From Asgard to Valhalla : the remarkable history of the Norse myths

232 Pages·2007·0.842 MB·English

by  O'Donoghue, Heather

From Asgard to Valhalla
For Ellen, Tom and Josie:
the next generation
F A
R O M S G A R D
V
T O A L H A L L A
THE REMARKABLE HISTORY OF THE NORSE MYTHS
HEATHER O’DONOGHUE
Published in 2007 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd
6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU
175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010
www.ibtauris.com
In the United States and Canada distributed by Palgrave Macmillan,
a division of St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010
Copyright © Heather O’Donoghue, 2007
The right of Heather O’Donoghue to be identified as the author of this work
has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any
part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of
the publisher.
Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders concerning images
used in this book. Where contact was impossible, images are used according
to the fair use provisions of relevant copyright laws.
ISBN 978 1 84511 357 5
A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Library of Congress catalog card: available
Typeset in Sabon by Dexter Haven Associates Ltd, London
Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Bath
C O N T E N T S
List of Plates vi
Acknowledgements vii
A Note on Proper Names vii
Introduction 1
PART ONE: THE EARLIEST SOURCES OF OLD NORSE MYTHOLOGY 9
1. Creation and Cosmos 11
2. Gods and Giants 23
3. Heroes and Humans 50
4. Afterlife and Apocalypse 68
PART TWO: THE RECEPTION OF NORSE MYTH 83
5. The Viking Legacy 85
6. Romantic Revolutions 103
7. The Rise of Racism 128
8. Contemporary Myths 163
Epilogue 201
Timeline 203
Bibliography 205
Index 209
L I S T O F P L AT E S
Carving on a Viking-age stone from Ramsund, in Sweden.
The Hørdum Stone from Thy, in Denmark.
Viking-age figurine of Thor, perhaps holding his hammer, from
Northern Iceland.
One of the eastern fjords of Iceland.
The Oseberg Ship, the sarcophagus of a royal woman buried in south-
ern Norway in the ninth century.
The first leaf of the Codex Regius, the manuscript of the Poetic Edda.
A Viking-age picture stone from the island of Gotland, Sweden.
Henri Fuseli: Thor Battering the Midgard Serpent (1790).
Odin summons the sibyl: one of William Blake’s illustrations for Gray’s
The Descent of Odin.
William Blake’s illustration for the title page of Gray’s poem The Fatal
Sisters.
Rune gymnastics. Drawing by Siegfried Adolf Kummer.
Poster for Peter Jackson’s film of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of
the King (2003).
Amalie Materna as Brünnhilde in the first Bayreuth production of
Wagner’s Die Walküre in 1876.
‘Brisings’ Ruff’, a piece of contemporary jewellery by Lori Talcott.
The Mighty Thor, as pictured by Marvel Comics.
Cover of the album Hammerheart, by Swedish Viking metal band
Bathory.
vi
A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S
I would like to thank all the students who came to my lectures and classes
on Norse myth. Whether they made comments, asked questions, looked
interested or looked bored, they all contributed to the writing of this
book, and I am grateful to them. A number of people offered invaluable
specialist advice: David Clark, Antje Frotscher, Alastair Hird, Carolyne
Larrington, Phil Lavender, Josephine McDonagh, Tom O’Donoghue,
Alex Sarll, Emma Smith and Beth Tovey. Particular thanks go to Tara
Stubbs, who gave me an enormous amount of expert help with pictures
and proof-reading, and to Alex Wright at I.B.Tauris, who has been
unfailingly supportive from the very beginning. The idea for this book
came to us both, separately but simultaneously.
A N O T E O N P R O P E R N A M E S
I have anglicized many of the Norse proper names, especially those which
have been picked up and used by later writers in English. This has often
involved substituting special characters, and removing accents and the
final ‘r’ from names such as Olaf (Old Norse Óláfr), or Frey (Old Norse
Freyr). Sometimes, however, that final ‘r’ has been retained by later
writers – for instance, Balder is a common form of the Old Norse Baldr.
In cases such as this, and others, I have retained it. No doubt there will
be inconsistencies; my aim has been ease of usage and readability, rather
than strict regularity.
vii

Introduction
Myth is a notoriously slippery term. It derives from the Greek
word muthos, ‘something said’ (as opposed to ‘something
done’), but derivation is more useful in showing us what
words once used to mean than in helping with present usage. Today the
commonest meaning of the word ‘myth’ is of something said which is
simply not true. But as a glance at the (very) long list of books whose
titles include the word ‘myth’ – from The Myth of Americathrough The
Myth of Motherhood, of Masculinityor of the Master Race, to The Myth
of the Welfare State – will show, whether or not myths are ‘true’, they
are certainly significant. They have an agenda, a purpose, and seem to be
of such powerful or fundamental relevance, either for society or for the
individual, that they demand a response. And while the works which try to
dispel these myths are the products of specific, often individual authors,
the myths themselves are less easy to source. They have, somehow, crept
up on us, taken shape and hold in mysterious and unaccountable ways.
They represent ‘something believed’.
The kinds of myths most Western readers are most familiar with –
classical myths, say, or the Norse myths which are the subject of this
book – belong to the distant past. They can be most easily defined as
stories about the gods. But both parts of this definition need some
discussion. The word story, for instance, should not be passed over
lightly. ‘Something said’ is not necessarily a story(and only in the loosest
possible terms could the sort of modern myths I’ve referred to be called
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FROM ASGARD TO VALHALLA
stories). But mythology – in the sense of a body of myths – has traditionally
come down to us in narrative form. In fact, it has been suggested that
myths began simply as entertaining tales, and only gradually acquired
significance and deeper meanings. This leads us to the second part of the
definition: are myths necessarily sacred stories? Many people would see
the relationship between myths and gods as absolutely fundamental –
indeed, would see myths as in some sense the ‘script’, or ‘screenplay’, of
actual religious practice, part of a ritual of worship. As it happens, some
of the most celebrated ‘myths’ in the classical tradition do not have gods
as their central characters: Oedipus, for example, is a legendary king of
the historical city of Thebes. Nonetheless, the story of Oedipus Rextakes
place in a world in which the supernatural – in the form of oracles,
monsters like the Sphinx, or Fate itself – plays its part in an otherwise
historical, human context. Whether myths are set in the distant past, or
in the realm of the gods, the key point is that it is always a world apart
from our own everyday one, a world which might physically resemble
our own, but one in which we may encounter gods, heroes or monsters,
and which is governed by strange potent forces, where anything at all
might happen: both the bafflingly unpredictable, and, with the mysterious
logic of dreams, the utterly inevitable.
If myths are about the pagan gods, then a modern reader might think
it stands to reason that they are untrue. But does this mean that con-
temporary religions can have no mythologies? We are likely to find phrases
such as ‘Christian mythology’ or ‘Islamic mythology’ uncomfortable, or
even offensive. Perhaps for this very reason, most of the work done on
the relationship between myth and religion has focussed on past societies
– or on so-called ‘primitive’ societies, distanced from us in time or
geographical space, or both. Myths are stories which other people – not
‘people like us’ – held (or hold) to be true. These sorts of myths are
interesting to scholars, because it seems that having been passed down in
story form, they can encode information about past or distant religions.
The theory goes that either religious rituals give rise to accompanying
stories – that is, mythology; or that the stories themselves somehow
provoke actions on the part of the listeners – that is, rituals. The supposed
function of these rituals is to make the stories – perhaps stories about
fertility or rebirth, violence or apocalypse – happen (or not!). Either way,
with the extant mythology, scholars aim to work either backwards or
forwards to find out about the religious ritual.
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