SCANDINAVIAN DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE.
MANY considerations combine to make it seem likely that at an
early period a migration took place from Southern Asia to Northern
Europe, which constituted the commencement of what afterwards grew
to be the great Gothic family. The correspondence of many of the
leading doctrines and symbols of the Scandinavian mythology with
well known Persian and Buddhist notions notions of a purely
fanciful and arbitrary character is too peculiar, apparently, to
admit of any other explanation.1 But the germs of thought and
imagination transplanted thus from the warm and gorgeous climes of
the East to the snowy mountains of Norway and the howling ridges
of Iceland, obtained a fresh development, with numerous
modifications and strange additions, from the new life, climate,
scenery, and customs to which they were there exposed. The
temptation to predatory habits and strife, the necessity for an
intense though fitful activity arising from their geographical
situation, the fierce spirit nourished in them by their actual
life, the tremendous phenomena of the Arctic world around them,
all these influences break out to our view in the poetry, and are
reflected by their results in the religion, of the Northmen.
From the flame world, Muspelheim, in the south, in which Surtur,
the dread fire king, sits enthroned, flowed down streams of heat.
From the mist world, Niflheim, in the north, in whose central
caldron, Hvergelmir, dwells the gloomy dragon Nidhogg, rose floods
of cold vapor. The fire and mist meeting in the yawning abyss,
Ginungagap, after various stages of transition, formed the earth.
There were then three principal races of beings: men, whose
dwelling was Midgard; Jotuns, who occupied Utgard; and the Asir,
whose home was Asgard. The Jotuns, or demons, seem to have been
originally personifications of darkness, cold, and storm, the
disturbing forces of nature, whatever is hostile to fruitful life
and peace. They were frost giants ranged in the outer wastes
around the habitable fields of men. The Asir, or gods, on the
other hand, appear to have been personifications of light, and
law, and benignant power, the orderly energies of the universe.
Between the Jotuns and the Asir there is an implacable contest.2
The rainbow, Bifrost, is a bridge leading from earth up to the
skyey dwelling place of the Asir; and their sentinel, Heimdall,
whose senses are so acute that he can hear the grass spring in the
meadows and the wool grow on the backs of the sheep, keeps
incessant watch upon it. Their chief deity, the father Zeus of the
Northern pantheon, was Odin, the god of war, who wakened the
spirit of battle by flinging his spear over the heads of the
people, its inaudible hiss from heaven being as the song of Ate
let loose on earth. Next in rank was Thor, the personification of
the exploding tempest. The crashing echoes of the thunder are his
chariot wheels rattling through the cloudy halls of Thrudheim.
Whenever the lightning strikes a cliff or an iceberg, then Thor
has flung his hammer, Mjolnir, at Joton's head.
1 Vans Kennedy, Ancient and Hindu Mythology, pp. 452, 463-464.
2 Thorpe, Northern Mythology, vol. ii.
Balder was the god of innocence and gentleness, fairest,
kindest, purest of beings. Light emanated from him, and
all things loved him. After Christianity was established in the
North, Jesus was called the White Christ, or the new Balder. The
appearance of Balder amidst the frenzied and bloody divinities of
the Norse creed is beautiful as the dew cool moon hanging calmly
over the lurid storm of Vesuvius. He was entitled the "Band in the
Wreath of the Gods," because with his fate that of all the rest
was bound up. His death, ominously foretold from eldest antiquity,
would be the signal for the ruin of the universe. Asa Loki was the
Momus Satan or Devil Buffoon of the Scandinavian mythology, the
half amusing, half horrible embodiment of wit, treachery, and
evil; now residing with the gods in heaven, now accompanying Thor
on his frequent adventures, now visiting and plotting with his own
kith and kin in frosty Jotunheim, beyond the earth environing sea,
or in livid Helheim deep beneath the domain of breathing
humanity.3
With a Jotun woman, Angerbode, or Messenger of Evil, Loki begets
three fell children. The first is Fenris, a savage wolf, so large
that nothing but space can hold him. The second is Jormungandur,
who, with his tail in his mouth, fills the circuit of the ocean.
He is described by Sir Walter Scott as
"That great sea snake, tremendous curl'd, Whose monstrous circle
girds the world."
The third is Hela, the grim goddess of death, whose ferocious
aspect is half of a pale blue and half of a ghastly white, and
whose empire, stretching below the earth through Niflheim, is full
of freezing vapors and discomfortable sights. Her residence is the
spacious under world; her court yard, faintness; her threshold,
precipice; her door, abyss; her hall, pain; her table, hunger; her
knife, starvation; her man servant, delay; her handmaid, slowness;
her bed, sickness; her pillow, anguish; and her canopy, curse.
Still lower than her house is an abode yet more fearful and
loathsome. In Nastrond, or strand of corpses, stands a hall, the
conception of which is prodigiously awful and enormously
disgusting. It is plaited of serpents' backs, wattled together
like wicker work, whose heads turn inwards, vomiting poison. In
the lake of venom thus deposited within these immense wriggling
walls of snakes the worst of the damned wade and swim.
High up in the sky is Odin's hall, the magnificent Valhalla, or
temple of the slain. The columns supporting its ceiling are
spears. It is roofed with shields, and the ornaments on its
benches are coats of mail. The Valkyrs are Odin's battle maids,
choosers of heroes for his banquet rooms. With helmets on their
heads, in bloody harness, mounted on shadowy steeds, surrounded by
meteoric lightnings, and wielding flaming swords, they hover over
the conflict and point the way to Valhalla to the warriors who
fall. The valiant souls thus received to Odin's presence are
called Einheriar, or the elect. The Valkyrs, as white clad virgins
with flowing ringlets, wait on them in the capacity of cup
bearers. Each morning, at the crowing
3 Oehlenschlager, Gods of the North. This celebrated and brilliant
poem, with the copious notes in Frye's translation, affords the
English reader a full conception of the Norse pantheon and its
salient adventures.
of a huge gold combed cock, the well armed Einheriar rush through
Valhalla's five hundred and forty doors into a great court yard,
and pass the day in merciless fighting. However pierced and hewn
in pieces in these fearful encounters, at evening every wound is
healed, and they return into the hall whole, and are seated,
according to their exploits, at a luxurious feast. The
perennial boar Sehrimnir, deliciously cooked by Andrimnir, though
devoured every night, is whole again every morning and ready to be
served anew. The two highest joys these terrible berserkers and
vikings knew on earth composed their experience in heaven: namely,
a battle by day and a feast by night. It is a vulgar error, long
prevalent, that the Valhalla heroes drink out of the skulls of
their enemies. This notion, though often refuted, still lingers in
the popular mind. It arose from the false translation of a phrase
in the death song of Ragnar Lodbrok, the famous sea king, "Soon
shall we drink from the curved trees of the head," which, as a
figure for the usual drinking horns, was erroneously rendered by
Olaus Wormius, "Soon shall we drink from the hollow cups of
skulls." It is not the heads of men, but the horns of beasts, from
which the Einheriar quaff Heidrun's mead.4
No women being ever mentioned as gaining admission to Valhalla or
joining in the joys of the Einheriar, some writers have affirmed
that, according to the Scandinavian faith, women had no immortal
souls, or, at all events, were excluded from heaven. The charge is
as baseless in this instance as when brought against
Mohammedanism. Valhalla was the exclusive abode of the most daring
champions; but Valhalla was not the whole of heaven. Vingolf, the
Hall of Friends, stood beside the Hall of the Slain, and was the
assembling place of the goddesses.5 There, in the palace of Freya,
the souls of noble women were received after death. The elder Edda
says that Thor guided Roska, a swift footed peasant girl who had
attended him as a servant on various excursions, to Freya's bower,
where she was welcomed, and where she remained forever. The virgin
goddess Gefjone, the Northern Diana, also had a residence in
heaven, and all who died maidens repaired thither.6 The presence
of virgin throngs with Gefjone, and the society of noble matrons
in Vingolf, shed a tender gleam across the carnage and carousal of
Valhalla. More is said of the latter the former is scarcely
visible to us now because the only record we have of the Norse
faith is that contained in the fragmentary strains of ferocious
Skalds, who sang chiefly to warriors, and the staple matter of
whose songs was feats of martial prowess or entertaining
mythological stories. Furthermore, there is above the heaven of
the Asir a yet higher heaven, the abode of the far removed and
inscrutable being, the rarely named Omnipotent One, the true All
Father, who is at last to come forth above the ruins of the
universe to judge and sentence all creatures and to rebuild a
better world. In this highest region towers the imperishable gold
roofed hall, Gimle, brighter than the sun. There is no hint
anywhere in the Skaldic strains that good women are repulsed from
this dwelling.
According to the rude morality of the people and the time, the
contrasted conditions of admission to the upper paradise or
condemnation to the infernal realm were the admired
4 Pigott, Manual of Scandinavian Mythology, p. 65.
5 Keyser, Religion of the Northmen, trans. by Pennock, p. 149.
6 Pigott, p. 245.
virtues of strength, open handed frankness, reckless audacity, or
the hated vices of feebleness, cowardice, deceit, humility. Those
who have won fame by puissant feats and who die in battle are
snatched by the Valkyrs from the sod to Valhalla. To die in arms
is to be chosen of Odin,
"In whose hall of gold The steel clad ghosts their wonted orgies
hold. Some taunting jest begets the war of words: In clamorous
fray they grasp their gleamy swords, And, as upon the earth, with
fierce delight By turns renew the banquet and the fight."
All, on the contrary, who, after lives of ignoble labor or
despicable ease, die of sickness, sink from their beds to the
dismal house of Hela. In this gigantic vaulted cavern the air
smells like a newly stirred grave; damp fogs rise, hollow sighs
are heard, the only light comes from funeral tapers held by
skeletons; the hideous queen, whom Thor eulogizes as the Scourger
of Cowards, sits on a throne of skulls, and sways a sceptre, made
of a dead man's bone bleached in the moonlight, over a countless
multitude of shivering ghosts.7 But the Norse moralists plunge to
a yet darker doom those guilty of perjury, murder, or adultery. In
Nastrond's grisly hail, which is shaped of serpents' spines, and
through whose loop holes drops of poison drip, where no sunlight
ever reaches, they welter in a venom sea and are gnawed by the
dragon Nidhogg.8 In a word, what to the crude moral sense of the
martial Goth seemed piety, virtue, led to heaven; what seemed
blasphemy, baseness, led to hell.
The long war between good and evil, light and darkness, order and
discord, the Asir and the Jotuns, was at last to reach a fatal
crisis and end in one universal battle, called Ragnarokur, or the
"Twilight of the Gods," whose result would be the total
destruction of the present creation. Portentous inklings of this
dread encounter were abroad among all beings. A shuddering
anticipation of it sat in a lowering frown of shadow on the brows
of the deities. In preparation for Ragnarokur, both parties
anxiously secured all the allies they could. Odin therefore
joyously welcomes every valiant warrior to Valhalla, as a recruit
for his hosts on that day when Fenris shall break loose. When
Hakon Jarl fell, the Valkyrs shouted, "Now does the force of the
gods grow stronger when they have brought Hakon to their home." A
Skald makes Odin say, on the death of King Eirilc Blood Axe, as an
excuse for permitting such a hero to be slain, "Our lot is
uncertain: the gray wolf gazes on the host of the gods;" that is,
we shall need help at Ragnarokur. But as all the brave and
magnanimous champions received to Valhalla were enlisted on the
side of the Asir, so all the miserable cowards, invalids, and
wretches doomed to Hela's house would fight for the Jotuns. From
day to day the opposed armies, above and below, increase in
numbers. Some grow impatient, some tremble. When Balder dies, and
the ship Nagelfra is completed, the hour of infinite suspense will
strike. Nagelfra is a vessel for the conveyance of the hosts of
frost giants to the battle. It is to be built of dead men's nails:
therefore no one should die with unpaired nails, for if he does he
7 Pigott, pp. 137, 138.
8 The Voluspa, strophes 34, 35.
furnishes materials for the construction of that ship which men
and gods wish to have finished as late as possible.9
At length Loki treacherously compasses the murder of Balder. The
frightful foreboding which at once flies through all hearts finds
voice in the dark "Raven Song" of Odin. Having chanted this
obscure wail in heaven, he mounts his horse and rides down the
bridge to Helheim. With resistless incantations he raises from the
grave, where she has been interred for ages, wrapt in snows, wet
with the rains and the dews, an aged vala or prophetess, and
forces her to answer his questions. With appalling replies he
returns home, galloping up the sky. And now the crack of doom is
at hand. Heimdall hurries up and down the bridge Bifrost, blowing
his horn till its rousing blasts echo through the universe. The
wolf Skoll, from whose pursuit the frightened sun has fled round
the heavens since the first dawn, overtakes and devours his bright
prey. Nagelfra, with the Jotun hosts on board, sails swiftly from
Utgard. Loki advances at the head of the troops of Hela. Fenris
snaps his chain and rushes forth with jaws so extended that the
upper touches the firmament, while the under rests on the earth;
and he would open them wider if there were room. Jormungandur
writhes his entire length around Midgard, and, lifting his head,
blows venom over air and sea. Suddenly, in the south, heaven
cleaves asunder, and through the breach the sons of Muspel, the
flame genii, ride out on horseback with Surtur at their head, his
sword outflashing the sun. Now Odin leads forward the Asir and the
Einheriar, and on the predestined plain of Vigrid the strife
commences. Heimdall and Loki mutually slay each other. Thor kills
Jormungandur; but as the monster expires he belches a flood of
venom, under which the matchless thunder god staggers and falls
dead. Fenris swallows Odin, but is instantly rent in twain by
Vidar, the strong silent one, Odin's dumb son, who well avenges
his father on the wolf by splitting the jaws that devoured him.
Then Surtur slings fire abroad, and the reek rises around all
things. Iggdrasill, the great Ash Tree of Existence, totters, but
stands. All below perishes. Finally, the unnamable Mighty One
appears, to judge the good and the bad. The former hie from fading
Valhalla to eternal Gimle, where all joy is to be theirs forever;
the latter are stormed down from Hela to Nastrond, there, "under
curdling mists, in a snaky marsh whose waves freeze black and thaw
in blood, to be scared forever, for punishment, with terrors ever
new." All strife vanishes in endless peace. By the power of All
Father, a new earth, green and fair, shoots up from the sea, to be
inhabited by a new race of men free from sorrow. The foul, spotted
dragon Nidhogg flies over the plains, bearing corpses and Death
itself away upon his wings, and sinks out of sight.10
It has generally been asserted, in consonance with the foregoing
view, that the Scandinavians believed that the good and the bad,
respectively in Gimle and Nastrond, would experience everlasting
rewards and punishments. But Blackwell, the recent editor of
Percy's translation of Mallet's Northern Antiquities as published
in Bohn's Antiquarian Library, argues with great force against the
correctness of the assertion.11 The point is
9 Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie, s. 775, note.
10 Keyser, Religion of the Northmen, part i. ch. vi.
11 Pp. 497-503.
dubious; but it is of no great importance, since we know that the
spirit and large outlines of their faith have been reliably set
forth. That faith, rising from the impetuous blood and rude mind
of the martial race of the North, gathering wonderful
embellishments from the glowing imagination of the Skalds,
reacting, doubly nourished the fierce valor and fervid fancy from
which it sprang. It drove the dragon prows of the Vikings
marauding over the seas. It rolled the Goths' conquering squadrons
across the nations, from the shores of Finland and Skager Rack to
the foot of the Pyrenees and the gates of Rome. The very ferocity
with which it blazed consumed itself, and the conquest of the
flickering faith by Christianity was easy. During the dominion of
this religion, the earnest sincerity with which its disciples
received it appears alike from the fearful enterprises it prompted
them to, the iron hardihood and immeasurable contempt of death it
inspired in them, and the superstitious observances which, with
pains and expenses, they scrupulously kept. They buried, with the
dead, gold, useful implements, ornaments, that they might descend,
furnished and shining, to the halls of Hela. With a chieftain they
buried a pompous horse and splendid armor, that he might ride like
a warrior into Valhalla. The true Scandinavian, by age or sickness
deprived of dying in battle, ran himself through, or flung himself
from a precipice, in this manner to make amends for not expiring
in armed strife, if haply thus he might snatch a late seat among
the Einheriar. With the same motive the dying sea king had himself
laid on his ship, alone, and launched away, with out stretched
sails, with a slow fire in the hold, which, when he was fairly out
at sea, should flame up and, as Carlyle says, "worthily bury the
old hero at once in the sky and in the ocean." Surely then, if
ever, "the kingdom of heaven suffered violence, and the violent
took it by force."