Episode 0 - The Vikings and Their Myths

Welcome to Norse mythology, the unofficial guide. It's unofficial because I'm neither a credentialed academic nor a time traveling medieval Norse pagan, but I deal with this material directly from the sources, interpreted through the lens of the experts in their opinions. If you're looking for depth and detail in a simple and accessible way, then you're in the right place. In the same year, the pagans from the northern regions came with a naval force to Britain like stinging hornets, and spread on all sides like fearful wolves, robbed, tore, and slaughtered not only beasts of bird and sheep and oxen, but even priests and deacons and companies of monks and nuns. And they came to the Church of Lindisfarne, laid everything waste with grievous plundering, trampled the holy places with polluted steps, dug up the altars, and seized all the treasures of the Holy Church. They killed some of the brothers, took some away with them in fetters, many they drove out naked and loaded with insults, some they drowned in the sea. This is a quote from a lost version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that was included by Simeon of Durham in his own work, Historia Regum, sometime before the mid-12th century. It describes events that took place in the year 793 AD when a band of Viking raiders attacked the monastery at Lindisfarne, which is an island off the coast of modern day Northumberland in England. This event was not the first Viking raid in history, and it wasn't even the first Viking raid in England. For example, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle also mentions three ships of what it calls "Northmen" off the coast of Wessex in 787, and a charter from Kenton 792 notes that the Kingdom of Mercy had been previously preparing defenses against "Pagan Seaman." But this event had enormous significance in the minds of the English people due to the prominence of the target. The monastery at Lindisfarne was a place that was renowned for miraculous healings of faithful Christians with various afflictions, and had become a popular destination for religious pilgrimage. It held the relics of St. Cuthbert, which many believed ought to have granted it some kind of protection from heathen aggressors, and after it was sacked, the only possible explanation in the minds of church leaders was that the attack must have been a manifestation of God's punishment for some unresolved sin, and the surviving monks were instructed to better adhere to their moral obligations in order to avoid these types of tragedies in the future. The attack on Lindisfarne was significant enough that it earned a place in the modern collective consciousness as the beginning of the Viking Age, which spans the next two and a half centuries' give or take, and sort of canonically ends, although substantially winds down is probably a better term, around 1066 AD, when Norwegian King Harold Hardrada is defeated by English King Harold Godwinson at the Battle of Stanford Bridge, which is interestingly another event taking place in England rather than Scandinavia. So we have this span of a little more than 250 years demarcated by events in English history that we often think of as characterized most prominently by Scandinavian pirates attacking usually poorly defended towns and monasteries, and establishing a trade network that will eventually take them to places as far away as Africa in the Middle East. But in the same way that Viking raids weren't actually confined to these years, Viking religion was also not confined to these years, and for that matter wasn't even confined to the Vikings. People often use the word Viking when what they really mean is "norse." To be a Viking is just a job in medieval Scandinavia. It's not a race or bloodline or a culture or a society. It's just a job where you throw on your helmet and mail, grab your spear most commonly and a shield, and then head out on a boat to seek your fortune either by taking it from someone else or by selling the treasures and slaves you've already taken to someone else. But the society we usually think of as having given rise to the Vikings is called "norse society," where "norse" is just the commonly accepted modern English word for anybody who spoke a North Germanic language in the medieval period. And most people in North society were not Vikings. They were farmers, they were smiths, they were poets or law speakers or religious leaders, or any number of standard jobs you might find anywhere in medieval Europe. And without those poets and law speakers and religious leaders, today we wouldn't have the fascinating collection of tales that have come to be known as Norse mythology. It certainly wasn't the Vikings who wrote them down. Norse mythology is a collection of stories and concepts that were recorded by Christians, hundreds of years after their ancestors had converted to Christianity. Prior to that, these stories were passed down through the generations as oral poetry. And lest we start to worry that Christians made them all up, linguists have actually been able to date much of the surviving poetry to having been composed during the pagan period. Above that, many of the deities and heroes and even some of the stories and poetic formulas are corroborated by counterparts that were held among pagans in places like Anglo-Saxon England and Germany among other places. This illustrates another problem with associating Norse mythology exclusively with Vikings. The mythology itself is just one component of a very seriously regarded religious tradition that spanned the entirety of territory wherein pre-Christian people spoke Germanic languages. There would have, of course, been variation in the ways this religion was practiced across the board. But whereas lazy pop culture media would sometimes have you believe that Vikings and Norse mythology were unique to medieval Norway, the actual mythology itself was chiefly recorded in Iceland and often deals with legendary heroes from Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and other locations seated even deeper in the heart of continental Europe. The saga of the Vulsung, for instance, recounts the story of Sigurd the Dragon Slayer who lives on the continent somewhere and whose widow, after his death, ends up marrying Attila the Hun. Another version of the same story is called the Nibbelungenlead and it comes to us from Germany with a hero named Siegflied, which isn't too different from the Old Norse seegwerther. But it's a clue that versions of this particular story were probably not told exclusively in Iceland and Germany, but in plenty of areas in between and probably dates back to the migration era somewhere between 300 to 700 AD. The takeaway is that Norse mythology, as it has been passed down to us today, reflects really only the shadow of one particular flavor of northwestern Germanic paganism as it was remembered past the point of Christianization and on into the 13th century. There's a lot we don't know about these ancient beliefs, but we know enough to realize that the details of the stories we have probably weren't considered to be universal dogma throughout all of Scandinavia. Our surviving source material contains enough contradictions to tell us that Germanic paganism was an organic and living system that changed shape bit by bit over time and geography, having evolved out of an earlier Indo-European tradition thousands of years ago. It shares common origins with Greek and Roman mythology and with Celtic and Slavic and Indian and Iranian mythology. And because of that common origin, all of these traditions share a lot of common concepts. It's a situation that makes it pretty hard to distinguish where the Norse piece of things begins and ends in time and space. There are no clear lines, just a fuzzy gradient of belief with a few manuscripts emerging from one general area on that spectrum. Those manuscripts, at least the ones that we might refer to as the core of Norse mythology, have been compiled and translated into a couple of works that today we often refer to as the poetic edda and the prose edda. The poetic edda wasn't originally titled the poetic edda. It's actually a collection of disparate poems by mostly anonymous authors dealing with the adventures and sayings of gods, supernatural creatures, and heroes. And as I already mentioned, even though they weren't physically written down until the 13th century, most of these poems can be pretty confidently dated to having been composed during the pagan period, using some techniques of linguistic analysis that have proven to be pretty solid over time. The poetic edda talks about the creation of the world centered around the enormous ashtree eagdrazel, and about the family of gods known as the Asyr, and their perpetual struggle against their rival clan, the Yoltenah. It tells about the chief of the gods, the one-eyed Othin, commonly called Oden in English pronunciation, and his obsessive quest for knowledge. It tells about Othin's son Thor, a savior to both humanity and the other gods with his powerful and magical hammer Mjolnir, as well as about the mischievous and troublesome shapeshifter Loki, who at one time formed a pact with Othin, wherein the two of them blended their blood together and swore to treat each other as brothers. It talks about the god Frayer and how he He traded his magic sword for marriage to a woman of the Altnod. We also learn about Frig, the wife of Othin, who knows the fates of all beings, and about Freya, the sister of Freyr, who seems to be the object of everyone's desire, yet is perpetually in sorrow over the absence of her own husband. Within the poetic edda, we are also introduced to elves and dwarves and dragons and heroes, and to the norns who are the maidens that author fate, and to the valkories who are women that shepherd the souls of those who die bravely in battle to Valhul, the hall of Othin, where they will feast and train in battle until the cataclysmic events called Ragnarok, where the whole earth will be destroyed by fire and sink into the sea. The poetic edda can be a little tricky to piece together as a beginner to the material, but it represents what is probably the least corrupt of all the sources we have with regard to Norse mythology. My favorite English translation, which I'll probably be reading from quite a bit, is Caroline Lerrington's second edition from 2014. The second of our two core sources is usually called the pros edda, and it was almost certainly written by an Icelandic chieftain, law speaker, historian, scholar, poet, and Christian, named Snory Storlason, also in the 13th century. Snory originally titled his work just edda, and his goal in writing it was to create a guide to the context and patterns that were necessary to understand and compose poetry in the way his ancestors did. This type of poetry relies largely on alliteration and meter, but in terms of content, it is absolutely filled to the brim with obscure and hard to decipher references to mythology. So if you aren't deeply familiar with the stories, you have essentially no hope in understanding any of it. To give you an example, here's the opening stanza to a 10th century schaldic poem called Forstrapa. The father of the sea thread decided to go to the preparer of the life net of the gods of precipice altars to leave home. Lopter was a serious at lying. The by no means trustworthy mind tester of the Galter of Host Thunder said that green paths lay towards the steed of the wall of Gerroth. If you aren't familiar with the mythology and the way this type of poetry works, you'll have no idea that all this is saying is that Loki decided to go to the door to leave home. He was a serious at lying and he said that green paths lay towards the house of Gerrother who was a jodan. The way Snory chose to introduce his audience to the mythology was by creating a story about a Swedish king named Gurdvi who visits Asgard or Oscarther in Old Norse, the home of the gods and asks the people he meets there questions about their beliefs. As they answer him, they tell him stories about Norse mythology organized into an easily digestible narrative timeline, which is something we don't get in the poetic era. Because of this, the prozeta is probably a better book to read first for anyone who's new to the material, but it's also worth a warning that if you start from the beginning, you might be a little confused about why Snory begins with reminding you that God of the Christians created Adam and Eve and that generations later Noah and his descendants survived this great flood on an ark. And it's important to remember that Snory was a Christian and his goal was not to convince his audience that the pagan traditions were true, but to teach them something interesting about the quaint beliefs of their ancestors. He was also a medieval scholar, which meant that a lot of his claims are poorly researched and reasoned by modern standards. Snory believed that sometime after the peoples of earth had forgotten how to properly worship God and invented pagan traditions, there was a clan of wizards from the ancient city of Troy, led by one of the greatest Trojan wizards of all, Othin, that migrated to Sweden and were eventually incorrectly remembered as gods by later generations in Scandinavia because of their great skills and magic. This allowed Snory to provide some legitimacy for the royal houses of Scandinavia who traditionally traced their ancestry back to the gods, as well as create a generally direct line from the venerated ancient Greeks to the Nordic people as a whole. Much of his, shall we say, theory was based on the fact that the word "assier" or "os" in the singular, looks kind of similar to the word "Asia". It's not correct in the slightest. So when Snory presents his narrative about this Swedish king traveling to Oscarther, he's not traveling to heaven to speak with the gods, he's traveling to another location in Sweden to speak with some wizards there who deceive him by disguising their true identities and then telling him stories about themselves as gods. So although Snory's idea of reality and the way he presents his story is a little weird, it does seem that he tries his best to accurately deliver information about the mythology. If he didn't, he would have failed in his goal of providing a useful guide to understanding and composing the old poetry after all. And in many cases, Snory cites his sources, although he doesn't in others. But a lot of what he says is also referenced in other sources. He also seems to have been working from certain sources that no longer survive. Overall, Snory seems to have been trying to present a cohesive canon of mythological information, which if we're being honest was probably a mistake given what we know about how the pagan tradition would have varied over time and distance. But there are moments where it becomes clear that he is aware of contradictory traditions, for example, and he chooses to canonize one version of a story over another, presumably because it fits better with the rest of the material he's gathered. Snory also delivers a level of intricate detail that we just don't see in other sources, which likely means that he has embellished the material to some degree and possibly even invented little things here and there to fill in some gaps. The prozetta is the only surviving source we have of some of the more famous mythological tales, but it's also good to retain a pinch of skepticism when reading through Snory's own explanations of religious and folkloric concepts. My favorite English translation of the prozetta is by Anthony Falks, and it's been made available online for free in PDF form. You should be able to find it pretty quickly with just a Google search. The poetic edda and the prozetta, as I mentioned, are often thought of as the core of where our notion of Norse mythology comes from. But they're not the only sources we have. Another extremely important source that in my opinion doesn't get nearly enough love is a work called Guest a Donorum, which was written by a Danish historian named Saxochromaticus roughly around the same time that Snory was writing the prozetta. It serves as a history of Denmark and goes to even greater lengths than the prozetta to euthemorize ancient deities, or in other words to assert that mythological characters must have been real figures in history at some point that were mistakenly deified as their legends grew. Like Snory, Saxoch also claims that the family of gods most commonly called the Asir must have once been an ancient tribe of wizards. Saxoch also wrote in Latin, so he renders names like Thor and Loki as Thorow and Locus, and what is to me most fascinating about Guest a Donorum are the ways in which it both corroborates Icelandic sources and also delivers different versions of some shared ideas. For example, the prozetta contains a story about Thor and Loki traveling together through the realm of the Yotnar and encountering a third character who calls himself Utgartheloki or the Loki from outside the enclosure. And in another story, after the normal Loki commits some heinous crimes, he is bound by the other gods and trapped in a cave. But in Guest a Donorum, Saxoch tells a story about a man who worships a being he calls Utgarthelokus, who is eventually discovered by a company of men bound and trapped in a cave, possibly illustrating a merger of two characters that were separated in the Icelandic tradition. Snory also tells a story about the origin of Thor's hammer, wherein Loki attempts to sabotage its creation and the result is that its handle is defectively short. In Saxoch's version Thor, or Thorow, wields a club whose handle is also short, but that's because it was cut short by the character Hodorus while in battle. Guest a Donorum also contains the story of Omleth, which served as the inspiration for Shakespeare's Hamlet, as well as the 2022 movie by Robert Eger's The Northman. My favorite translation of Guest a Donorum is by Karsten Freys Jensen and Peter Fisher. Outside of these three works, there is also a wealth of information to be found in Scaldic poetry. There is also the entire corpus of the sagas, which mainly come from Iceland and discuss the political nature of North society and the types of conflict that would have been memorable for the ancient Norse people. Some of the sagas deal with human beings encountering supernatural characters, others deal with exploration and for more information. For instance, the discovery of North America, which turned out to be somewhat historically accurate when the archaeological site at Lonsometto's in Newfoundland, Canada was discovered in 1960. We also have records such as medieval law codes that give us clues as to what types of behaviors were considered normal or unacceptable in North society, and in some cases, may even indirectly reference certain events from mythology when laying out behaviors that ought to be considered criminal. Overall, it is somewhat of a shame that the pagan-norsed people didn't have a culture of creating extensive written records. They of course had their own alphabets and were literate to some degree. They left us a sizable body of runic carvings, but they never deliberately documented or much less codified their own religion or even folklore. That sort of thing came along hundreds of years later, after the conversion, after more exposure to what was going on on the continent, caused them to evolve a greater tradition of documentation. Though we can be grateful to those who finally wrote down what stories and poems they did, we are still very much at a loss to describe most of their worship practices with any real degree of confidence or to understand how these stories affected their day-to-day actions and behaviors. While there is certainly still folklore live in Scandinavia, without attestations of folkloric belief from pagan times, it's nearly impossible to know whether any given idea derives from a pagan tradition or was invented and spread in their early modern period. But in lieu of having all the answers, we instead get to let our imaginations run wild, apart from creative retellings of familiar stories, scholarly brains have been cranking on tiny hints and clues to try and infer greater meanings for centuries now. Unfortunately within the last 60 years or so, they've started to get pretty good at it. Recently, scholars have been debating the merits of things like statistical literary analysis over more traditional functional analysis in an effort to understand weather words like "aciod" wherever actually intended to mean what we assume they mean and have assumed they mean for a very long time. More fundamentally, questions like "was Thor ever actually a thunder god?" have become popular recently. Although the answer may seem obvious at face value, you might be surprised at how strong some of the opposing points are. But it's through this lens that we'll be approaching these stories going forward. We'll try and have some fun retelling the old stories, after all some of them are intended to be pretty silly. We'll also devote a lot of energy to nuance and accuracy, to make sure we're not misinterpreting the information that's been passed down to us by mistakenly applying our own modern sensibilities. We'll also talk about scholarly theories that can help us avoid taking things for granted that we may not have considered before, as we try to interpret this information the way its ancient authors would have. In any case, it's not so much the journey that matters, but the gold we can plunder along the way. So let's go all weeking together again next time on Norse mythology, the unofficial guide. [BLANK_AUDIO]