Njord and Skadi

by Sheena McGrath

  No doubt for some a myth that relates directly to nature is emotionally satisfying.

  I want to be clear here: I am not denying that there are aspects of the Njord - Skadi myth that are clearly about nature, but I think that if that was all it was, then it would be no more than a primitive tale of little interest. It has to have some resonance in human emotions and behaviour before it's of any worth. In other words, a myth needs to be a good story first.

  What aspects of this myth are connected to nature and human activity in nature? In his article on Gift-Ref’s saga, Bruce Lincoln suggests a set of oppositions:

  Njord

  Skadi

  sea

  land

  ships

  skis

  seagulls

  wolves

  summer

  winter

  harbours

  mountains

  fishing

  hunting

  singing

  howling

  I'm still not entirely sure where the summer - winter one comes from, unless it's the common northern pattern of living on or near shore during the summer, then moving inland once the harbour ices up, and hunting game for food.

  No doubt in real life people lived on both, probably depending on what was available at any given time. However, as we will see in later chapters, the Icelanders who lived on the coast saw themselves and their lifestyles as quite different from the inland Sami and Finns, and ships were seen as prestige objects, to the point where people were buried with or in them. The fishing, and later trading and raiding that they allowed were prized above agriculture and hunting, although both were practiced.

  The binary that Njord and Skadi seem to embody (from nature-myth to structuralism in a single bound) must have a larger meaning, but what is it? Various authors have different ideas, all related to conditions in northern Europe. Lincoln sees the ship and the possibilities it presents as an embodiment of capitalism, allowing Ref to accumulate money and goods in contrast to Pinchpenny who lives in the mountains, and who is such a miser that even the slightest loss causes him and his family members to commit suicide. The contrast between the sociability and money-making of the shore and the fear and isolation of the mountains couldn't be starker.

  Lincoln mentions summer vs. winter, although he doesn't elaborate on it. Guerber, quoted above, also sees Njord as a summer god, although it's not clear why. Perhaps Hkr's account of the good crops during Njord's reign influenced them.

  A more modern version from Alice Karlsdottir sees them as light and darkness, as well as the seasons. The ship was a mode of travel for the warmer months, before the ice set in. Skis and skates would be far more useful in winter. Further, she says: "It is interesting to see a variation on the usual theme of winter married to summer, in that it is the male deity who represents fertility and warmth, and the female who is the bringer of darkness and death."[186]

  Karlsdottir raises two further points which are worth pursuing in light of this question of male fertility deities. First, is the link between fertility and death, which I will discuss in more detail further on along with Gro Steinsland's sacred marriage theory. The link between fertility and death is evident, however, in everything from compost bins to oil deposits. Second, Njord and his family represent two groups of food sources, one wild and one domestic. Njord, as god of sailors and fishermen, provided one source, while Freyr made the crops grow, and Freya looked after the fertility of humans and animals. So Freyr and Freya complemented each other domestically, while Njord and Skadi did the same for wild food.

  McKinnell, on the other hand, sees the seas as full of life, while the mountains are barren. Another way of looking at it is that Njord and Skadi are not dependent:

  The story of Njord and Skadi shows a mutual break up, as neither of them can be happy in the home of the other (Gylf XXIII Prose Edda 23-4). They are both independent deities, and do not rely on each other to perform their divine functions: indeed, as Skadi is a ski goddess, and Njord is god of the sea, their divine functions make them mutually incompatible. This suggests that their break up is the best result in order for them to act as gods, and implies that divorce, among the gods at least, is a possibility.[187]

  In other words, they have no need of each other, and indeed get in each other's way.

  Another way of looking at it, and probably a more historically accurate one, is to say that both are needed to make a living in the north:

  Even though the story of the union between Njord and Skade underlines the differences between sea and mountain, I think we could interpret the story as a union between the coast and the mountain, as people in the coastal areas needed both places to make a living.[188]

  Holm thinks that the Vanir operate as a bridge between the infield and outfield (Midgard - Utgard) and perhaps hark back to a period when this division was less sharp. That would explain why two of the Vanir men are married to giantesses.

  The connection with mountains and skiing, as well as the hunting with a bow, led to Skadi being thought of as a Sami-like woman. In the chapter on Sami Parallels I have gone more deeply into the question of the conceptual similarity of Sami and jotun, based on both living in the North and East and living a similar lifestyle. As Else Mundal puts it:

  The otherness of the Saamis and their culture and the fact that they mostly lived outside the areas where the Nordic people lived, especially in the North, but farther south also in the border areas between Norway and Sweden and in the inland of Eastern Norway, conformed to the pattern of Midgardr–Útgardr. According to the mythological map the Saamis became the Útgardr people.[189]

  Like the giants, the Sami had precious objects that the Norse wanted, notably the magical arrows that the Sami king Gusir got from his giant brother Brúni, and in turn gave to Ketill hœngr.[190]

  The Skadi - Njord myth, whether you accept the Sami idea or not, clearly has to do with marriage, and the problems associated with it. One obvious problem is the one that confronts Njord: proximity and distance. We are told that Njord was married already, but his wife was also his sister. When he joined the Aesir as a hostage, he had to give up his first wife, which seems remarkably accommodating of him. (I wonder if he hadn't been promised a substitute as a reward for compliance. Skadi may not have been the only one hoping to snag an Ase for a spouse.)

  It also smacks of the Roman practice of taking hostages from among tribes around the Empire and educating them in Roman ways before making them into client-rulers. (See Hostages for more on this.) If his first wife was too close, at least to human and Aesir eyes, his second wife couldn't be more distant. A jotunn, from Utgard, with completely different ways and preferences.

  As Clunies-Ross points out, the Vanir may have fought their way into a truce with the Aesir, but they joined them on the Aesir's terms. She sees them as compromises between "divine endogamy and the exchange of women that the giants desire".[191] Njord is caught in the middle of this; he will not be allowed to marry into the Aesir, and he had to give up the wife he had among his own aett; only the giants are left to him and Freyr.

  Oosten notes that while the Vanir are marked by incest, the Aesir are marked by fratricide: "The opposition between alliance and war, marriage and death is also represented in the relations between the myth of Balder and the myth of the marriage of Njord and Skadi."[192] The relations between Vanir and giants was one of compensation and marriage, very different from the relations between Aesir and jotnar. "...[I]n the myths of the war between these groups we find not an exchange of women, but an exchange of men."[193]

  This leads into the idea of "negative reciprocity", first defined by Marshall Sahlins in his book On the Sociology of Primitive Exchange in the chapter "Stone Age Economics":

  Reciprocity is a whole class of exchanges, a continuum of forms. This is specially true in the narrow context of material transactions as opposed to a broadly conceived social principle or moral norm of give-and-take. At one end of the spectrum stands the assistance freel
y given, the small currency of everyday kinship, friendship, and neighbourly relations, the "pure gift" Malinowski called it, regarding which an open stipulation of return would be unthinkable and unsociable. At the other pole, self-interested seizure, appropriation by chicanery or force requited only by an equal and opposite effort on the principle of lex talionis, "negative reciprocity" as Gouldner phrases it. The extremes are notably positive and negative in a moral sense. The intervals between them are not merely so many gradations of material balance in exchange, they are intervals of sociability. The distance between poles of reciprocity is, among other things, social distance...[194]

  Clunies-Ross and Kristensen have applied this theory to relations between Aesir, Vanir and jotnar to considerable effect. When we add in Levi-Strauss' idea about marriage as an exchange of women (see Oosten, above) then we see a clear pattern of rules about who can marry whom, and who is willing to exchange with whom. In this view, the Aesir are on top, the jotnar on bottom, and the Vanir are "the filling in this uneasy sandwich"[195].

  While Clunies-Ross sees the system as inherently flawed, Kristensen argues that it works just fine for the party that created it; the Aesir. Kristensen turns the focus on tensions in the kinship structure, both within the Aesir and in their relations with the giants.

  He also does not see the giants as inherently evil, but rather as neutral, morally.[196] He sees the myths about relations between the different groups, and within the groups, as exploring what was permissible, and what was taboo:

  The Old Norse myths, often preoccupied with relationships probably disallowed in the real world, thus tested various (systematically inverted) positions of the system and at the same time could explain sexual prohibitions and marriage patterns in the culture in which they were told.[197]

  John Lindow and Margaret Clunies-Ross have both written about the Njord-Skadi myth from the viewpoint of folktales and medieval customs. Clunies-Ross looks at the whole myth, Thiazi's half and Skadi's half, as based on various wondertale motifs, and the Skadi half as also a burlesque on the bridal-quest tale, with gender inversion as the order of the day. Lindow goes along with the gender inversion, and adds some parallels from medieval customs including the parading of penitents or the losers in a war barefoot, and the law against adultery that punished the woman and her lover by having them paraded through the town with her drawing him by the penis. He sees Loki as playing with status (since freemen did not have to endure physical punishments) as much as gender.

  If Lindow and Clunies-Ross see the marriage myth as a burlesque in which both parties endure humiliation, Gro Steinsland reads it very differently. To her, the marriage of god and giantess is of a very different order, a hieros gamos or sacred marriage in which the god-king fertilizes the land (giantess) and this results in the birth of a new kind of being, a divine king. Others are not convinced by this, including Clunies-Ross, whose paper "Royal Ideology" is a rebuttal of Steinsland's thesis. Others who have looked at kingship include Sundqvist and Tolley, both of whom seem unconvinced by the idea as mooted by Steinsland, and the Frazerian addendum of the ritual death of the sacred king that many have read into the poem Yt. Steinsland's ideas are nonetheless influential, with Else Mundal among others.

  Another version of this idea comes from John McKinnell, whose book Meeting the Other outlines his own theory about a pattern he finds in Ys and other myths such as Njord - Skadi. He observes of the latter:

  One might have expected myths about the ‘sacred marriage’ between the fertility god and the earth-giantess to be celebrations of a joyful union, but in fact the fundamental hostility between gods and giants was so strong that they are usually misalliances.[198]

  Among the human kings of Ys he sees a pattern in which the man he calls the Summer King goes to a land of winter or death where he encounters a Winter King and his daughter. The Summer King and the woman marry and have a son, but the Summer King abandons his wife, and dies because of her curse. Their son then takes the throne.[199]

  Of course, in the Njord story it is Skadi who does the abandoning, leaving Njord to return to her mountains. However, Georges Dumézil has suggested that the story of Njord could be seen as a male version of the selkie or swan-maiden myth, in which a human (usually a hunter) either woos or entraps an otherworldly woman into living with him. They have a son, but either the woman finally finds her animal-skin, or her longing for home becomes too great, and she leaves her husband. The son often becomes a sort of shaman or super-hunter, thanks to his connection to the animal world.

  The swan-wife story is only one of the many folktale/fairytale elements of this story. In fact, you could analyse the Thiazi half of this story as a succession of fairytale elements, with Stith Thompson's motif-index in one hand and the Prose Edda in the other.

  Some, including Jan de Vries, have been dismissive of the Thiazi myth and its sequel on the grounds that it is so heavily based on folktales.[200] However, the same can be said of Thor's stories, which tend to burlesque their hero as well. Clunies-Ross borrows from Vladimir Propp's analysis of folktales for her paper on Skadi, but she doesn't see the similarities as diminishing the Skadi myth at all. We are more aware these days of the ways that forms once kept separate as "high" and "low" actually flow into one another.

  The second half of the myth, in fact, inverts expectations so much that its use of "low" folktale motifs may be deliberate. Skadi begins the inversion by embarking on a quest for vengeance, which turns into a bridal-quest, along with a suitor test for first her and then the Aesir. After all this drama, you would expect the deities to settle down to be married, but they keep moving around, and finally separate. The end dramatically reverses our expectations of all myths about marriage between deities - you expect them to marry and be happy, if anyone is going to.

  But dismissing this myth as just a funny story ignores the way it uses humour to sneak up on some crucial issues in Norse myth: the relations between outside and inside, kinship and its obligations, and the fate of the worlds. In addition, it addresses the question of what makes for a good marriage. Not bad going for a simple nature-myth.

  Chapter 8

  What is a Giant? Or, Risar and Thursar and Trolls, oh my!

  In the earliest days of our lives we are all surrounded by giants, often loving, sometimes hostile and possibly dangerous, but first and foremost much larger and very different from us... Mythology would not be so potent if it did not parallel human experience. It is logical that the story of the world and the greatest mythical journey begin with giants, just like that world which is born whenever a human opens his eyes for the first time.[201]

  (Jakobsson "Identifying the Ogre: The Legendary Saga Giants")

  A primitive man, on meeting other men, will first have experienced fright. His fear will make him see these men as larger and stronger than himself; he will give them the name giants. After many experiences, he will discover that the supposed giants are neither larger nor stronger than himself, and that their stature did not correspond to the idea he had originally linked to the word ‘giant’. He will then invent another name that he has in common with them, such as, for example, the word man, and will retain the word ‘giant’ for the false object that impressed him while he was being deluded.[202]

  (Rousseau’s ‘Essay on the Origin of Languages’)

  The exact nature of a giant is one of those questions to which there is a simple answer and a much more complicated one. First, the simple answer.

  A giant is a mythological being. In Norse myth, these beings live in their own territory, Jötunheim (Giant-Home). Some of them have magical abilities and knowledge, but some of them are just big brutes. Although the gods are related to the giants, they are enemies, engaged in a war that culminates with the death of the gods at Ragnarok. Giants are usually envisioned as well, big.

  Now for the complicated version. First off, as the chapter title tells us, there are several different words for a giant. They can be called risi, tröll, jötunn, and thurs. Ther
e are others, but these are the four main ones.

  The classic quote on these names is from the Cleasby/Vigfussion Icelandic Dictionary:

  In popular Icel. usage risi denotes size, jotunn strength, thurs lack of intelligence; thus har sem risi, sterk sem jotunn, heimskr sem thurs, as tall as a risi, strong as a jotunn, stupid as a thurs. The ancient legends describe the risar as handsome, and a long-lived race...[203]

  Lotte Motz sums it up like this:

  The terms, related to OI troll thus refer to magicians and their craft, those related to jotunn mainly to features of the landscape and, metaphorically, hugeness of size, those related to thurs to deficiency of intellect, while the risi-group is sparsely represented and coincides, to some extent, with words of the jotunn-group. It is thus possible, or even likely, that the giantess as hideous hag and the giantess desired for her loveliness by a god, the giant as wise teacher and the giant as dim-witted ogre had at one time belonged to different families.[204]

  Risi: are often said to be larger than a man, and handsome. Bárdar’s saga makes a distinction between trolls and risi, the former bad, the latter good. Bardar’s risar inheritance is invoked to explain his good looks and good behaviour, while another character, Dumbr, is, like his troll family, strong but also shifty and violent.

  Troll: Simek offers the translation: “fiend, monster, giant”. The meaning of “troll” changed over time, especially as people became Christianised, but it always indicated a hostile giant. In more Christian stories they become beings of folklore, which still live in mountains, but have magical powers.

  Jötunn: is the most neutral term for a giant, although oddly enough it comes from the word eta, “eat”, and so means something like “big eater”.[205] This might explain Thiazi devouring the food that Odin, Loki and Hoenir were cooking in the Idunn myth. (This became Old English eoten, which gives us etin.)