Children of Ash and Elm

by Neil Price;

  It is clear that the Norse gods were not necessarily particularly admirable by modern lights, and perhaps the Vikings felt the same way. While the Aesir and Vanir could lend their support to human schemes and individuals, this was mostly on a whim, almost for amusement. They could also be crude, stupid, appallingly prejudiced in our eyes, violent, and cruel—the gods as essentially a quarrelsome family, largely indifferent to humans other than as objects of temporary interest. There is a parallel to be found here between the residents of Asgard and the older pantheons of the classical Mediterranean cultures, the squabbling Greek deities of Mount Olympus and their Roman descendants, and this prompts a larger question that bears closer examination: can a genuine connection be traced between Viking beliefs and those of classical antiquity?

  There are certainly many points of resemblance, not only in the divine families but also details of the mythology itself. In the Greek cosmogony, as related by Hesiod around 700 BCE, the worlds began in chaos (as a specific, original term) that had the sense of a yawning void—just like Ginnungagap. Even the continuation of the creation story is similar, at least in part, with gods spontaneously generated or birthed through improbable couplings, and a cosmos created from bloody murder and dismemberment. Other elements can be linked too, such as the great hound that guards the doors of Hel, matching Cerberus in the Greek underworld, and there are more to be found.

  Some scholars do see the Norse gods as later shadows of antique precursors, something that has especially been argued for Odin. Others trace the lineage of Asgard back further still, and controversially, to the dimly perceptible religions of the Indo-Europeans, who are argued to have originated either on the Asian steppe or in Anatolia thousands of years before the time of the Vikings. There are reasonable comparisons that can be made, which also begin to bridge the immense spans of time involved. For instance, some rituals recorded for the Vedic period of Bronze Age India (c. 1500–500 BCE) are remarkably close to some Norse practices. Ultimately, however, the chronological and geographical gulf is vast, and the links are tentative at best.

  At some level there is undoubtedly a web of cultural inheritance, by no means confined to religion, that links the prehistories of many Northern peoples, and this may well extend beyond Europe itself. However, when we look deeper at specific times and places, unique qualities emerge—and this is hardly surprising. Individual similarities notwithstanding, there are many more respects in which the spiritual world of Viking-Age Scandinavia differed markedly from what had gone before (even the classical parallels are but isolated cases). When reviewed together in all their marvellous complexity, the products of the Norse mind form a category all their own, and we should approach them that way.

  To take just one example from the realm of the gods, it seems hardly appropriate to speak of a Norse ‘pantheon’ at all, at least in the classical sense of the term. With the exception of the poem Loki’s Quarrel and a handful of other stories such as the death of Baldr and some elements of the Seeress’s Prophecy, the Norse divinities rarely even seem to meet or interact with each other in the mythic tales. The world of Asgard seems to have been every bit as cosmopolitan as its human mirror below, its population building up over time with incomers from all over—a remarkably faithful reproduction of Midgard, in fact.

  One other dimension of the gods’ lives is intriguing. Strangely, Asgard also contained temples, cult buildings where the gods themselves made offerings—but to what or whom? The mythology of the Vikings is one of only a tiny handful in all world cultures in which the divinities also practised religion. It suggests something behind and beyond them, older and opaque, and not necessarily ‘Indo-European’ at all. There is no indication that the people of the Viking Age knew what it was any more than we do.

  The idea of a related power to the gods also connects to their own Others, the giants. They are present in the cosmogony right from the beginning—in fact, from before the first god appears. They are primal beings and recur throughout the many stories of divine adventures as enemies of Asgard. In revenge for Ymir’s death, the crime at the core of the Viking world, the giants’ hatred of the Aesir will extend to the Ragnarök itself when their armies of frost and fire will invade the gods’ home. There have been many attempts to understand what the giants ‘mean’. Unlike the gods, they do not seem to have impinged on the human world of Midgard at all, but they are part of the deepest, oldest strata of tales. Are they spirits of the wilderness, the ultimate adversaries? Do they represent the Sámi, partnered with the Norse gods but distinctively different? Are the endless couplings of giants and Aesir somehow symbolic of royal ritual marriages, uniting the constituencies of a realm? We simply do not know, but the giants are indivisible from the wider arena of the great powers.

  One concept above all was central to the gods’ relationship with the human world and intersected with the lives of its other, supernatural inhabitants: the idea of fate. Governing beings of every kind—mortal and divine, living and dead—was the preordination of the future; it lay at the heart of the Norse mind-set. For the Viking-Age Scandinavians, fate did not represent the absence of choice but rather the manifestation of a pre-existing truth. Free will existed, but exercising it inevitably led to becoming the person you always, really, had been.

  Fate was embodied in many forms, but none clearer than the Norns, female supernatural beings of immense power who were responsible for the unfolding of individual destiny. As ever, the sources are mixed and ambiguous, combining Eddic and skaldic verse with Snorri’s prose. Most often mentioned are the three women—Urd, Verdandi, and Skuld—whose names arguably have connotations of the past, present, and future (or perhaps just different perspectives on being). ‘Urd’ at least has clear overtones of ‘Fate’, and the three Norns lived in a hall by the well of that name at the root of the World Tree that connected to Asgard. Every day they took moist clay from the water’s edge, smearing it on the trunk and branches to keep Yggdrasill cool and healthy. In some poetic descriptions they are giantesses, in others young girls; their relative age is uncertain, but one should not trust too easily in the cliché of ‘maiden, woman, crone’ that often attaches to them. In the skaldic verse, the Norns appear as metaphors of judgement, lawyers of life bringing a kind of ultimate arbitration of fate.

  The Norns worked their power in the shadows, invisible, although sometimes appearing in dreams. Their fingernails each bore a rune, the symbols of secrets. The Norns often are depicted weaving fate on a loom, another motif common to several mythological traditions. On an upright loom, the warp of a textile always has a pattern, inherent from the beginning and determined by the threading of the heddles. It is made by the decisions of the weaver, but cannot be fully perceived until the cloth nears its finished state. It is an elegant metaphor for the essential outline of a life, revealed through human experience, ending only when the last thread is cut.

  Some Eddic poetry refers to many more Norns linked to types of beings besides humans—including elves, dwarves, and even gods. Occasionally there are references to ‘good’ and ‘evil’ Norns who are responsible for different twists of fate, although it is unclear if this should be taken literally. Snorri says that the Norns of the Aesir visit each human child at birth, shaping the course of its days to come. It may be that this multiplicity of Norns is the truer Norse picture and that the idea of a primary trinity is influenced by classical models, perhaps filtered through Christian writers.

  Alongside the major celebrities of the Norse ‘pantheon’, the other supernatural beings best known today are the Valkyries. They, too, were agents of fate, but as their name—‘choosers of the slain’—implies, their province was war. The Valkyries are exceptionally well attested in the written sources, both prose and verse, from the late ninth century into the 1300s and beyond. Images that arguably represent them are commonly found in the iconography of the Viking Age, and there is no doubt they were a genuine part of the belief system. Like the Vikings themselves, the Valkyries have also been
obscured by centuries of appropriation and stereotype.

  In the literature the Valkyries are servants of Odin and select the bravest warriors to die in battle. This might hardly seem positive but was, in fact, a compliment to those they chose because it meant they would join the war god in Valhöll. As the slain prepare for the Ragnarök, they are served mead by the Valkyries as hostesses of the hall, and perhaps offered more personal comfort. The Valkyries are described as armed with spear, sword, and shield, armoured in mail, and sometimes helmeted. They ride horses through the sky; when you see dew on the grass, it is sweat fallen from the flanks of the Valkyries’ steeds. The battle-women occasionally don the skins and wings of swans, permitting them flight. In the Eddic poems, Valkyries at times adopt an individual human hero, protecting him in combat and often falling in love—but it is at this point (if not earlier) that they begin to merge with what would become their legend.

  An internet image search reveals ‘Valkyries’ endlessly recycled today through the male gaze, usually depicted as voluptuous young women with big swords and minimal clothing. These dreary tableaux bear little resemblance to the demons of carnage in Norse mythology, but they dimly echo what the medieval Christian mind seems to have found in the Valkyries. Clerical men, in particular, had fantasies of their own and created the image of them as lovelorn heroines. Recast as beautiful women, armed and armoured, they were an exciting subversion of both medieval realities and the chivalric ideal. In the Old Norse heroic poems, they overcome obstacles to rescue or at least mourn their human boyfriends, even embracing their revived corpses in the grave. The later frisson of Gothic horror seems not far away, with appropriate appeal to the Victorians, and it is these Brünnhildes who enjoyed a long afterlife to populate Wagner’s Ring and its analogues. However, this version of them has little place in the Viking-Age consciousness or that of earlier centuries, from which the Valkyries originally emerged.

  5. A woman of war. This silver-gilt, tenth-century figurine from Hårby, Denmark, is the first three-dimensional image of an armed female known from the Viking world. The subject is unclear—whether a Valkyrie, a war-goddess, a human warrior woman, or some other martial being—but her sword and shield are unequivocal, with the characteristic knotted hairstyle that seems to have been the primary female marker in Viking art. Photo: John Lee, © National Museum of Denmark, used by kind permission.

  These ‘primal’ Valkyries did not visit the battlefield, swooping gracefully down to bear away their chosen heroes; instead, they were unleashed upon it and personified its harsh realities. Indeed, they appear to have literally represented aspects of the fighting, as revealed by their names. We know of some fifty-two individual Valkyries, and there are many, many more anonymously subsumed in collectives. It is extraordinary, and telling, how many different terms for ‘battle’ and ‘war’ can be found in the Valkyrie names. Clearly, many of them embodied the condition of combat itself, often through the metaphor of a violent storm. The sense of swirling chaos is increased by the significant portion of the Valkyries whose names refer to noise, the overwhelming din and screaming confusion of a Viking-Age battlefield. Thus, we meet Göndul, the ‘War-Fetter’, who brought the freezing hesitation that could be fatal; perhaps the same is meant by Hlökk, the ‘Chain’, or Mist, the ‘Cloud’. Around them move Hjalmthrimul, ‘Helmet-Clatter’; Hjörthrimul, ‘Sword-Noise’; and Hjlód, ‘Howling’. There is Randgnithr, the ‘Shield-Scraper’, and behind her Skalmjöld, the ‘Sword-Time’; Sváva, the ‘Killer’; and Tanngnithr, ‘Teeth-Grinder’. Other Valkyries’ names focus on weapons in combination with different elements—Geirahöd, ‘Spear-Battle’; Geirdríful, ‘Spear-Flinger’; Geirskögul, ‘Spear-Shaker’; and so on. Their many sisters’ names include Battle-Weaver, Shaker, Disorder, Scent-of-Battle, Victory-Froth, Vibration, Unstable, Treader, Swan-White, Shield-Destroyer, Helper, Armour, Devastate, and Silence. The list goes on.

  There is much to learn here concerning the realities of early medieval warfare, and also of the battle-spirits whom the Vikings believed governed its fortunes. The Valkyries were indeed handmaidens of Odin, but in the sense that befits the vicious servants of a god of war. There is only minimal evidence to suggest they were physically attractive, but plenty that implies they were terrifying. Perhaps echoing Odin’s governance of the military mind, even the sight of Valkyries could be lethally mesmerising—as it says in the Saga of the Völsungs, referring to their role as shield-maidens, “looking at them was like gazing into flames”.

  As agents of fate, the Valkyries also have obvious links with the Norns, and Snorri even says that the “youngest” Norn, Skuld, rides with the Valkyries to choose the slain. In a strange battle poem called The Web of Spears, dating to either the tenth or eleventh centuries, a troupe of twelve horse-borne Valkyries are seen dismounting to enter a cottage. When the observer peeks inside, he sees them working an immense loom made of human body parts, weaving a cloth of entrails dyed with blood, using weapons for tools. The women sing verses that make it clear they are, in fact, weaving the outcome of a distant battle, the motions of their implements mimicking (and effecting) the dart and swoop of projectiles on the field. Here, the Valkyries and Norns are truly combined. When the cloth is finished, they tear it to shreds and ride off with the scraps.

  The Valkyries were the essence of violence, unsettling and terrible.

  Not all the shadowy, non-human denizens of the Norse world were as dangerous to know. Many were extensions of the natural beauty that surrounded the Scandinavians every day.

  Beyond their vibrant cityscapes, to outside eyes the Nordic countries today are still a region of untrammelled peace, a vast canvas of forests, mountains, and waterways that is seemingly one of the last places in Europe to offer the true solitude of the wild. To a person in the Viking Age, such a view would be incomprehensible. Anyone moving through the landscapes of trees and rock, snow and ice, wind and water, would have understood themselves to be in the midst of teeming life—not just of animals and insects, but of something far more—that other population of beings with whom humans shared their world.

  It is hard to find a collective noun for them, and even individual terms can be difficult in modern languages. One can speak of ‘elves’ and ‘dwarves’, for example, but it would be disingenuous to claim that such beings can ever be truly viewed now without thinking of their later incarnations in Tolkien and other fantasy media. At the same time, the characters of today’s games and movies are very different from the álfar and dvergar that the Vikings knew. Creatures of this kind are important not just for their intrinsic interest, but because they played a far greater part in people’s everyday lives than the higher powers of the gods and their servants. In modern Swedish they are called väsen, a general term that cannot readily be translated but encompasses the whole variety of ‘supernatural beings’, although here again there are problems in that their essence was entirely ‘natural’; the Norse would not have made a distinction as we do in this regard.

  My favoured term for them comes from modern Iceland (although with older precedents), where they are known as the huldufólk, the ‘Hidden People’, which is usefully vague but captures the correct distinction in that what divides them from us is mainly their discretion. In Iceland today, belief in the Hidden People just about survives (though to a much lesser degree than tourist brochures would have you think) as part of a deeper and more widespread respect for the spiritual currency of the past in relation to a landscape that is far from inert.

  The álfar, or elves, were probably the most prevalent of the Norse nature-beings, and they were often in direct contact with humans. They could be influential in the prosperity of a farm, as they were able to harm livestock or crops if they chose, and keeping on their good side was highly advisable. The ‘average’ Viking-Age person probably rarely felt the presence of the gods, but putting butter out for the elves living in that rock behind your house was part of the farmyard routine. The álfar could heal the sick or make people ill.
They could bring luck or misfortune. Several sagas recount offering ceremonies for the elves—álfablót sacrifices held in halls at regular intervals—so they may have been part of the ritual calendar in a similar way as the holy days of today’s world faiths.

  Dwarves were distinct from the elves, though Snorri calls them svartálfar, or ‘black elves’, and seems to think they were related in some way. In the few secure images of them that exist, for example on carvings that depict familiar scenes from the legend of Sigurd, dwarves appear to look the same as humans. There is no sense that they were especially small, which was a medieval development. They lived mostly underground, and were very much creatures of stone. In the myths they emerge as skilled craftworkers, jewellers, and miners, masters of the mystical transformation of ore, minerals, and crystal into beautiful objects. There are no records of rituals held for them, and they seem to have been a broadly friendly presence in the human world. They kept to themselves.

  Some otherworldly beings were more personal in their interactions with humans. The most important of them were the dísir, an ambiguous mixture of goddess and spirit who appear to have represented the ancestral heritage of families—perhaps the souls of its dead matriarchs. These supernatural women were often invisible, but they appeared in dreams and could also be perceived by those with the gift. They occasionally took on martial aspects, with shades of the Valkyries, or represented the prospect of victory as ‘seen’ before a fight. At other times they are guarantors of fertility, especially of the harvest. As tutelary spirits the dísir acted either singly or in groups, and sometimes appeared as cloaked riders. In dreams, the colour of their clothes, black or white, could portend good or evil. Such variants were known as spádísir, ‘dísir of prophecy’. There is a suggestion that these beings too had a special link to Odin. The word dís itself was a synonym for goddess and for women in general; it appears occasionally as part of female personal names, for example.