ÓÐINN’S SEARCH FOR WISDOM As we know, Óðinn sacrificed his eye in Mímir’s Well in order to gain knowledge of the future. Yet he still, obsessively, seeks out those who might be able to tell him more. The Seeress’s Prophecy recounts a seeress’s response to being questioned by Óðinn about past and future. Much of what follows in this chapter is drawn from her account. But Óðinn also visits the giant Vafþrúðnir; despite Frigg’s warning him against the adventure, Óðinn sets out boldly and enters the giant’s hall:
Greetings, Vafþrúðnir! Now I have come into the hall
to see you in person;
this I want to know first, whether you are wise
or very wise, giant!
VAFÞRÚÐNIR’S SAYINGS, V. 6
Vafþrúðnir rises to the challenge, recognizing the invitation to participate in a wisdom contest, and he sets the stakes: ‘we shall wager our heads in the hall, / guest, on our wisdom’ (v. 19). God and giant exchange arcane lore, about the distant past, the history of the gods, and about the future: the events of ragnarök. Wisdom contests are complex undertakings, for the idea is as much to catch out the opponent as to learn from him or her, and both contenders must know enough to discern whether the other party is lying. At the end of this contest, Óðinn seems to have heard enough about ragnarök and what comes after it, and he concludes with his favourite unanswerable question:
Much have I travelled, much have I tried out,
much have I tested the Powers;
what did Óðinn say into his son’s ear
before he mounted the pyre?
VAFÞRÚÐNIR’S SAYINGS, V. 54
And with this question Vafþrúðnir knows that the game is up, for only Óðinn can know the answer. The poem ends with this admission; we assume that Vafþrúðnir must surrender his head, though whether Óðinn takes it may be another matter.
Why does Óðinn embark on this quest for wisdom, risking his own neck to verify the information that he has? One likely reason is a compulsive need to check – and double-check – whether fate is really ineluctable. Is there any possibility that one of the universe’s many wise beings knows of a different narrative about the future? Must Óðinn meet the wolf and be devoured by him? Must the world plunge headlong, engulfed in flames, before vanishing under the sea? As we know, and as the god repeatedly hears from those he questions, ragnarök will indeed come one day. The signs of the world’s destruction are already beginning to manifest themselves, for Óðinn’s clever question shows that one of the portents of the end has already occurred; Baldr, best and brightest of the gods, is dead.
THE DEATH OF BALDR We have not heard much about Baldr so far, and that’s primarily because little more is narrated about him than the events surrounding his death. Snorri assures us that he is radiantly handsome (so much so that a flower, baldrsbrá, a kind of camomile, is named after his eyelashes). Clever, wise, kindly, married to Nanna, Baldr is loved by everyone.
One day, however, he begins to have ominous dreams and, after their usual consultation, the gods resolve to ask every created thing to swear an oath not to harm him. In one poem, Baldrs Draumar (Baldr’s Dreams), Óðinn himself, like any anxious father, saddles up his mount Sleipnir and sets out for Hel’s kingdom to find out the truth of the matter. But on the edge of Hel’s kingdom, he meets a blood-stained pup (a young hell-hound perhaps) and instead of pressing forward to Hel’s hall, he decides to awaken a dead seeress whose grave lies nearby. As in his other dialogues with the wise, Óðinn dissembles his identity. The grumpy seeress confirms her questioner’s fears:
For whom are the benches decked with arm-rings,
is the dais so fairly strewn with gold? […]
Here mead stands, brewed for Baldr,
clear liquor; a shield hangs above,
the Æsir are in dread anticipation.
Reluctantly I told you, now I’ll be silent.
BALDR’S DREAMS, VV. 6–7
The seeress imparts further details to Óðinn until he brings the conversation to an end by posing another mysterious question – apparently a riddle about waves. This is enough to reveal his identity and the seeress refuses to converse further.
Baldr seems then to be doomed. In Snorri’s account it’s Frigg, the god’s energetic mother, who works her way through creation, taking the oaths of everything to refuse to harm her son. ‘Fire and water, iron and all kinds of metal, stones, the earth, wood, sickness, animals, birds, poison, serpents’ – all swear to do him no harm. What then could bring about the god’s death? Frigg had not bothered with the lowly mistletoe, for it seemed to her too young and tender, and she lets slip this information to an inquisitive woman who visits her in her hall, Fensalir. That was her mistake, for the woman was Loki in disguise, and he makes good use of this information.
Meanwhile, the gods are amusing themselves mightily at their meeting-place. Baldr stands in the middle and the others hurl missiles at him. All their weapons bounce harmlessly off him – a temptation to complacency, perhaps. Standing sadly at the edge of the group is Höðr, Baldr’s brother, who is blind, and who can’t take part in the game. But here is a friendly voice in his ear, asking if he wants a go; a slender dart is slipped into his hand and the speaker guides his aim so that it hits its mark (see page 40). Baldr falls; a great wail goes up from all the gods and Loki slips away in the hubbub. The mistletoe dart has brought down the best of the gods. Óðinn is doubly grief-stricken; not only is his son dead, but he knows that this death is a clear portent of ragnarök.
Frigg promises all her favour to anyone who will ride to Hel to negotiate Baldr’s return, and a man called Hermóðr leaps on Sleipnir and sets off. Baldr’s funeral is prepared; his body is taken to the shore and placed on his ship. But the ship will not slide down the rollers into the sea until a giantess called Hyrrokin appears, riding a wolf with serpents for reins. Hyrrokin launches the ship with a single push, so mighty that sparks fly and all the lands quake; despite this service she narrowly escapes being obliterated by Þórr. Nanna dies of grief at this and her body is laid beside Baldr’s on the pyre. Flames engulf the two bodies, witnessed by all kinds of beings who have gathered to do Baldr honour. An unfortunate dwarf, Litr, gets under Þórr’s feet as he steps forward to consecrate the pyre and is straight away kicked into it.
Viking Ship-Burials
High-born men and women were often buried in ships in the Viking Age, symbolizing perhaps the journey the dead had to make to the Other World. The Oseberg ship, described in the Introduction, is only one such archaeological find. In Britain, the seventh-century Anglo-Saxon king buried at Sutton Hoo was also interred on a ship (though nothing has survived of it but its rivets), proving that this was not exclusively a Viking-Age custom. In the ninth century, an Arab traveller, Ibn Fadlan, encountered some Viking Rus warriors on the Volga. Their chieftain had just died and Ibn Fadlan gives a detailed account of the funeral rites. There is no space to describe them in full here, but at the culmination of the ceremony the chieftain’s ship, on which his corpse is lying, is set ablaze with a flaming torch, borne by the dead man’s next of kin. He circles the ship stark naked and walking backwards, covering his anus with one hand. And, says Ibn Fadlan, so much wood was piled round the ship and such a brisk wind sprang up that within an hour, ship, chieftain and all were consumed to ashes.
Hermóðr bravely made his way down to Hel, and found its ruler not entirely unsympathetic to the gods’ request. Baldr and Nanna were already present in the hall, Baldr sitting in the high seat no less. Hel stipulated that Baldr might return to the world of the living if all things were to weep for him, and Hermóðr headed back with the news. The Æsir quickly mobilized on hearing Hel’s conditions and messengers were sent out all over the world. They met with great success, persuading everything to weep for Baldr – even metals (the origin of condensation, Snorri tells us). But in a cave they found a giantess called, ironically, Þökk (Thanks). When asked to weep for Baldr she retorted:
Þökk will weep
dry tears
for Baldr’s funeral.
Living nor dead
I get no joy of any man’s son:
let Hel hold what she has.
THE TRICKING OF GYLFI, CH. 49
The Rape of Rindr
Óðinn knows that Baldr’s avenger must be born of Rindr, a human princess. Impregnating her is not altogether a straightforward task. Rindr resists the ugly old god’s advances; though he insinuates himself into her father’s household, where he operates as a very successful general, his first attempt at a kiss gets him only a slap across the face. Next, he becomes a metal-worker and brings Rindr beautifully made bracelets; this is no more effective and another slap follows. Finally he bewitches her, using runes to send her mad. Then, disguising himself as an old woman, Óðinn pretends to be a healer. He prescribes a horribly bitter drink, one so vile that Rindr must be tied to the bed so that she can’t refuse to swallow it. And, left alone with the patient, the apparent healer rapes the unhappy girl. The other gods, so this story (related by Saxo Grammaticus) tells us, were so horrified by this behaviour that Óðinn was sent into exile. Rindr, however, became pregnant and gave birth to Váli.
And it is strongly suspected that this uncooperative giantess was none other than Loki.
The aftermath of Baldr’s death was twofold. Óðinn had learned from the dead seeress that only one man could avenge Baldr, and that he was not yet born.
Little Váli was indeed prodigious; like Helgi, he was ready to fight at one night old, says The Seeress’s Prophecy :
He never washed his hands
nor combed his hair
until he brought Baldr’s adversary
to the funeral pyre.
THE SEERESS’S PROPHECY, V. 33
But it is the poor blind brother, Höðr, ‘the slayer by hand’ – not Loki, ‘the slayer by plan’, the one behind the murder – whom Váli kills. For Loki’s fate is written differently.
Why must Baldr die? He’s often been compared with other gods who perish through some horrible accident or conspiracy. Ancient Near Eastern figures such as the Egyptian Osiris, or Attis, the beloved of Cybele, also die; the context of their myths suggests that this occurs in a seasonal cycle and resurrection comes with the spring. Isis succeeds in reconstituting Osiris, her brother/lover, as the Nile rises again every year to fertilize the land, and Attis too is reborn annually. But Baldr’s resurrection (at least for now) fails. A fertility dimension to the myth seems unlikely, therefore.
Baldr may be a sacrifice; certainly being pierced by a missile is congruent with sacrifice to Óðinn. Yet no benefit seems to accrue from Baldr’s death; if he is a sacrifice, it seems a pointless one (unlike Óðinn’s own sacrifice of himself to gain the secret of the runes). The myth speaks to the horror of conflict within kin-groups; vengeance cannot be achieved by killing the perpetrator, for Váli’s vengeance on Höðr simply eliminates yet another of Óðinn’s sons. Who should take vengeance for Höðr? In this respect, Óðinn is fortunate in that he can sire new sons, replacing those who die. But, as the myth acknowledges, sons are not so interchangeable; Váli cannot truly take Baldr’s place.
THE BINDING OF LOKI Snorri follows his account of the failure to weep Baldr out of Hel with the gods’ swift pursuit, capture and binding of Loki. In the poetic tradition, Loki’s binding is consequent on his final rupture with his fellow-gods. Remember the feast at Ægir’s hall – the one that required Hymir’s extra-enormous cauldron? All the gods and goddesses were there, except for Þórr who was away as usual smiting giants in the east, and Loki, who was persona non grata. Yet he presents himself coolly at the hall and demands to be assigned a seat and given a drink. Bragi, the god of poetry, is ready to refuse him, but, once Loki invokes the blood-brother relationship between himself and Óðinn, and reminds the god that he had sworn never to drink unless Loki were offered drink too, Óðinn decrees that the ‘Father of the Wolf’ must be admitted.
In the poem Loki’s Quarrel which relates this tale, Loki now proceeds systematically to insult each of the gods in turn. The pattern is quite uniform; Loki insults god A, god A replies, Loki responds, and god B speaks up in A’s defence, only to draw Loki’s bad-mouthing down upon himself. The gods are subjected to a range of calumnies: Óðinn has performed seiðr (see Chapter 2) and is an oath-breaker; other gods are cowards or have been disgraced in some way. Njörðr is accused of letting Hymir’s daughters (giantesses, here probably symbolizing rivers) piss in his mouth, as the rivers run into the sea, and of having fathered his children on his sister. The goddesses are charged with sexual promiscuity, often with having had sex with Loki himself, or, like Skaði, they are reminded of Loki’s role in their kinsman’s death. Frigg is taunted with the loss of Baldr, and Freyja with having slept with every man within the hall – including her own brother. Even Sif, Þórr’s wife, is charged with having slept with Loki, and we wonder just how it was that Loki was able to steal Sif’s wonderful golden hair. Finally Þórr arrives and with his habitual bellowing and threats puts a stop to Loki’s barbs – notwithstanding some telling remarks about Þórr’s behaviour in the Skrýmir adventure (see Chapter 3). And then Loki leaves:
but for you alone I shall go out
for I know that you do strike.
LOKI’S QUARREL, V. 64, LL. 4–6
That may be a crack about the master-builder and the oath-breaking that inaugurated Ásgarðr’s new walls; maybe it’s a rueful recognition of the risks involved in annoying Þórr. As far as we can tell from other sources, most of what Loki says is true, though he puts a disreputable gloss on Týr’s sacrifice of his hand, and Freyr’s willingness to give Skírnir his sword in order to win Gerðr. Loki’s Quarrel is a very funny poem, but its humour is charged with horror, both at Loki’s shamelessness and at the revelations about the gods. Is the poem a serious critique of the pagan deities – perhaps composed by a Christian who wants to reveal them as hypocrites and cowards? Or is the poem the work of someone who was secure in his belief, who wanted to show that the gods are indeed different from us – and that their fulfilment of their divine functions cannot be comprehended within human ethical frameworks? Very likely Loki’s Quarrel was understood differently at different times in its existence; much depends on the nuance imparted by the performer. But it’s not hard to feel by the end of it that perhaps the world will be better off without this rabble.
Loki made good his escape from the furious gods, turning himself into a salmon and hiding in a waterfall. Snorri’s account of his capture elaborates on this. Loki built himself a house in the mountains near the waterfall and lurked underwater by day. One evening he began to speculate about how the Æsir might manage to catch him in his fish-form. Picking up some linen thread, he made a prototype fishing-net. Then, realizing that Óðinn had spotted him from his high seat Hliðskjálf, and that the gods were on their way to the hideout, he quickly threw the net in the fire and dived into the water. The wisest of the gods (named here as Kvasir, the one whose blood gave rise to the mead of poetry) saw the pattern the net made in the ashes and deduced what its purpose must be. The gods quickly replicated the device and, although salmon-Loki jumped over it, he was eventually captured in mid-leap by Þórr who had waded into the middle of the river. Though Loki slithered as fast as he could through Þórr’s hands, his tail caught in the god’s fist; this explains why salmon taper markedly towards the tail and why they leap out of the water when making their way upstream.
Loki now finds himself in peril; he has not surrendered to the gods under pre-arranged conditions, but rather he is their captive. The gods take three great flat rocks, set them edge upwards and make a hole in each slab. Loki’s sons are seized and transformed into wolves; Nari tears his brother Narfi into pieces, and the gods use Narfi’s guts to bind his father to the rock. The guts tighten magically into iron bonds; as a final flourish, Skaði hangs a poisonous serpent over Loki’s face, venom dripping from its fangs. And Sigyn, Loki’s wife, now stands by her husband holding a basin to catch the poison. Every now and then she must turn away to empty it, and when the venom falls onto Loki’s face, he writhes horribly in his bonds – the cause of earthquakes.
Loki’s final break with the Æsir raises some interesting questions. His usual mode of operation has been as an ambivalent figure, siding inconsistently with the giants, but also helping the gods recover stolen items, and he has a particular role as Þórr’s sidekick. Why this, now? One suggestion links Loki’s behaviour to the various prophecies concerning ragnarök. Just as Fenrir must first be bound if he is to break his fetters and attack the gods on that final day, so Loki must also be confined if he is to sunder his bonds to lead the giants against his former companions. And thus he must provoke the gods into binding him, through the twin offences of bringing about Baldr’s death and by his bravura display of insults in Loki’s Quarrel. If Baldr’s death is a portent of ragnarök, then Baldr must die, and Loki must be bound. This assumes a chronological coherence to the tales surviving from what must have been a great corpus of varying myths originating in different parts of the Norse-speaking world. But even if the idea of Loki possessing a master-plan strains credulity, there’s certainly a strong sense that the fate of the gods is already determined, that, despite Óðinn’s efforts to see whether the prophesied future can be falsified or forestalled, the end is already written. Suggestive too, as noted above, is the fact that Snorri knows one of Loki’s sons (the brother-killing wolf) as Váli, sharing the name of Óðinn’s newly begotten son who kills his half-brother Höðr in vengeance for his other half-brother Baldr. Themes of fratricide, of vengeance, of those apocalyptic beasts, wolves and serpents, run through these two tales in a way that underlines the fundamental link between the two gods, Óðinn and Loki.
SIGNS OF THE LAST TIMES First comes the Great Winter, the fimbulvetr. Three winters run into one another, with no intervening summers; snow drives from all directions with biting winds and sharp frost. Social dislocation follows:
Brother will fight brother and be his slayer,
sisters’ sons will violate the kinship-bond;
hard it is in the world, whoredom abounds,
axe-age, sword-age, shields are cleft asunder,
wind-age, wolf-age, before the world plunges headlong;
no man will spare another.
THE SEERESS’S PROPHECY, V. 45
Punishing Sinners – A Christian Concept?
Near a place called Corpse-strand, the seeress sees a cloudy and turbulent river where those who swear false oaths, murderers and seducers of other men’s wives are wading. Another river flows down from the east, called Fearful; it’s filled with axes and knives. That there are Other World punishments for human sinners is not an idea found elsewhere in Norse myth; the inclusion of these torments suggests Christian influence. Given that the version of the poem in the Codex Regius may have been composed around the time that Norway was converting to Christianity (1000 CE), this is not impossible.
The world drives forward into chaos. Before mankind falls into civil war, the seeress summons up other indications of the end times.
Deep in Gallows-wood a cock with sooty-red plumage crows. Another is heard in Ironwood where a trollwoman is nurturing Fenrir’s offspring: the wolves who pursue the sun and the moon. The uncannily discordant soundscape of the end is punctuated by the howling of the great hound Garmr (maybe a double of Fenrir, or a quite independent monstrous beast, a kind of hell or Hel-hound). Now comes the terrible moment when both the heavenly bodies are engulfed by the gaping jaws of the beasts who have so long pursued them and the world is plunged into darkness.
Now Yggdrasill catches fire. The great ash tree totters, and Heimdallr sounds the alarm by blowing his mighty Gjallar-horn. Óðinn takes emergency counsel with Mímir’s head, but it is too late to hope for advice from that quarter now. The mountains quake, driving the dwarfs outside where they stand groaning before their rocky doors. Trollwomen wander the roads; humans don’t know what to do. The Einherjar ride out to face the battle for which they’ve been training all these millennia, but – or so Fáfnir the dragon prophesied to Sigurðr in his dying moments – as they and the gods journey from Óskópnir (Not-yet-made), the island where the final battle takes place, the rainbow bridge Bifröst breaks and their horses founder in the river. Victory is snatched away from them.
The Great Wolf
There’s a terrifying description of the great wolf Managarm (Garmr or Hound of the Moon) in Alan Garner’s 1960 novel, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen. Garner makes use of quite a lot of Old Norse myth in the novel; at its culmination, a dark and terrible magic is unleashed:
Racing out of the north was a cloud, lower than any that hid the sun and black. Monstrous it was, and in shape a ravening wolf. Its loins fell below the horizon, and its lean body arched across the sky to pounding shoulders, and a head with jaws agape that even now was over the far end of the valley … All the sky to the north and east was wolf head. The mouth yawned wider, till there was nothing to be seen but the black, cavernous maw, rushing down to swallow hill and valley whole.
Alan Garner, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, London 2010, p. 283
Luckily the magic of the Weirdstone dispels the horror, and the world is saved.
The forces of terror are unleashed from each of the cardinal points. From the south comes the fire-giant Surtr, bearing an enormous sword from which the sun glances in dazzling brilliance. The sinister corpse-ship Naglfari, made of dead men’s nails, has set sail from the east with fire-giants as its crew; Loki is its steersman, bringing fiery destruction to the worlds of gods and men. Also advancing from the east comes Hrymr, another frost-giant leader, and in the ocean the huge coils of the Miðgarðs-serpent are thrashing. And Fenrir, finally, has snapped the silken fetter that has held him in thrall all these ages and is loping on the loose.
THE LAST BATTLE AND THE DEATHS OF THE GODS Now the long-prophesied single combats come to pass. Óðinn walks boldly forward to face the wolf, but the god of the spear finds that Gungnir is of no help to him, and Fenrir swallows him in one mighty gulp. Frigg weeps to see her husband die; ‘Frigg’s dear-beloved’, the poem calls him, comparing his death to that of Baldr, as ‘Frigg’s second sorrow’. The goddesses mourn on the sidelines as the gods shoulder their shields against their mortal foes. Next up is Þórr, encountering once again his old enemy, the Miðgarðs-serpent. The god brings the great snake down but, staggering only nine paces away from the corpse, he too falls, overcome by the serpent’s might and venomous breath.
Snorri adds some details which are not known from anywhere else; they may be traditional or may be the product of his own instinct for organization. Freyr goes against Surtr, and now, as Loki foretold, he must surely regret the lack of the sword he gave away for the giant-girl Gerðr. The great dog Garmr, whose terrible howling presaged ragnarök, brings down Týr; that god’s past history with Fenrir gives rise to the suspicion that Garmr and Fenrir are indeed the same, and that the wolf has unfinished business with the god whose hand he snapped off. Heimdallr and Loki contend against one another – not for the first time – and each slaughters the other.
The gods do make some headway against the monsters. Víðarr, Óðinn’s son, leaps into Fenrir’s maw; his feet are protected from the wolf’s fangs by the thick-soled shoes he wears. Every time sole-material is clipped from toes or heels, Snorri tells us in an aside, this contributes to Víðarr’s footwear. With one hand he reaches to the wolf’s upper jaw and tears him asunder. This image, the death of the father and the vengeance of the son, is a favourite of Viking-Age sculptors.
Heimdallr and Loki in Conflict
Tradition tells us that Heimdallr and Loki have met in combat before. On that occasion, they fought out in the sea on a skerry called Singasteinn, both adopting seal-form for the battle. The bone of contention was possession of the Brisinga men, Freyja’s great neck-ring, which had somehow come into Loki’s hands. Heimdallr wins the fight and restores the precious jewelry to the goddess; this is probably a version of the tale of Loki’s theft that was related in Chapter 2.
Now the giant Surtr’s fire sets the whole world ablaze and the process by which the earth was made at the beginning of The Seeress’s Prophecy (as recounted in Chapter 2) is thrown into reverse:
The sun turns black, land sinks into the sea;
the bright stars vanish from the sky;
steam rises up in the conflagration,
hot flame plays high against heaven itself.
THE SEERESS’S PROPHECY, V. 57
A Volcanic Catastrophe?
Since The Seeress’s Prophecy has been dated to around the year 1000, well after the settlement of Iceland, it has been mooted that the description of ragnarök that it contains reflects the island’s volcanic nature. Certainly in the verse cited above, features of a volcanic eruption – flames shooting upwards, the darkness as the ash-cloud obscures the sun, the disappearance of the land under the red-hot lava flows, and the sizzle of the black molten rock meeting the sea – could all be read into the poem’s vision of the end of the world.
That the sun has already been swallowed up by the wolf that has pursued it for aeons shows how the poems and Snorri’s prose tradition seek to integrate different traditions into coherent narratives. Darkness, relieved only by the leaping flames, brings the end of the world.
REBIRTH The end of the world, as the sea surges over the land and fiery destruction rains down on an earth where gods, men and even giants have all perished, marks the end of Time in Christian tradition. Not so in other mythologies, however; many systems imagine time and space as cyclical, and believe that, once the old, corrupt world has been swept away, a new one arises to take its place. For, although in eddic poetry the phrase ragnarök means ‘doom of the Powers’, Snorri uses a slightly different word, rökkr, which means something like ‘dusk’ or ‘glimmering’ – hence Wagner’s understanding of the end of his heroic world as ‘The Twilight of the Gods’. Rökkr could equally mean ‘half-light before dawn’ as well as ‘twilight’, and thus rökkr can usher in a new, brilliant day.
And this indeed is what we find, in the poetic tradition and in Snorri’s account, derived from it. For the seeress whose vision constitutes The Seeress’s Prophecy looks beyond the end of the world, and:
She sees, coming up a second time,
earth from the ocean, eternally green;
the waterfalls plunge, an eagle soars above them,
over the mountain, hunting fish.
The Æsir find one another on Iðavellir,
and they converse about the mighty Earth-Girdler,
and Fimbultýr’s ancient runes.
There will be found again in the grass
the wonderful golden chequers,
those which they possessed in the bygone days.
THE SEERESS’S PROPHECY, VV. 59–61
For some of the Æsir will return. Amazingly, Hœnir, that mysterious third who walked beside Óðinn in many important moments in the past, comes back. And so too, wonderfully, the unwitting slayer and the sacrificial victim, Höðr and Baldr, return from the other side of death (the secret that Óðinn whispers into his dead son’s ear on the pyre, we surmise). A new golden age is signalled: fields yield their crops without sowing, all harms are healed, and the golden chequers, so resonantly symbolic of the earlier age of innocence, are found once more on the plain. With the dazed air of survivors of a great catastrophe, the new Æsir reminisce about the Miðgarðs-serpent and the runes which Óðinn won for them.
The giant Vafþrúðnir too, in his wisdom contest with Óðinn, back in the old world, had foreseen the renewal that follows the cataclysm, revealing to the anxious god that some humans, with the promising names of Líf and Lífþrasir (Life and perhaps Life-thruster, male and female maybe) survive by hiding in Hoddmímir’s wood (perhaps Yggdrasill, given that great ash’s proximity to Mímir’s Well). The sun too, before she was swallowed by Fenrir, gave birth to a daughter who will travel on her mother’s paths. Vafþrúðnir identifies further Æsir who will form the new generation of gods: Víðarr, avenger of his father Óðinn; Váli, avenger of his brother Baldr; Móði and Magni, Þórr’s two sons, who will wield Mjöllnir, their father’s weapon. Vafþrúðnir’s vision is less optimistic than the vision of the seeress; the return of the sons of Óðinn and Þórr suggests the resumption of the old patterns of living, of vengeance and violence reasserting themselves. There’s none of the emphasis on reconciliation that we find in The Seeress’s Prophecy, no mention of the twin victims of Loki’s terrible malice, Höðr and Baldr, coming to terms, their brotherhood renewed.
Even in the new world envisioned by the seeress, and despite the miraculous return of the lost golden chequers, there are signs that ineluctable systems are again at work, that the clock is ticking down to the next renewal. Once Hœnir has set up home in Óðinn’s former territory he begins to cut ‘wooden slips for prophecy’; fate is still operating. The very last thing that the seeress sees before she sinks down in her trance is the dragon Níðhöggr, the monstrous serpent who used to attack Yggdrasill, flying through the sky bearing corpses in his wings. This seems ominous. Some have suggested that this detail marks the seeress’s return to the ‘now’ of her vision, and that, as her prophecy draws to its close, she sees the flight of the dragon in the present. Others have wondered whether Níðhöggr has a positive role in the new world, and is clearing away the last vestiges of the final battle by carrying off the corpses. But there’s no compelling reason to think that the new world will not go the same way as the old, that evil and corruption will not manifest themselves once again (perhaps through a different vector from Loki and his giant allies), and that ragna rökkr, the dark before the dawn, will fall again – and again – through the cycle of the ages.
A New God?
A version of The Seeress’s Prophecy that was written down in the early fourteenth century contains an extra verse at the point where the new generation of gods has moved into the golden-roofed hall of Gimlé, when the world has begun anew.
Then comes the mighty one to the judgment of the Powers, full of strength, from above, he who rules over all.
Who can this mighty one be who comes to the reconstituted council of the gods? Is this Jesus, returned for the Last Judgment, ready to call time on the pagan pantheon, and to announce that the new religion is truly here to stay?
MYTHS LIVING ON By the time that the ‘mighty one’ descended to take charge, in the early fourteenth century, Iceland had long been Christian. Yet the Old Norse myths and legends still had resonance. Some new poems were being composed around this time, incorporating mythological and legendary motifs into traditional forms, but telling fresh stories. In one fourteenth-century poem a hero is cursed by his wicked stepmother to woo the unattainable maiden Menglöð. Young Svipdagr first visits his dead mother’s grave-mound to obtain some protective spells and advice and then journeys to Menglöð’s castle. A hostile giant who guards it won’t let him in and the two embark on a long discussion of what tasks he must fulfil to gain entry. But these are impossibly circular; to complete the first task, Svipdagr would already have had to have performed the last. The situation is hopeless, unless – as his interlocutor explains – his name should happen to be Svipdagr! And immediately the gates swing open, the hero enters and the lovely Menglöð is taking him in her arms, demanding to know what took him so long.
Some myths and legends were converted into ballads and remained in the popular imagination. Though it’s unlikely that anyone believed in Óðinn and Þórr any longer, the gods and heroes remained useful to think with, their stories reminding people of the importance of poetry, of cleverness and courage, of standing up to evil and of laughing in the face of death. Icelandic did not change much as a language over the centuries, and the myths preserved in sagas and poems were still understood. In the seventeenth century, the Codex Regius poems were edited, and translated into Latin; soon knowledge of them was circulating widely through Europe. The first English translations appeared in the eighteenth century (some containing hilarious errors), and the myths and legends of the north were popularized by the Brothers Grimm and Richard Wagner in Germany, and by William Morris and J. R. R. Tolkien in Britain. Now, with such popular cultural phenomena as Game of Thrones (with its constant threat of the Fimbulvetr, the Mighty Winter), Viking Death Metal or the Vikings TV series, whose hero is the very Ragnarr Shaggy-breeches whom we met in Chapter 5, the Scandinavian myths and legends are as vibrant today as at any time since Christianity displaced them from the hearts and minds of the north.
