tremble and a man and a woman who hide within it, Lif and Lifthrasir, will survive the ensuing holocaust and flood. They stand alone at the end of one cycle and the beginning of another in the world of time and men.
But the tree that suffers, that cares for all living creatures and ensures continuity, is in turn sustained by the Norns, Urd (Fate), Skuld (Being) and Verdandi (Necessity). In a sense, therefore, the life not only of man but also of the guardian of men lies within their hands. Snorri Sturluson wrote:
It is said further that the Norns who live near the spring of Urd draw water from the spring every day, and along with it the clay that lies round about the spring, and they besprinkle the ash so that its branches shall not wither or decay.
The continuing tradition of the Guardian Tree is further discussed in Note 1.
A great many mythologies have a tree or column or mountain at the centre of the world. More specifically, the symbol of three cosmic regions connected by a tree that we find in Norse mythology also appears in Vedic Indian and Chinese mythologies. H. R. Ellis Davidson has written of Yggdrasill that
the fact that it formed a link between the gods, mankind, the giants, and the dead meant that it was visualised as a kind of ladder stretching up to heaven and downwards to the underworld. This conception of a road between the worlds is one which is familiar in the beliefs of the shamanistic religions.
The use of Yggdrasill for a shamanistic journey is the subject of Myth 4, in which Odin voluntarily hangs on the tree for nine nights, his side pierced with a spear, in order to learn the wisdom of the dead. And, indeed, the squirrel Ratatosk’s carrying of insults between the eagle and the serpent can be seen to represent both the division and the unity of heaven and hell.
Nine worlds encompassed by the tree (which so becomes a symbol of universality known to mythologists as the World Tree); nine nights hanging on the tree: the number nine recurs again and again in Norse mythology. Odin learns nine magic songs from a giant that enable him to win the mead of poetry for the gods; Heimdall has nine mothers; Hermod, Odin’s son, journeys for nine nights in his attempt to win back the god Balder from Hel; the great religious ceremonies at the temple of Uppsala lasted for nine days in every ninth year, and required the sacrifice of nine human beings and nine animals of every kind. Why nine was the most significant number in Norse mythology has not been satisfactorily explained, but belief in the magical properties of the number is not restricted to Scandinavia. In The Golden Bough, J. G. Frazer records ceremonies involving the number nine in countries as widely separated as Wales, Lithuania, Siam and the island of Nias in the Mentawai chain. Nine is, of course, the end of the series of single numbers, and this may be the reason why it symbolises death and rebirth in a number of mythologies; hence it also stands for the whole.
This section offers a guide only to the most notable features of the Norse mythical universe – the nine worlds that undoubtedly owe many of their characteristics to the volcanically active, often hostile island of Iceland in which they were finally shaped and recorded (see Notes 1 and 32). The individual myths describe that universe in much more detail – especially Numbers 1, 12, 15, 27 and 32. The way in which the giant Ymir’s body is divided so that everything, even his eyebrows, were used in the creation of the world; the four dwarfs who hold up the sky; the wolves that chase the sun and moon; the giant’s eyes that are tossed up into heaven and turned into stars: these and a host of other particulars become narrative elements within the cycle. It is time now to turn to the Norse pantheon.
Snorri Sturluson, writing in Iceland in the thirteenth century, says that, excluding Odin and his wife Frigg, ‘The divine gods are twelve in number … The goddesses [who number thirteen] are no less sacred and no less powerful.’ This section introduces the four principal deities, Odin, Thor, Freyr and Freyja, in some detail, and points to the principal attributes of the others; they, and other protagonists, are discussed further in the notes where appropriate.
Odin is often called Allfather: this means he was not only the actual father of many of the gods and (with his two brothers) created the first man and woman, but that he was also foremost of the gods. Snorri Sturluson is quite clear on this point:
Odin is the highest and oldest of the gods. He rules all things and, no matter how mighty the other gods may be, they all serve him as children do their father … He lives for ever and ever, and rules over the whole of his kingdom and governs all things great and small. He created heaven and earth and sky and all that in them is.
Germanic pre-Christian Europe was fraught with conflict between family and family, tribe and tribe, country and country. A culture finds the gods it needs and the Norse world needed a god to justify the violence that is one of its hallmarks. Odin appears to have inherited the characteristics of the earliest Germanic war gods, Wodan and Tîwaz, and is seen above all as the God of Battle. Terrible, arrogant and capricious, he inspired victory and determined defeat; in his hall, Valhalla, he entertained slain warriors, chosen and conducted there by the Valkyries, who were to fight with him at Ragnarok; and he required propitiation with human and animal sacrifice.
The same inspiration that enabled one man to win a battle enabled another to compose poetry. Thus Odin, the God of War, travelled to Jotunheim to win the mead of poetry for the gods (Myth 6), and one reason why he is so prominent in the eddaic poems may be that he was the patron of the poets who composed them!
Odin was not only the God of Battle and the God of Poetry; he could also act as a seer. Like a shaman, he could send out his spirit, sometimes riding on his eight-legged steed Sleipnir, sometimes in another shape, on journeys between worlds; like a shaman, he could win wisdom from the dead. In the eddaic poem Voluspa, and in his voluntary sacrifice on the world ash Yggdrasill (Myth 4), we see him as the God of the Dead.
Odin is a formidable presence. He has only one eye and wears a wide-brimmed hat to escape instant recognition; he always wears a blue cloak and carries the magic spear Gungnir; on his shoulders sit the ravens Huginn (Thought) and Muninn (Memory), birds of battle symbolic also of flights in search of wisdom; and from the high seat of Hlidskjalf, in his hall Valaskjalf, he could survey all that happened in the nine worlds. He is a terrifying god: maybe a god to be respected, but not a god to be loved.
Thor, son of Odin and Earth, was second in the pantheon and it is clear from the terms in which he is described by the eddaic poets, Snorri Sturluson and the saga writers, and from the large number of place names embodying his name, that he was the most loved and respected of the gods. While Odin stood for violence and war, Thor represented order. With his hammer Mjollnir, he kept the giants at bay and was physically strong enough to grapple with the world serpent, Jormungand. Men invoked him in the name of law and stability.
Odin championed the nobly born – kings, warriors, poets; Thor championed the farming freemen (Myth 22) who constituted the majority of the population. His physical image fits this role well; he was huge, red-bearded, possessed of a vast appetite, quick to lose his temper and quick to regain it, a bit slow in the uptake, but immensely strong and dependable. The eddaic poets (and Snorri Sturluson in their wake) may have exaggerated Odin’s significance; according to the eleventh-century historian Adam of Bremen, Thor was the greatest of the Norse gods and, in the great temple as Uppsala, his statue occupied the central position between Odin and Freyr.
The second myth in this collection which forms a complete cycle, beginning with the creation and ending with the destruction of the nine worlds, describes a war between the warrior gods, the Aesir, and the fertility gods, the Vanir. This conflict appears to embody the memory of a time when two cults struggled for the possession of men’s minds and, as invariably happens when one religion replaces another, were ultimately fused. Thor thus took on characteristics associated with fertility and made them his own. The hammer Mjollnir, for instance, was not only an instrument of aggression but also of fertility (see Note 10). Likewise, Thor was the cause of thunder (the noise made by the wheels of his chariot) and lightning (fragments of a whetstone were lodged in his head) and, in the words of Adam of Bremen, Thor was held to control ‘the winds and showers, the fair weather and fruits of the earth’.
The most important of the fertility gods, however, was Freyr, God of Plenty. Freyr appears to have been a descendant (who somehow changed sex) of Nerthus, the Earth Mother whom Tacitus described as having been worshipped in Denmark in the first century AD. And Snorri Sturluson writes: ‘Freyr is an exceedingly famous god; he decides when the sun shall shine or the rain come down, and along with that the fruitfulness of the earth, and he is good to invoke for peace and plenty. He also brings about the prosperity of men.’ The idol of Freyr at Uppsala had a gigantic phallus and Freyr was clearly invoked not only for the increase of the earth but also for human increase. Freyr’s principal possessions, the ship Skidbladnir and the boar Gullinbursti, are both ancient fertility symbols, and the one surviving myth directly concerned with him (Myth 11) is a celebration of all that he stands for.
Freyr’s father was Njord and his sister was Freyja (see page xxx for discussion of goddesses) and all three were involved in the exchange of leaders when the Aesir and Vanir made a truce (Myth 2). Njord, the senior god of the Vanir, governed the sea and the winds and guarded ships and seafarers. His hall was called Noatun or shipyard. Njord married the frost giantess Skadi and his son the frost giantess Gerd in myths which both symbolise the union of opposites (see Notes 9 and 11).
There are a bewildering number of theories about another of the leading gods, Heimdall, but he, too, was probably originally one of the Vanir. He was associated with the sea and was the son of nine maidens (perhaps nine waves). According to Snorri, ‘He needs less sleep than a bird, and can see a hundred leagues in front of him as well by night as by day. He can hear the grass growing on the earth and the wool on sheep, and everything that makes more noise.’ His stamina and acutely developed senses made Heimdall the ideal watchman for the gods. His hall Himinbjorg (Cliffs of Heaven) stood near the rainbow Bifrost, and he owned the horn Gjall whose blast could be heard throughout the nine worlds. Heimdall is also identified in the prose preface to the Rigsthula as the progenitor of the races of men (Myth 5); we do not know enough about his origins to be sure why he and not Odin (who, with his brothers, actually created the first man and woman) appears in this context.
Another leading god, Tyr, was a son of Odin, although one source (Myth 17) makes him the son of the giant Hymir. Like Odin, he inherited characteristics from earlier Germanic gods of battle, and his origins are discussed in Note 7. He is the bravest of the Aesir and only he is prepared to sacrifice a hand so that the wolf Fenrir can be bound (Myth 7), thereby ensuring the safety of the gods until Ragnarok.
Ragnarok is precipitated by the death of Balder, the gentle and beloved son of Odin and Frigg, who is felled by a mistletoe dart thrown by his own brother Hod, a blind god whose aim is guided by the evil Loki. Balder’s character is discussed in detail in Note 29; in the inimitable words of Snorri Sturluson: