Episode 5 - The Flow of Time and the Birth of Sleipnir

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. Then all the powers went to the thrones of fate, the sacrosanct gods, and considered this, which people had troubled the air with treachery, or given Ode's girl to the giant race. Thor alone struck a blow there, swollen with rage. He seldom sits still when he hears such a thing, the Oaths broke apart, words and promises, all the solemn pledges which had passed between them. What you just heard were Stanzas 26 and 27 of Voluspa, a poem as cryptic as it is beautiful. It's clearly alluding to an intriguing story here, but our poetic sources never lay that story out in detail. They only mention it in passing. This is partially how we know that Snory Storrelison, a later scholar who authored one of our main sources for Norse mythology, was working from sources that are lost today. Zeta explains this story in much greater detail over multiple paragraphs. Who Ode's girl is, what the treachery was, which Oaths were broken, why Thor struck a blow, and who exactly he struck. I've picked this story as the first myth to really dive into now that we've covered the creation of the world, because it introduces a few of our most common characters, but it also displays a dynamic between some of the gods that will play out time and time again over the course of various myths. So now that we've laid a basic foundation for how the Norse mythic world works, we can finally introduce Thor and Loki. But before we do, let's talk a little bit about time. Both legitimate scholars and amateur internet content creators have a lot to say about how time works in mythology, and sometimes the stuff published by both camps can seem so incredibly nuanced and complex that we just end up taking it all at face value. We hear a novel idea that sounds smart and we accept it. Anyone who spent a lot of time learning something on their own has probably experienced this. But there also comes a moment where sometimes after we've read through the source material over and over again, and we start to become a little more confident in our own knowledge base that we start to realize, wait a minute, that novel idea doesn't seem to be supported by any of these sources. In the modern pragmatic mindset, time flows in one direction from past to future in some way that is related to entropy. We are aware of physical laws that describe how time behaves within the framework of relativity, and we wonder about the plausibility of scientific advancements that might someday allow us to move through time in different directions. But how do you suppose time was imagined a thousand years ago before the scientific and mathematical discoveries were made that allow us to think in this modern way? Your first guess will probably be that time might have been thought of in terms of cycles. Day becomes night and night becomes day, summer turns into winter and then back into summer again, the moon waxes and wanes on a schedule, and you wouldn't be wrong to guess this. Natural cycles of time are venerated and mythicized all over Indo-European religious traditions. Some even going so far as to describe cycles that span hundreds of thousands if not millions of years, where one common motif is that the world cycles through various ages that move progressively from utopian toward terrible until some cataclysm starts the cycle over again. In Norse mythology, there might be some small hints at an ancient belief system that fell in line with this to some degree. But we also can't just throw out the direct information we have in the slice of religious tradition that was actually preserved just because we got caught up chasing and exciting idea. If you start searching around online for Norse mythic time, you will probably come across someone telling you that the timeline of Norse mythology was cyclical, which is an interpretive idea most of the time, but is sometimes used to directly mislead people. In reality, there are only two so-called mythic cycles, and maybe a better word for them is ages, that are ever explicitly described in the sources, amounting to essentially the current age where the world was created and exists as it does now before Ragnarok, and a future age of the world as it will exist afterwards. Anything beyond this is theoretical, and it's inferred only through tiny hints. But some people will take this idea a lot farther, claiming that the Norse mythic timeline is repeatable, or even that it is entirely non-linear, basically that it's all jammed into a perpetual present with all of the myths taking place in both the past, present, and future simultaneously all of the time. It's at this moment, when we need to take a step back and ask ourselves, do the sources actually support any of this? My favorite answer comes from John Lindow's handbook, called Norse mythology, a guide to the gods, heroes, rituals, and beliefs from 2002. Here, Lindow builds upon earlier work by Margaret Clooney's Ross, and explains that the Norse mythological timeline is not weird or unintuitive or even unexpected. He divides it into five simple phases, events of the distant past, the near past, the present, the near future, and the distant future. The distant past encompasses ideas about the universe before the world was created. The near past deals with the creation of the Earth and all species of sentient beings. The mythological present deals with the largest body of stories, including most of the adventures and mishaps that befall the gods. The near future deals with the signs and portents of Ragnarok, as well as with Ragnarok itself and the destruction of the Earth and the distant future deals with the conditions of the world moving onward indefinitely after most of the gods are dead and the Earth has once again been renewed. If you read the sources for yourself, you will realize pretty quickly that there is absolutely no reason to doubt this very simple and intuitive idea. Events that have already happened are referred to in past tense 100% of the time. Events of the future are referred to in future tense, or at least in a context that implies future tense, also 100% of the time. The thing that makes mythic time mythic, Lindow says, is that within the scope of one of these past, present, or future categories, we can't actually arrange all the stories into perfect chronological order. But that's because, as we've talked about 100 times before, the stories of Norse mythology were created in an organic oral tradition with no codified canon. There was variation in belief across time and distance, and as a result, the timeline ends up a little murky, and even contradictory in certain places. But that in itself is no reason to assume that an event like Ragnarok, for example, was ever believed to be repeatable or occurring in some kind of weird perpetual present. On the idea of cyclical time, Lindow explains that other scholars have pointed out reasons to think that a cyclical system of destruction and renewal of the Earth may have been present in the minds of ancient Scandinavians at some point, but he notes that even if some cyclical notion of time was at play in ancient times, it doesn't require us to think of time within any one of those cycles as nonlinear. And the scholars who advocate for the cyclical concept agree with this as well. There have been some scholars in the past, such as Mircha Eliade, who have talked about a concept of sacred time, which refers to time that humans spend performing religious rituals as being ever present and repeatable because, well, humans repeat rituals. But to sum everything up, the timeline for the stories we actually have in Norse mythology is just a normal, regular timeline moving from past to future. Neil Gaiman wrote in his book of popular retellings of Norse myths that he still isn't personally sure whether or not Ragnarok has already happened. Well, I am, and it has not. All of the sources discuss Ragnarok as a future event. It just so happens that we can't put all the stories into perfect chronological order because they were never designed to be placed into perfect chronological order. My guess is that Gaiman included that statement in order to be tactful. I recognize that there are members of modern spiritual movements working towards reconstructing ancient pagan religion or reworking some of the concepts to better fit a modern worldview to have incorporated the idea that Ragnarok is something more like a spiritual metaphorical event that has already happened into their religious systems. If you fall into that category, I have no desire to argue with you. My purpose here is is only to explain how these myths would have been understood by pagans in ancient times based on the current state of the research and based on material found in the sources. I am not interested in debunking modern paganism. With that in mind, the myth of the broken oaths that we're going to be talking about in this episode takes place somewhere early in the timeline. It might not be the very first event that happens after the world is created, but it does seem to be one of the first fully comprehensible narratives described in the sources that takes place in Lindow's mythic present. So it's as good a place as any to begin. Let's introduce some new characters. Thor's name means thunder. It comes from the protogermanic word Thunraz, which also evolved into Thunor in Old English and then into thunder in modern English. It also evolved into Donard in Old High German and then to Dona in modern German. In Old English and Old High German, these were words for both the sound of a thunderclap and also for the name of their version of the god Thor. In a broadly Germanic sense, this is clearly a god that is very tightly coupled with thunder. Weirdly, Thor never directly causes a clap of thunder or a flash of lightning anywhere in the Eddas. And even though he does have a few alternative names like most of the gods do, none of them are indisputably related to thunder. For whatever reason, the word "thrumah" ended up taking on the role of the common old Norse word for a thunderclap, although there are words for thunder in modern Scandinavian languages that literally mean "thorden" or in other words, "thor noise". Thor is the son of Othin and Yorth, which means "earth". The general consensus about Yorth is that she is originally a Yolten who comes to be accepted among the Asia, which is not an uncommon occurrence at all. Snory refers to her as both Othin's daughter and one of his wives, but this seems to be his own reconciliation of the fact that Othin created the Earth and then also had a son with Earth or Yorth. In another place, he names two different characters as Yorth's parents, so take that for what it's worth. I bring it up here to reinforce a couple of points. Then is that the Asia and the Yoltenod are more like clans than they are different kinds of beings. They can change sides through marriage, for example. And the second point is that I want you to keep in mind just how much of Thor's ancestry comes from the Yoltenod clan. His mother is a Yolten, and so is his grandmother on his father's side. In spite of this, Thor's mission in life seems to be to spend nearly all of his time killing Yoltenod. There's a reason for that, which we'll save for another episode. Loki, on the other hand, is a prolific shape shifter, often changing himself and others into various forms, from animals to inanimate objects to the likenesses of other people. He's the son of a Yolten father named Faubauti and a mother named Laovoi, who some scholars theorize might be a member of the Asia. He is not Thor's brother, in any sense of the word. If you're approaching the mythology with ideas informed by Marvel comics or movies, my advice would be to forget about literally 100% of what you learned from Marvel and just start fresh with the real sources. The reason scholars theorize that Laovoi might have been an Olsenia, meaning a female member of the Asia or Goddess, is because Loki often goes by his mother's name, calling himself Loki Laovoierson, rather than using his father's name, which would be Loki Faubauti son, and would be the normal thing to do, unless perhaps your mother is of a higher status than your father, and the Asia are very clearly the clan of the highest status in the mythology. But it's also important to note that the phrase Loki Laovoierson works really well for a literative Norse poetry, and we shouldn't discount how frequently the rules of poetry dictate the way things are said in our sources. There's a lost myth that is alluded to in a poem called Lococena that describes the relationship between Loki and Othin. We know that at some point in the past, Othin and Loki made a blood brother pact. What this means is that they both cut themselves and blended their blood together as a ritual way of declaring a brotherly relationship between two people who aren't biologically brothers. As part of this pact, Othin swore that he would never drink any ale unless it was served to the both of them. This seems like an easy promise for him to keep, given how the poem Grimna Small explains that even though all sorts of great food and drinks are served in Othin's hall, Othin subsists on nothing but wine. Anyway, this pact seems like the probable reason why Othin tolerates Loki, who is constantly causing problems for the gods. This sort of a trope among enthusiasts of Norse mythology to say things like, "Well yes, Loki does create a lot of trouble for the gods, but he also usually solves those problems in a way that leaves the gods in a better position than when they started. And this is true sometimes. But it's also important to realize that in some of the worst cases where Loki causes problems, there is no solution, and he will even brag about the fact that he has ensured that there is no solution." So with that foundation laid, let's jump to Gilvigating Section 42 in Snorries etta. If you'll recall, the way the narrative in Gilvigating is set up is that a Swedish king has disguised himself as a traveler called Ganglady and has gone to visit a tribe from Troy that recently settled in Sweden. He meets with a group of three wizards there and asks them questions about their worldview, which they answer by telling him stories from Norse mythology. As the story picks up in Section 42, the wizards have just quoted a list of things that are each considered best in their category. Igdrazel is the best tree. Bivroast is the best bridge, that sort of thing. They also mention that a horse called Slapeneer is the best horse, which peaks Ganglady's interest and he asks them what there is to tell about Slapeneer. One of the wizards who calls himself "high" acts incensed that Ganglady doesn't already know this story, and he begins to relate events that he describes as having occurred right at the beginning of the gods' settlement, just after Mithgarther was established and Valhul was built. High explains that at this point, a certain builder showed up on the scene with a proposition for the gods, and he says to them, "You know, if the Yotnod ever get into Mithgarther, your dwelling places here are all at risk. If you want, I can build you another fortification here around Oskarther, and I can do it in three seasons, which in this context means something more like a year and a half, where a year is being divided up between summer and winter." As payment, the builder says, "I would require marriage to the goddess Throya, and also the sun in the moon." So the gods had a conference about it, and they came back to the builder with some slightly revised terms. If he could finish all the work in one winter, all by himself, without any help from anyone, he would get the payment he requested. But on the first day of summer, if there was anything it all left unfinished, he would forfeit payment entirely. The builder was willing to agree to these terms, but only on the condition that he would at least be allowed the help of his stallion, called Swavalfati, which is an interesting name, meaning something like "the one who goes on a slippery place." An old Norse, using this same compound in the plural, Swavalfati was a way of denoting disasters, and for a person who was using the idea of walking on a slippery place to note that someone was taking a bad fall. The implication in the name is that allowing the builder to get help from his stallion here was a huge mistake. And that's because the larger point being implied is that the gods didn't expect the builder to be successful, and had no desire to hand over the sun and the moon and the goddess Freya at all. However, high explains, Loki was responsible for this request being granted. We don't have a lot of details on exactly how that interaction went down. In fact, the only detail we get is the phrase "and we read Loki," meaning "and Loki advised it," so it happened. The builder got to work on the first day of winter, building during the day and hauling up stone with the help of Swavalfar the workhorse by night. As the work progressed, the gods began to notice that Swavalfar it was able to haul some amazingly large stones, and was essentially doing twice as much the hard labor as the builder himself. And this started to make the gods a little nervous. Up until now, Snory hasn't made it clear to us exactly who this builder was. But as he has high continued the narration, we finally get glued into the idea that the builder was actually a member of the Yotnott clan. High explains that the Yotnott generally didn't feel safe being around the ass here, unless there was an iron-clad truce in place, for fear of being killed by Thor. And so, the deal the builder had made with the gods included many strong witnesses and many oaths made. One thing to call out here is that Thor is not actually present as the events of the story are unfolding. The way Snory has high tell it, the Yotnott are afraid specifically of Thor returning home. Thor is often not present during stories that don't feature him as the subject of the narrative. and in many of those stories and also in many of the stories that do feature him as the protagonist, Thor is usually described as being somewhere out in the East, which is where he is at the moment, in this story, quote, "beating trolls." There are a lot of words for otherworldly creatures in Norse mythology, and they aren't always distinct from each other. A troll can be any scary evil creature, so in some contexts it can be used interchangeably with Yolten or Thurs. Assuming the Yolten or Thurs in question meets vague boogieman-like characteristics, but the point is that whenever Thor is out in the East, it means he is out Yolten hunting. So, winter passed, and the building of the fortification progressed quickly, eventually taking the form of a wall, so high and strong that it couldn't be stormed. Three days out from the beginning of summer, the builder had almost gotten around to working on the entrance of the fortification, which we assume had been saved for last. At this point, the gods were really starting to worry, so they held council again, looking for both a solution to the problem that the builder might actually be successful, and also for someone to blame for the fact that they were in this mess in the first place. The gods decided that the person who "high" says is responsible for the most evil, Loki, was also responsible for the current debacle, and they declared that if he didn't figure out a way to cause the builder to forfeit his payment, he would be killed. Upon hearing this, Loki became afraid, high tells us, and he swore oaths that he would prevent the builder from being successful no matter what the cost would be to himself. It's important to call out the fact that I'm not embellishing the story here. The phrase "snory" gives us is "whatsamhan kostalitil", meaning literally "whatever it cost him". This is important for understanding what happens next in the story, as there have been a lot of misconceptions made in popular media about Loki's motivations. If we want to understand this story the way the ancient Norse did, we need to understand that at this moment, Loki is afraid for his life. He's under explicit threat of death, and he verbalizes the fact that he may end up having to do something that would amount to a great cost to himself in order to solve the problem. That same evening, the builder took swaddle farry out on their nightly journey to haul stones up to the construction site. When suddenly, a mayor came bounding out of the woods and "nade" at swaddle farry, who immediately went frantic and tore off his tackle and chased the mayor back into the woods. The mayor, of course, was actually Loki in the form of what must have looked to swaddle farry to be an extraordinarily enticing female horse. The builder chased after them all night to no avail, and as a result, work on the fortification was delayed. The next day, the builder realized that he was not going to be able to finish his work by the agreed upon deadline, and he fell into what Snory calls a "yotin style rage", a "yotin moth". Now seeing for certain that the builder was indeed a bear greasy, or so-called mountain giant that had come among them, the gods disregarded the oaths they had made and called upon Thor, who immediately returned and paid the builder. Not with the wages he had been promised, of course, but with a single crushing blow to the head with his hammer mule near, that shattered the builder's skull into pieces and sent him down under Niflheim, or in other words, to hell, the Norse world of the dead. By this time, as High puts it, Loki had had "such dealings" with swaddle farry that sometime later, Loki gave birth to a foll named Sleipnir. It was gray and had eight legs, and is the best horse among gods and men. The name Sleipnir means "slippery one", which in this case seems to be a reference to the amazing speed attributed to him in the sources, but it's also interesting in light of the fact that his father's name was also a reference to Slipperenus, but in that context, it was Slipperenus as the cause of disaster. So we see here in their names, or at least I do, this poetic reference to the fact that something good has now come out of this thing that was a problem. There are some who will tell you that Loki lovingly raised this foll, treating it the way a mother treats her own child. Since in this case, Loki technically is Sleipnir's mother. Unfortunately, the people who will tell you that piece of the story have made it up. The story ends in our sources with Loki giving birth. And we know that at some point Othin took ownership of Sleipnir, but we don't know if it was right away or after Sleipnir had grown to adulthood or somewhere in between. But he does become Othin's primary source of quick long distance transportation from here on out. There are a lot of details that are frustratingly absent from this story. We do discover that Oth's girl, mentioned in Volospaw, is a reference to Freya. And we discover that the Othes mentioned in those stanzas were Othes of truce between the builder and the gods. But we're given exactly zero information on how Freya responded to this situation, for example. And that's sort of disappointing. As a bargaining chip, she has no dialogue at all. What is clear from Snorri's account is that Loki's motivation for transforming into a female horse is fear for his life. The "dealings" he has with Swadilfari while in that form and their resulting consequences are viewed as a "cost" he has to pay to prevent his own execution. We also have a description of Swadilfari chasing after him all night long. So did Loki deliberately allow himself to be caught and impregnated or did Swadilfari just catch Loki, who might have ultimately been trying to lure him away from his work, but may not have necessarily wanted to engage in any horse on horse activities. I bring this up here because notions of Loki's gender and sexuality have become sensitive topics recently. Again, partly due to Marvel influence, but I also recognize that there are a lot of people out there who don't fit into traditional boxes of identity and are looking for a concept of deity that they can identify with. And Loki fills that gap in their lives. I have no desire to take that away from anyone. So I want to be clear about my own motivations in how I'll be treating this topic and the type of language I'll be using. While identity and how it applies to Loki is a complex issue worthy of an entire episode on its own, this show is about digging into historical interpretations, as opposed to modern ones. To that end, it's important to consider all of the information the way the source has presented. In the case of this story, Snory, who is a post-Christianization scholar, provides our only detailed account. So we just can't know for sure how the story may have evolved before it ended up in our hands, or how Snory might be interpreting some old poem that he didn't bother quoting. But what I will say is that before using this particular story as evidence for any gender or sexuality related characteristics Loki may or may not have had, it's important to keep in mind that the story we've actually been handed involves a person's interactions with a horse that he had while in fear for his own life. Obviously, nobody can tell you exactly how much you should trust Snory, and nobody can tell you how you should or shouldn't process these stories for yourself, or what your take away on a topic like this must be. I refer to Loki with the word "him" because that's what the sources do. It's the pronoun that the society who invented him used when they talked about him. You may have heard that there are some exceptions to this, but if so, you should know that that's sort of a misleading thing to say, and we'll cover it all in more depth in the future. Loki was the product of a society without modern views about identity, and as much as I have no desire to take something away from anyone alive in our time, I also have no desire to impose modern sentiments onto an ancient person's idea of their own religion. But if you, who do live in a modern world, choose to interpret Loki as any type of non-heterosexual nonsense-gendered character, that is absolutely your right. Because times have certainly changed, and despite the existence of reconstructionist movements, original Norse paganism went extinct long ago. There is no official canon, and nobody owns the rights to the mythology. However, the details of this particular story, specifically a one-night stand with an animal under threat of death, may not be the right place to look for informing any kind of interpretation at all. So for now, let's do our best to understand how ancient stories would have been understood by ancient people, and pick up with more of those stories next time on Norse mythology, the unofficial guide. Sources for this episode include Concepts of Time in Old Norse Myth by Margaret Clooney's Ross in Prolonged Echoes, Volume 1, 1994. Norse mythology, a guide to the gods, heroes, rituals, and beliefs by John Lindow, 2001. Prophane duration and sacred time by Mircha Eliade in the sacred and the profane, the nature of religion, 1963. The poetic edit translated by Caroline Larrington, 2014, and the Pro Zeta translated by Anthony Falks, 1995.