V. "The Wolf will swallow the father of men; Vidar will avenge it. He
will cleave the Wolf's cold jaws in the battle."
(2) _Völuspa_:
"A hag sits eastward in Ironwood and rears Fenri's children; one of
them all, in troll's shape, shall be the sun's destroyer. He shall
feed on the lives of death-doomed men; with red blood he shall redden
the seat of the Gods. The sunshine shall grow black, all winds will
be unfriendly in the after-summers.... I see further in the future
the great Ragnarök of the Gods of Victory.... Heimdal blows loudly,
the horn is on high; Yggdrasil's ash trembles as it stands, the old
tree groans."
The following lines tell of the fire-giants and the various combats,
and the last section of the poem deals with a new world when Baldr,
Höd and Hoeni are to come back to the dwelling-place of the Gods.
The whole points to a belief in the early destruction of the world
and the passing away of the old order of things. Whether the new
world which _Vafthrudnismal_ and _Völuspa_ both prophesy belongs to
the original idea or not is a disputed point. Probably it does not;
at all events, none of the old Aesir, according to the poems, are
to survive, for Modi and Magni are not really Gods at all, Baldr,
Höd and Vali belong to another myth, Hoeni had passed out of the
hierarchy by his exchange with Njörd, and Vidar's origin is obscure.
* * * * *
_The Einherjar_, the great champions or chosen warriors, are intimately
connected with Ragnarök. All warriors who fall in battle are taken
to Odin's hall of the slain, Valhalla. According to _Grimnismal_,
he "chooses every day men dead by the sword"; his Valkyries ride
to battle to give the victory and bring in the fallen. Hence Odin
is the giver of victory. Loki in _Lokasenna_ taunts him with giving
victory to the wrong side: "Thou hast never known how to decide the
battle among men. Thou hast often given victory to those to whom thou
shouldst not give it, to the more cowardly"; this, no doubt, was in
order to secure the best fighters for Valhalla. That the defeated
side sometimes consoled themselves with this explanation of a notable
warrior's fall is proved by the tenth-century dirge on Eirik Bloodaxe,
where Sigmund the Volsung asks in Valhalla: "Why didst thou take the
victory from him, if thou thoughtest him brave?" and Odin replies:
"Because it is uncertain when the grey Wolf will come to the seat
of the Gods." There are similar lines in Eyvind's dirge on Hakon
the Good. In this way a host was collected ready for Ragnarök:
for _Grimnismal_ says: "There are five hundred doors and eighty
in Valhalla; eight hundred Einherjar will go out from each door,
when they go to fight the wolf." Meanwhile they fight and feast:
"All the Einherjar in Odin's courts fight every day: they choose
the slain and ride from the battle, and sit then in peace together"
(_Vafthrudnismal_,) and the Valkyries bear ale to them _(Grimnismal_).
It is often too hastily assumed that the Norse Ragnarök with
the dependant Valhalla system are in great part the outcome of
Christian influence: of an imitation of the Christian Judgment Day
and the Christian heaven respectively. Owing to the lateness of our
material, it is, of course, impossible to decide how old the beliefs
may be, but it is likely that the Valhalla idea only took form at
the systematising of the mythology in the Viking age. The belief
in another world for the dead is, however, by no means exclusively
Christian, and a reference in _Grimnismal_ suggests the older system
out of which, under the influence of the Ragnarök idea, Valhalla was
developed. The lines, "The ninth hall is Folkvang, where Freyja rules
the ordering of seats in the hall; half the slain she chooses every
day, Odin has the other half," are an evident survival of a belief
that all the dead went to live with the Gods, Odin having the men,
and Freyja (or more probably Frigg) the women; the idea being here
confused with the later system, under which only those who fell in
battle were chosen by the Gods. Christian colouring appears in the
last lines of _Völuspa_ and in Snorri, where men are divided into the
"good and moral," who go after death to a hall of red gold, and the
"perjurers and murderers," who are sent to a hall of snakes.
For Ragnarök also a heathen origin is at least as probable as a
Christian one. I would suggest as a possibility that the expectation of
the Twilight of the Gods may have grown out of some ritual connected
with the eclipse, such as is frequent among heathen races. Such
ceremonies are a tacit acknowledgment of a doubt, and if they ever
existed among the Scandinavians, the possibility, ever present to
the savage mind, of a time when his efforts to help the light might
be fruitless, and the darkness prove the stronger, would be the germ
of his more civilised descendant's belief in Ragnarök.
By turning to the surviving poems of the Skalds, whose dates can be
approximately reckoned from the sagas, we can fix an inferior limit
for certain of the legends given above, placing them definitely in the
heathen time. Reference has already been made to the corroboration
of the Valhalla belief supplied by the elegies on Eirik Bloodaxe
and Hakon the Good. In the former (which is anonymous, but must have
been written soon after 950, since it was composed, on Eirik's death,
by his wife's orders), Odin commands the Einherjar and Valkyries to
prepare for the reception of the slain Eirik and his host, since no
one knows how soon the Gods will need to gather their forces together
for the great contest. Eyvind's dirge on Hakon (who fell in 970) is an
imitation of this: Odin sends two Valkyries to choose a king to enter
his service in Valhalla; they find Hakon on the battle-field, and
he is slain with many of his followers. Great preparation is made in
Valhalla for his reception, and the poet ends by congratulating Hakon
(who, though a Christian, having been educated in England, had not
interfered with the heathen altars and sacrifices) on the toleration
which has secured him such a welcome. A still earlier poet, Hornklofi,
writing during the reign of Harald Fairhair (who died in 933), alludes
to the slain as the property of "the one-eyed husband of Frigg."
Several Skalds mention legends of Thor: his fishing for the World-Snake
is told by Bragi (who from his place in genealogies must have written
before 900), and by Ulf Uggason and Eystein Valdason, both in the
second half of the tenth century; and Thjodulf and Eilif (the former
about 960, the latter a little later) tell tales of his fights with
the giants. Turning to the other Gods, Egil Skallagrimsson (about 970)
names Frey and Njörd as the givers of wealth; Bragi tells the story
of Gefion's dragging the island of Zealand out of Lake Wener into
the sea; and Ulf Uggason speaks of Heimdal's wrestling with Loki.
The legend of Idunn is told by Thjodulf much as Snorri tells it:
Odin, Hoeni and Loki, while on a journey, kill and roast an ox. The
giant Thiazi swoops down in eagle's shape and demands a share; Loki
strikes the eagle, who flies off with him, releasing him only on
condition that he will betray to the giants Idunn, "the care-healing
maid who understands the renewal of youth." He does so, and the Gods,
who grow old and withered for want of her apples, force him to go
and bring her back to Asgard.
The poet of _Eiriksmal_, quoted above, alludes to the Baldr myth:
Bragi, hearing the approach of Eirik and his host, asks "What is
that thundering and tramping, as if Baldr were coming back to Odin's
hall?" The funeral pyre of Baldr is described by Ulf Uggason: he is
burnt on his ship, which is launched by a giantess, in the presence
of Frey, Heimdal, Odin and the Valkyries.
Though heathen writers outside of Scandinavia are lacking, references
to Germanic heathendom fortunately survive in several Continental
Christian historians of earlier date than any of our Scandinavian
sources. The evidence of these, though scanty, is corroborative,
and the allusions are in striking agreement with the Edda stories in
tone and character.
Odin (Wodanus) is always identified by these writers with the
Roman Mercurius (whom Tacitus named as the chief German God). This
identification occurs in the eighth-century Paulus Diaconus, and in
Jonas of Bobbio (first half of the seventh century), and probably rests
on Odin's character as a wandering God (Mercury being diaktoros), his
disguises, and his patronage of poetry and eloquence (as Mercury is
logios). Odin is not himself in general the conductor of dead souls
(psychopompos), like the Roman God, his attendant Valkyries performing
the office for him. The equation is only comprehensible on the
presumption of the independence of Germanic mythology, and cannot be
explained by transmission. For if Odin were in any degree an imitation
of the Roman deity, other notable attributes of the latter would have
been assigned to him: whereas in the Edda the thieving God (kleptis)
is not Odin but Loki, and the founder of civilisation is Heimdal.
The legend of the origin of the Lombards given by Paulus Diaconus
illustrates the relations of Odin and Frigg. The Vandals asked Wodan
(Odin) to grant them victory over the Vinili; the latter made a similar
prayer to Frea (Frigg), the wife of Wodan. She advised them to make
their wives tie their hair round their faces like beards, and go with
them to meet Wodan in the morning. They did so, and Wodan exclaimed,
"Who are these _Long-beards_?" Then Frea said that having given the
Vinili a name, he must give them the victory (as Helgi in the Edda
claims a gift from Svava when she names him). As in _Grimnismal_,
Odin and Frigg are represented as supporting rival claims, and Frigg
gains the day for her favourites by superior cunning. This legend
also shows Odin as the giver of victory.
Few heathen legends are told however by these early Christian writers,
and the Gods are seldom called by their German names. An exception is
the Frisian Fosite mentioned by Alcuin (who died 804) and by later
writers; he is to be identified with the Norse Forseti, the son of
(probably at first an epithet of) Baldr, but no legend of him is
told. It is disappointing that these writers should have said so
little of any God except the chief one. A very characteristic touch
survives in Gregory of Tours (died 594), when the Frank Chlodvig tells
his Christian wife that the Christian God "cannot be proved to be
of the race of the Gods," an idea entirely in keeping with the Eddic
hierarchy. Before leaving the Continental historians, reference may be
made to the abundant evidence of Germanic tree-worship to be gathered
from them. The holy oak mentioned by Wilibald (before 786), the sacred
pear-tree of Constantius (473), with numerous others, supply parallels
to the World-Ash which is so important a feature of Norse mythology.
A study of this subject would be incomplete without some reference to
the mythology of Saxo Grammaticus. His testimony on the old religion
is unwilling, and his effort to discredit it very evident. The
bitterness of his attack on Frigg especially suggests that she
was, among the Northmen, a formidable rival to the Virgin. When he
repeats a legend of the Gods, he transforms them into mortal heroes,
and when, as often happens, he refers to them accidentally as Gods,
he invariably hastens to protest that he does so only because it had
been the custom. He describes Thor and Odin as men versed in sorcery
who claimed the rank of Gods; and in another passage he speaks of
the latter as a king who had his seat at Upsala, and who was falsely
credited with divinity throughout Europe. His description of Odin
agrees with that in the Edda: an old man of great stature and mighty
in battle, one-eyed, wearing a great cloak, and constantly wandering
about in disguise. The story which Saxo tells of his driving into
battle with Harald War-tooth, disguised as the latter's charioteer
Brun, and turning the fight against him by revealing to his enemy Ring
the order of battle which he had invented for Harald's advantage, is
in thorough agreement with the traditional character of the God who
betrayed Sigmund the Volsung and Helgi Hundingsbane. Saxo's version
of the Baldr story has been mentioned already. Baldr's transformation
into a hero (who could only be slain by a sword in the keeping of
a wood-satyr) is almost complete. But Odin and Thor and all the
Gods fight for him against his rival Hother, "so that it might be
called a battle of Gods against men"; and Nanna's excuse to Baldr
that "a God could not wed with a mortal," preserves a trace of his
origin. The chained Loki appears in Saxo as Utgarda-Loki, lying bound
in a cavern of snakes, and worshipped as a God by the Danish king
Gorm Haraldsson. Dr. Eydberg sees the Freyja myth in Saxo's story of
Syritha, who was carried away by the giants and delivered by her lover
Othar (the Od of the Edda): an example, like _Svipdag and Menglad_,
of the complete transformation of a divine into an heroic myth. In
almost all cases Saxo vulgarises the stories in the telling, a common
result when a mythical tale is retold by a Christian writer, though
it is still more conspicuous in his versions of the heroic legends.