cannot well pass over in silence that poor Tyr, the very type of
intrepidity and loyalty, who fell a victim to his own prowess and to his
imprudent confidence in the other gods. {156}The latter, having one day
met the wolf Fenris, invited him to enjoy a good meal with them. The
wolf, always voraciously hungry, listened to the proposal. Then the
Ases, pretending to fear that he might play them an ugly trick on the
way home, insisted upon leading him by a chain around his neck, pledging
their word as gods, however, that they would set him free upon going to
table.
[Illustration: 176]
Fenris, suspicious as all wolves, in fact, as all wicked creatures are,
consented to be bound, but made it a condition that as a proof of the
good faith of the Ases, one of them should put his hand into his mouth.
Tyr agreed to do so without hesitation, not expecting that personages of
such lofty position could possibly be faithless. The gods, {157}however,
did behave faithlessly and kept Fenris a prisoner, whereupon the wolf
claimed the fulfillment of the pledge, and when Tyr put his hand into
his mouth, coolly bit it off up to the wrist. Hence that particular
joint has ever since been called _the wolf’s joint_, in memory of this
inartistic amputation.
Thus the gods had a one-handed brother among them, after having long
been presided over by a one-eyed god. But Tyr and Odin were by no means
the only gods who labored under such an infirmity. Heimdall with the
golden teeth must evidently have had a set of false teeth; Widar, the
god of silence, was dumb, and Hoder, that mysterious being whose name
must not be pronounced by any one, was blind. There was also a certain
god, called Herblinde, who was not only blind but--actually dead! We
poor mortals generally imagine that death includes blindness as a matter
of course, but it was not so, apparently, among these mystic personages.
Herblinde, for instance, was quite blind, although he was quite dead
also, and yet he attended the meetings of the gods and even had a vote
in their counsels. Do you understand that? I do not, I am sure.
And this grand council, this hospital of the Walhalla, which counted
among its members a onehanded and a dumb god, a toothless and two blind
{158}gods, was, as I said, presided over by one-eyed Odin! This fact
recalls forcibly the old proverb: Among the blind the one-eyed is king.
But why had Odin but one eye?
Fortunately I am able, for once, to give an answer to this question.
Astronomers have naturally found a reply to this Why? in their
imperturbable system of sidereal interpretations. Odin was the sun-god;
the sun was the eye of Nature, Nature had but one eye--consequently
Odin was bound to be born one-eyed!.... Now you see why your daughter is
deaf-mute.
The Edda, however, gives a different account of the matter, and I feel
bound to adopt this explanation, as it is founded upon a knowledge of
the most secret mysteries.
Odin had two eyes when he was born, and the sun was nothing more than
his travelling companion, when he came from the far East, to revive and
warm the earth which had so long been in the hands of’ the giants of the
frost.
Several centuries after he had created man, he was one day walking up
and down in the lower parts of his great ash tree Ygdrasil, and thinking
of the greatly increased responsibility which rested upon him since he
had added the government of the earth to that of heaven, and since the
earth {159}had begun to be peopled with a multitude of races. He was
asking himself whether the knowledge of all things had been revealed
to him fully enough to enable him satisfactorily to fill, his two great
offices. He had quaffed ample draughts by turns from the three vessels
of Kvasir, but Eloquence, Poetry, and even Logic do not supply Wisdom.
[Illustration: 179]
As he passed by a large tank fed by a purling brook, he saw three
beautiful swans swimming merrily about in it, who after having examined
him with half thoughtful, half mocking attention, twisted their long
flexible necks in strange contortions and then seemed to converse with
each other by significative glances.
He spoke to them and asked them if they possessed the secret of Wisdom.
The swans suddenly plunged beneath the surface, {160}and in their place
there appeared three beautiful women, representing three different
stages of life.
They were the Norns.
[Illustration: 180]
The first, called Urda, knew the Past; the second, called Verandi, saw
the Present unfold itself before her eyes, hour by hour and minute by
minute, and when to-day had become yesterday, her older sister gathered
up the departed day and entered it on her record. Finally Skulda, the
third, the Norn of the Future, enjoyed the privilege of beholding with
her far-seeing eyes the germs of all future events and of being able to
foretell with unerring accuracy the date and the consequences of their
occurrence.
Let us pause here a moment to notice a remark communicated to me by the
amiable and learned {161}Dr. Rosalh, which may not be without interest
to some of my readers.
It will be remembered that the Romans had at first pretended to
recognize in these three Norns their own three Fates, probably because
they were three and because they were women; at least I can see no other
reason. Urda, Verandi, and Skulda were as beautiful and as graceful
as the three Parcæ--Alecto, Lachesis, and Atropos--were ugly. Besides,
their duties were entirely different. The Norns knew the fate of men,
but they were utterly unable to lengthen human life. Such at least is
the opinion of the great Holinshed in his Chronicles. Warburton sees
in them nothing more than Valkyrias, but, what is far more astonishing,
Shakespeare chose these three beautiful prophetic virgins, to furnish
the three hideous, unclean, and toothless witches, the weird sisters,
who called out to Macbeth, “All hail, Macbeth, that shalt be king
hereafter!”
Shakespeare had evidently taken the curse denounced by the Church
against the ancient deities in its literal meaning.
Odin had a better opinion of the three sisters; he conversed for some
time with them, and afterwards came frequently back to visit them. It
was thus and by their aid that he gained experience.
But even Experience, added to the precious gifts {162}of Eloquence,
Poetry, and Logic, is not able to supply Wisdom.
[Illustration: 182]
He took counsel with the Norns, and in his anxiety to possess this most
precious of all gifts, he expressed his willingness to exchange for it,
if needs be, his treasures of poetry and of eloquence, his magic armor
which made him safe against all danger, his horse Sleipner, which had
eight legs and crossed the air with the rapidity of lightning, his eagle
and his vulture, his squirrel and his two {163}ravens. Then he went to
Mimer, the wisest man in existence, the successor of old Kvasir, and
attended his lectures like the most humble and zealous of students. When
he had mastered the subject, and felt that he had acquired Wisdom at
last, he paid the philosopher liberally by giving him one of his own
eyes, in order thus to show him the high value he set upon the service
which had been rendered to him by Mimer.
This was the reason why Odin was one-eyed. The truth is far too
honorable to the god to be hid under idle astronomical pretexts.
Now, what use did he make of his wisdom?
He began by regulating the government of heaven. The Ases had until now
lived very much as they chose; he now gave to each of them a duty to
perform: to Niord the management of rivers and of fishing; to Egir, the
seas and navigation; and so to others, requiring regularity and accuracy
of all, but sternly prohibiting the display of extreme zeal, just as
Talleyrand used to do with his diplomatic apprentices.
Then he turned to the earth.
Here men had multiplied incessantly, and with their numbers their wants
had increased, and alas! with these, their vices also! In order to
satisfy the wants and to repress the vices, they had established among
them that great, primitive law which {164}constitutes the whole code of
laws among barbarians--the right of the stronger.
[Illustration: 184]
“TO EGIR, THE SEAS AND NAVIGATION.”
The most fertile pastures, the rocks and grottoes best fitted for
dwellings and safe retreats, the forests that were richest in game and
the springs that were most frequented by the flocks, all were taken by
force and possession maintained by the strength of the sword.
Wise Odin felt that violence gave no right and that theft could not
give a title to possession. He {165}determined to establish the right of
property, and to give it, for greater efficiency, a religious character
which would make it sacred in the eyes of nations.
One of his daughters, Gefione, was sent by him to one of the most
powerful chiefs of Scandinavia. She presented herself before his tent,
with presents in her hands. In return she asked only for a span of land.
The chief gave her a vast but uncultivated territory.
[Illustration: 185]
Next she went, with secret purposes in her mind and always inspired by
Odin, to a distant country, into the mountains, where giants dwelt. Here
she married one of these giants, the most powerful of them all, to whom
she bore four sons. The strong are apt to be gentle. Gefione took her
four sons, changed them into oxen, and by words of gentle persuasion
induced her husband to harness them himself to a plough. A river marked
the boundary of the field, on the other side stood an altar. Thus was
the first piece of property inaugurated, {166}by purchase, by labor, and
under the protection of the gods. The first owner, the gigantic husband,
represented Force submitting to Right, and the four oxen represented the
hard-working family, improving the soil and enriching it with the sweat
of their brow.
Soon people began to imitate Gefione’s example, and in all directions
land was measured and laid out; stones were put up to mark the boundary
lines of each legal possession, and these stones were held sacred.
In order to encourage men in these efforts, the Ases made it a point
every morning to show their bright, shining heads above the horizon and
thus to cheer them by their presence and the interest they took in their
labors.
The god Thor even came once to pay a visit to his sister Gefione, and
then cast a few flashes of lightning upon each one of the newly acquired
pieces of land, to render them sacred. Hence the old, deeply rooted
notion that lightning hallows all it touches. Afterwards, and as late as
the fifteenth century, it was deemed sufficient at Bonn, at Cologne, and
at Mayence, to cast Thor’s hammer upon the piece of land that had become
a fief, in order to establish an absolute right of proprietorship.
But the right of property alone did not suffice to render human society
stable and flourishing,--{167}the nations of the earth longed for a
hierarchy of rank and race; at least the divine pupil of the wise Mimer
decided it should be so. The means he employed to found such a hierarchy
and the system itself appear curious and odd enough to us, who are no
gods, but, unsuitable as they look now, they were successful at the
time.
By his order Heimdall, the god with the false teeth, abandoned his post
as guardian of the Wal-halla for nine days, and after a long journey
across the country, knocked at the door of a wretched tumbledown hut,
where the _Great-grandmother_ lived. Here he remained three days and
three nights.
The Great-grandmother brought a male child into the world,
black-skinned, broad-shouldered, with hard horny hands, and powerful
arms. They called it _Thrall_, the serf.
Thrall’s natural inclination led him to prefer the hard work in mines
and in the wilderness; he was fond of the society of domestic
animals and even slept with them in their stables. His sons became
cattle-raisers, miners, or charcoal-burners.
Heimdall had continued his journey. He next stopped at the
_Grandmother’s_ house, a small, simple cottage, but lacking in nothing
that was useful.
Here he remained three days and three nights.
The Grandmother gave birth to a son, who was called _Karl_, the free
man. {168}Karl was fond of driving oxen under the yoke, of working in
wood and in iron, of building boats and houses, and of trading. From him
are descended our workmen and artisans, our merchants and builders.
Turning his face towards the south, Heimdall next went to a beautiful
mansion, surrounded by magnificent gardens and reflected in the blue
waters of a large lake. As the god had only to show his golden teeth
in order to be welcomed by every woman he saw, the mistress of this
mansion, the _Mother_, also received him with great delight and tried
to do him honor. Dressed in her most costly robes she put an embroidered
cloth upon a table of polished wood and offered him in silver dishes
all the varieties of fish and game, in which the lake and the park near
the house abounded. The Mother did everything to keep the god as long
as possible at her house, but, as at the Grandmother’s and at the
Great-grandmother’s, so he remained here only three days and three
nights.
A son appeared to console the Mother for the departure of her
illustrious guest; this child had at its birth already rosy cheeks,
long hair, and a haughty look. When he was still a child, he was fond of
brandishing his spear and of bending his bow; at fifteen he swam across
the blue waters of the lake, or plunged on an unbroken horse into
{169}the depths of the forest, riding as fast as the wind. They called
him Jarl, the noble.
Some years later Heimdall paid another visit to this country; delighted
with the prowess of Jarl, he acknowledged him as his son and taught
him the language of birds, which the gods alone understand and fluently
speak. He taught him also the science of Runes, of runes of victory
which are engraven on the blades of swords; runes of love to be traced
upon drinking horns or the thumbnail; runes of the sea, with which the
prow and the rudder of ships are decorated--in all cases precautionary
measures by which alone ill fortune can be kept at bay.
Besides these gifts of knowledge, he bestowed upon him an inalienable,
hereditary domain. This was the first entailed estate ever known in
Europe.
Jarl, says the Edda, was a man of _eight-horse power_. Could we express
it better in the noble railway Anglo-Saxon of our day, or does
our modern English really go back to the old Scandinavian, as this
coincidence would seem to prove?
Jarl’s descendants are the great chieftains, the barons, princes,
kings, and Druids, who have all inherited great power from their divine
ancestor with the golden teeth. They alone are his legitimate
and acknowledged children; the descendants of the grandmother and
great-grandmother are illegitimate. {170}Still, whether acknowledged by
the law or not, they all form a close chain, a single family, they all
spring from the same god! Thus the humblest among them saw his rights
secured for the future.
I must confess that, the more carefully I examine these barbarians,
whether they were gods or men, the more I am surprised to discover
beneath the outward cloak of their fables so many correct ideas of order
and of justice. These fables had, of course, their day and then passed
away. Up to the present time, it is true, there is not much of the day
gone; perhaps also Odin may be blamed for having invented, before the
world was a few hundred years old, both the Middle Ages and the Feudal
System. But it would be wrong to blame him, for it must be acknowledged,
that in spite of the violence of their manners and the bloody nature
of their worship, a certain civilization had at last appeared among
the Scandinavians. It may be called brutal, I grant; it may be called
aggressive even, but it was after all an improvement, and it has held
its own in the North, under snow and ice, like the vigorous plants of
our Alps. How comes it that the Germans and the Franks, more favored by
climate and by contact with highly civilized nations, remained so long
inferior to the Scandinavians in this respect? Perhaps they were more
liable to be invaded than the Sons of the North; the Scandinavians
invaded the continent {171}in all directions, but no one ever dreamt of
invading their country.
After having thus established the right of property and a certain social
hierarchy, Odin had next instituted marriage with the symbolic ring, and
finally courts of justice.
But, since he had given to man an immortal soul, and since he held out
to him reward or punishment in another world according to his deserts,
Odin had been compelled to establish the first high tribunals in that
other world.
[Illustration: 191]
We must, therefore, find our way to Walhalla and even to Hell, if the
reader is disposed to follow us to that place.
[Illustration: 195]
VII.
{175}Heaven and Hell.--_The Valkyrias.--Amusements in Walhalla.--Pork
and Wild Boar.--A Frozen Hell.--Balder’s Death.--Frigg’s Devotion.--The
Iron Tree Forest.--The Twilight of the Gods.--Idunas’ Apples.--The Fall
of Heaven and the End of the World.--Reflections on that Event.--The
Little Fellow still alive._
When the warriors were preparing for battle, a number of blue-eyed young
maidens, mounted on {176}bright, shining horses, passed through their
ranks, animating them with word and gesture, and whispering into their
ears warlike songs to be soon changed into triumphal chants for those
who fell on the battlefield, mortally wounded.
[Illustration: 196]
These maidens were the Valkyrias, those Valkyrias whom ever since the
poets and painters of the Ossianic school have reproduced in a thousand
forms. Nor must it be forgotten that this remarkable school, which the
Scotchman Macpherson revived {177}towards the end of the eighteenth
century, counted among its most ardent admirers two enthusiastic
Frenchmen, whose names were Napoleon and Lamartine.
These Valkyrias, beautiful nymphs of carnage as they were, delighted in
the clash of arms, the shedding of blood, and the dying groans of the
wounded, even in the odors exhaled by the dying,--a taste which seems
little suited to fair, blue-eyed maidens. These unnatural tastes were,
however, justified to a certain extent, by the peculiar mission which
they had to fulfill, a mission of kindness and tender compassion. They
walked to and fro on the battlefield, not to carry off the dead, but to
gather the souls of those who had fallen. Of the _Seola_ (such was the
sweet name of the Soul among the nations of Germanic or Scandinavian
race), they rapidly asked these questions:--
“Seola, did you belong to a free man or to a slave?
“Seola, did your master honor the gods and the priests of those gods?
“Did he keep his pledged word?
“Did he die like a brave man, with his face to the enemy and not a fear
in his heart?
“Seola, did he ever fight against the men of his own blood and his own
race?”
The human soul, as soon as it escapes from the {178}wretched bondage of
this earth, no longer possesses the sad power of being able to tell a
falsehood; Seola, therefore, answered these questions truthfully, even
though it were to its own condemnation. In the latter case the Valkyrias
left it to the black Alfs, a kind of demons who belonged to hell; but
if the Seola had belonged to a brave and loyal warrior, the Valkyria
instantly unfolded her white wines and took it to Walhalla, the home of
the gods and the paradise of heroes.
This paradise, exclusively intended for free men, was still open to
slaves also, if they had fallen by the side of their masters, or if they
had thrown themselves voluntarily into the fire of the funeral pile for
the purpose of continuing their service in the future life.
Let us see whether the delights of Walhalla were sufficiently attractive
to warrant such selfimmolation.
The one great enjoyment of all who dwell in Walhalla was combat and
strife. That is a matter of taste, but did they not carry combat and
strife a little too far? They fought there for hours and hours, with
eagerness, with fury, even piercing each other and cutting each other to
pieces to their hearts’ delight. It is true, that as soon as the dinner
hour came the blood ceased to flow, the wounds closed their gaping lips,
the {179}limbs that had been lopped off by the swords returned to their
place, the broken heads and exposed entrails were restored without the
surgeon’s aid, not leaving a scar behind, and the heroes went arm in arm
to dinner, looking forward with joy to a repetition of the same merry
sport as soon as the meal should be finished.
The fare at this table of gods and heroes does not seem to have been
peculiarly wholesome; at all events it was not very varied.
The pork-butchers’ business was at that time uncommonly flourishing both
in heaven and on earth. Tacitus tells us that among the races of the
North, as far as the borders of the Baltic Sea, chieftains and matrons
alike loved to wear suspended around their neck a small image of a pig
as an emblem of abundance and fecundity. Rich and poor, all looked
upon pork as the main supply of their pantry. The pig, however, was not
deemed worthy to appear on Odin’s table, and its place was taken by the
boar: the gods lived upon wild boar, men upon domestic pig, that was the
whole difference.
I am often tempted to eat pork, and I am occasionally enabled to taste
wild boar; but I must solemnly confess, swearing if needs be by my
stomach, that in my opinion, the gods and the heroes had by no means the
best of it. It may {180}be, however, that wild boars here below are not
quite equal to heavenly boars.
[Illustration: 200]
However that may be, there appeared every morning upon the edge of one
of the marvelous forests to be found in Walhalla, an enormous colossal
boar, a very mammoth of a boar. The {181}heroes proceeded to hunt it,
accompanied at times by Thor, by Vali, the skillful archer, or by Tyr,
the one-handed god, who nevertheless wielded his sword with power and
accuracy. Then the monster was killed, cut up and roasted, and all dined
together.
[Illustration: 201]
The next day there appeared on the edge of the marvelous forest another
wild boar, quite as fat and quite as enormous, in fact in every respect
as attractive as the boar of the day before--some think it was always
the same animal, come to life again. Then a new hunt and a new dinner
upon roasted wild boar. Surely we poor people might become disgusted for
the rest of our lives, one would imagine,--and those were immortal gods!
What taste!
But there is worse behind yet. The Scandinavian {182}paradise was by
no means the only one where the pork-butcher was thus glorified. In a
neighboring paradise, which the Finns had established, we are told by
a learned writer, the rivers were flowing with beer and hydromel, the
mountains consisted of lard and the hills of half salted pork.
To help them in digesting their solid food, the Scandinavian gods drank,
like those of Finland, great quantities of beer and hydromel; but they
had in addition, an abundance of wine which they quaffed from gold cups.
Wine! In this one word thoughtful historians have discovered a whole
revelation.
Now would it ever have occurred to Odin, in his hyperborean lands, where
the vine did not exist and could not possibly live, to bring the fruit
of the vine to his paradise? Did he know grapes? And when had he learnt
to know them? But as I do not wish to interrupt my story, I reserve the
discussion of this great and important question, with several others
of the same kind, for another chapter, in which I hope to be able to
develop my views fully and scientifically.