Different methods of observing this primitive rite of blood-covenanting
are indicated in the legendary lore of the Norseland peoples; and these
methods, in all their variety, give added proof of the ever underlying
idea of an inter-commingling of lives through an inter-commingling
of blood. Odin was the beneficent god of light and knowledge, the
promoter of heroism, and the protector of sacred covenants, in the
mythology of the North. Lôké, or Lok, on the other hand, was the
discordant and corrupting divinity; symbolizing, in his personality,
“sin, shrewdness, deceitfulness, treachery, malice,” and other phases
of evil.[64] In the poetic myths of the Norseland, it is claimed that
at the beginning Odin and Lôké were in close union instead of being
at variance;[65] just as the Egyptian cosmogony made Osiris and Set
in original accord, although in subsequent hostility;[66] and as the
Zoroastrians claimed that Ormuzd and Ahriman were at one, before
they were in conflict.[67] Odin and Lôké are, indeed, said to have
been, at one time, in the close and sacred union of blood-friendship;
having covenanted in that union by mingling their blood in a bowl, and
drinking therefrom together.
The Elder Edda,[68] or the earliest collection of Scandinavian songs,
makes reference to this confraternity of Odin and Lôké. At a banquet of
the gods, Lôké, who had not been invited, found an entrance, and there
reproached his fellow divinities for their hostility to him. Recalling
the indissoluble tie of blood-friendship, he said:
“Father of Slaughter,[69] Odin, say,
Rememberest not the former day,
When ruddy in the goblet stood,
For mutual drink, our blended blood?
Rememberest not, thou then didst swear,
The festive banquet ne’er to share,
Unless thy brother Lok was there?”
In citing this illustration of the ancient rite, a modern historian
of chivalry has said: “Among barbarous people [the barbarians of
Europe] the fraternity of arms [the sacred brotherhood of heroes] was
established by the horrid custom of the new brothers drinking each
other’s blood; but if this practice was barbarous, nothing was farther
from barbarism than the sentiment which inspired it.”[70]
Another of the methods by which the rite of blood-friendship was
observed in the Norseland, was by causing the blood of the two
covenanting persons to inter-flow from their pierced hands, while they
lay together underneath a lifted sod. The idea involved seems to have
been, the burial of the two individuals, in their separate personal
lives, and the intermingling of those lives--by the intermingling of
their blood--while in their temporary grave; in order to their rising
again with a common life[71]--one life, one soul, in two bodies. Thus
it is told, in one of the Icelandic Sagas, of Thorstein, the heroic son
of Viking, proffering “foster-brotherhood,” or blood-friendship, to the
valiant Angantyr, Jarl of the Orkneys. “Then this was resolved upon,
and secured by firm pledges on both sides. They opened a vein in the
hollow of their hands, crept beneath the sod, and there [with clasped
hands inter-blood-flowing] they solemnly swore that each of them should
avenge the other if any one of them should be slain by weapons.” This
was, in fact, a three-fold covenant of blood; for King Bele, who had
just been in combat with Angantyr, was already in blood-friendship with
Thorstein.[72]
The rite of blood-friendship, in one form and another finds frequent
mention in the Norseland Sagas. Thus, in the Saga of Fridthjof the
Bold, the son of Thorstein:
“Champions twelve, too, had he--gray-haired, and princes in
exploits,--
Comrades his father had loved, steel-breasted and scarred o’er the
forehead.
Last on the champions’ bench, equal-aged with Fridthjof, a stripling
Sat, like a rose among withered leaves; Bjorn called they the hero--
Glad as a child, but firm like a man, and yet wise as a graybeard;
Up with Fridthjof he’d grown; they had mingled blood with each
other,
Foster-brothers in Northman wise; and they swore to continue
Steadfast in weal and woe, each other revenging in battle.”[73]
A vestige of this primitive rite, coming down to us through European
channels, is found, as are so many other traces of primitive rites,
in the inherited folk-lore of English-speaking children on both sides
of the Atlantic. An American clergyman’s wife said recently, on this
point: “I remember, that while I was a school-girl, it was the custom,
when one of our companions pricked her finger, so that the blood came,
for one or another of us to say ‘Oh, let me suck the blood; then we
shall be friends.’” And that is but an illustration of the outreaching
after this indissoluble bond, on the part of thirty generations
of children of Norseland and Anglo-Saxon stock, since the days of
Fridthjof and Bjorn; as that same yearning had been felt by those of a
hundred generations before that time.