The Gods and Goddesses, Part Six

Loki's darker side, in the end, proves him to be more closely connected to the giants than to the gods. He is both father and mother to a brood of supernatural creatures; three of his children prove to be the bane of the gods, although one – the mystic horse Sleipnir – becomes the steed of Odin. Mating with the wicked giantess Angrboda ("harm-bidder"), Loki produces the three great monsters of Norse mythology: Fenrir, Jörmungand, and Hel.

Fenrir ("fen-dweller") is a giant and vicious wolf. As he grows from a pup, the gods realize that he will eventually be large enough to threaten them. They attempt to bind him, but he twice breaks the fetters they tie him with. Eventually, they present him with a dwarf-wrought magic fetter and challenge him to break it. He agrees to let them try it on him, as long as one god puts a hand into his mouth as insurance. Týr bravely offers his right hand, which is bitten off when the bonds prove unbreakable. Snorri writes, matter-of-factly, "when the wolf kicked, the bond became firmer, and the more he struggled, the harder the bond became. Then they all laughed, except Týr. He lost his hand." The wolf remains bound, with an upright sword between his jaws, until he is freed during the final battle of Ragnarök, in which he kills Odin.

Týr, as he survives in the Norse mythological corpus, is an enigmatic figure who is known mostly for this encounter with the wolf. Like all of the other gods, he is handicapped going into the final battle with the giants and monsters. He has only one hand, Odin has only one eye, Frey has given away his magic sword and must fight with an antler, and Thor has a hammer with a handle that is too short. Týr is thought to be a diminished version of an older sky-god, the very early Germanic god whose name has been reconstructed as Tîwaz. This god may once have been a primary god of certain tribes, as his name means "god" and is related to both the Greek Zeus and the Latin deus.

Jörmungand ("mighty wand") is the Midgard Serpent, the giant snake that lies beneath the oceans and encircles the world. He has several run-ins with Thor in the mythology, and is considered the archenemy of the Thunder God. At Ragnarök, his final contest with Thor will result in both of their deaths. Loki, as the father of both the wolf and the snake, is literally the "father of evil" – his children kill the two most powerful gods in the Norse cosmology.

Hel is the goddess who rules the underworld of the dead known as Niflheim ("mist-home"). While Odin and Freya divide fallen warriors and Thor gets the common folk, Hel receives those who die of sickness or old age. Old vikings were known to mark themselves with a spear-tip in their final moments in attempt to avoid a "straw death" – an inglorious end while lying on a mattress filled with straw rather than in the heat of battle. Snorri describes Hel: "She is half black and half the colour of flesh, and so she is easily recognized, and rather sad and grim-looking." Like her monstrous siblings, Hel helps assure the destruction of the gods by depriving them of Baldur, the bright and beautiful god.

Loki and Höðr by Emil Doepler (1905)

Several Eddic poems refer to the story of Baldur. The tale begins with the god's dreams of his own demise. Troubled, his mother Frigg extracts oaths from all things that they will not harm him - from fire and water, metal and stone, beasts and birds, diseases and poisons, snakes and trees. The other gods make a game of throwing weapons and stones at him, amusing themselves as the implements glance harmlessly off the blessed god. Loki, ever jealous, disguises himself as a woman (he is often seen changing gender) and finds out from Frigg that the one thing that can harm Baldur is the mistletoe, which the goddess considered too small and harmless to bother with. Loki gives a dart of mistletoe to the god Höðr, who has been unable to participate in the game on account of his blindness. Höðr ("warrior") is another character who is thought to descend from an older and larger god, in this case a god of war; as a god bereft of sight, he represents the arbitrary nature of success in battle. Loki eggs on the blind god, who throws the dart and instantly kills Baldur.

Odin sends Hermóð ("war-spirit"), who is either his son or his servant, down to Hel to bring Baldur back to the living. The goddess of the dead agrees, if everything that is in the world will weep for him. Everything does, except one mean-spirited giantess, who is suspected to be Loki in disguise. The gods lose Baldur forever, and Snorri says, "Odin took the loss the hardest, since he knew most clearly how great a damage and deprivation there was for the Æsir in Baldur's death." This is usually taken to mean that Baldur's death signals the beginning of Ragnarök, but make more sense in light of the handicapping of the gods as they enter their final battle; they are not only deprived of body parts and weapons, but also of their brightest ally, the Light God who could have combated the forces of darkness.

Baldur can also be seen as a god of the sun or of summer. When he descends, as the sun does at night or the summer does in winter, the world "weeps" – dew and frost are seen on all things – and his brightness and warmth are beloved by all things. In the poem Völuspá, the prophetess describes the birth of a new world after the destruction of Ragnarök:

Without sowing the fields will grow,
all ills will be healed, Baldr will come back;
Hod and Baldr, the gods of slaughter, will live happily together
in the sage's palaces.

In a new era, free of giants and monsters, the killer and the victim will live together in harmony, all wrongs forgiven.

Sigyn and Loki by Emil Doepler (1905)

After the death of Baldur and his imprisonment by Hel, Loki flees but is eventually captured. By this point, the playful Trickster is gone, and Loki is revealed as a giant and a mortal enemy of the gods. The Æsir murder a son he bore with the goddess Sigyn ("victorious girl-friend"), use the child's entrails to bind Loki to three stone slabs, and hang a snake above him who drips poison into the god's face. Loki's loyal wife holds a bowl over him to catch the poison; whenever she turns aside to empty the bowl, the poison drips on his face and his writhing causes earthquakes – one final Just-So Story of the god, who is now associated with rock and earth as an elemental giant.

As the bound Fenrir breaks free at Ragnarök, so the bound Loki. According to Völuspá, Loki will steer the mystic ship Naglfar ("corpse-ship") that brings all the enemies of the gods to the final battle. Snorri describes how the world will be flooded by the thrashing of the furious Midgard Serpent, and that the Naglfar will ride the waters. The prophetess of Völuspá says that the ship will come from the East, and that its passengers will be "Muspell's people." Muspell is the land of fire in the Norse creation myth, but the name derives from the Old High German muspilli ("doomsday") – a name that, at this point in the mythology, finally makes sense. "Muspell's people" are the giants who have, inevitably, come to fight the gods and bring about the end of all things. At the head of the monstrous forces, Loki has shed all aspects of godhood and allied himself completely with the giants.

The Gods and Goddesses, Part Five

Loki and his monstrous progeny are every bit as complex as Freya and the valkyries. Depending on the source that is examined, Loki can be a friend to the gods or a deadly enemy, a mischievous trickster or a powerful warrior, a slightly-built traveling companion or a gigantic force of vengeance. Many of the tales that involve Loki are only attested in very late sources, and may be the creation of storytellers during an age when belief in the old religion was waning or had already dissipated.

Jacob Grimm, in his 1835 treatise Teutonic Mythology, gives a convoluted argument that Saturday is named for Loki. While the other days are clear translations from the Roman days of the week into their Germanic pagan equivalents, Saturday does not fit the pattern. Every other weekday is named for a god or goddess from Norse mythology: Sunday/Sol, Monday/Mani, Tuesday/Tyr, Wednesday/Odin, Thursday/Thor, and Friday/Freya. Grimm asserts that Saturday does not retain the name of the Roman Saturn, but is named for Sæter ("insidiator" or "one who lies in ambush"), a name that he connects with Loki and supports with Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse sources. However, there is no evidence of a historical Loki-cult, or that he was ever worshiped as a god. There are, instead, multiple contradictory portrayals of the slippery figure.

Loki is best-known in the guise of the Trickster – the god who continually gets into mischief, has his escapades go horribly wrong, gets compelled by the other gods to fix the results of his troublemaking, and ends up doing good in the end as a sort of byproduct of his machinations. One of the more intriguing etymologies of his name connects it to the Swedish dialect-word Locke ("spider"), which places Loki in the world continuum of Trickster Gods with animal forms. In 1933, French philologist Georges Dumézil argued that the characterization of Loki as master thief is incredibly ancient, and can be traced back as one of the foundational conceptions of Indo-European mythology.

Loki as flea on Freya's cheek by Maria Klugh [?] (1909)

Indeed, many of the tales of Loki center around both his transformation into animal shape and his thefts from the gods. In order to steal the golden necklace of Freya, he turns himself into a flea. When Heimdall, the watchman of the gods, confronts him to win it back, the two gods fight in the form of seals. We have already seen how Loki is forced by the giant Thjazi to kidnap the goddess Idunn and her golden apples of youth, and how he transforms himself into a falcon (with the aid of Freya's magic cloak) and turns the goddess into a nut to carry her back to safety.

Combined with this transformative ability and thieving nature is the idea that Loki's pranks end up redounding to the benefit of the gods and of humanity. The clearest example of this occurs in the Skáldskaparmál ("The Language of Poetry") section of the Edda. After Loki cuts of the hair of the goddess Sif as a prank, Thor threatens him with grievous bodily injury unless he can convince some dwarves to make her a new head of hair. Loki somehow convinces a pair of dwarves to not only spin the golden hair, but to also forge the ship Skíðblaðnir and the spear Gungnir ("swaying one"). The hair magically attaches to Sif's head and begins to grow. In the Ynglinga saga, Snorri writes that the ship, given to Frey, "is large enough for all the Æsir to board it fully armed, and it takes a fair wind as soon as the sail is hoisted, wherever it has to go. When it is not at sea, it is constructed so skillfully and of so many parts that it can be folded up like a cloth and put in a pocket." In the Eddic poem Sigrdrífumál, the valkyrie tells Sigurd that there are mystic runes cut into the point of the spear. According to Snorri, it has the magic power that it is "never stopped in its thurst" and will be used by Odin during his final battle with the monstrous wolf Fenrir that will occur at Ragnarök.

Loki as gadfly by Willy Pogany (1920)

Loki then goes to another pair of dwarves and bets them his head (a common enough wager in the mythology) that they can't make three things as fine as the three treasures created by the first pair. In order to handicap his bet, Loki turns into a fly and continuously bites the dwarf who is manning the forge-bellows. Despite his meddling, the dwarves create the boar Gullinbursti ("golden bristles"), the ring Draupnir ("dripper"), and the hammer Mjolnir ("mauler" or "crusher"). In Snorri's telling, the boar "could run across sky and sea by night and day faster than any horse, and it never got so dark from night in worlds of darkness that it was not bright enough whereverit went, there was so much light shed from its bristles." The ring, which is thought to be an arm-ring rather than a finger-ring, would "drip" eight rings equal to itself in size on every ninth night. The hammer is the mighty hammer of Thor, which is endowed with the magic power of never missing its target, of always returning to the Thunderer's hand when thrown, and could be shrunk down "so small that it could be kept inside his shirt." Due to Loki's interference with the forging, the hammer's handle turned out a bit short.

The triumvirate of Odin, Thor, and Frey judges that the hammer is the greatest treasure of the lot, as it will defend them in their battles with the enemy frost-giants, and they decree that the dwarves have won the wager. Loki, of course, is not quite willing to give up his head and uses his magic shoes to flee across the sky and sea. At the dwarves' request, Thor (ever the enforcer of legal contracts), catches the fleeing Trickster and brings him back. When the dwarves attempt to cut off Loki's head, he tells them that they are welcome to it, as long as they don't damage his neck in the process. Frustrated by the letter of the contract from taking the head away, one of the dwarves instead pierces Loki's lips with an awl and sews his mouth shut. A stone carving from the Viking Age found in Denmark is sometimes thought to be a depiction of Loki on account of what appear to be stitch-marks on the figure's lips.

Loki's misadventures also redound to the benefit of humanity. After he has brought about the death of the god Baldur, Loki is finally driven from the company of the gods once and for all. Hiding from the wrath of the Æsir, he spends his days in salmon-form at the bottom of a river. Trying to figure out what device the gods might use to capture him, he develops a net, but throws it into the fire when he realizes that his enemies are near. Kvasir, the wise Vanir, sees the ashes of the net and realizes what Loki had created. The gods weave their own net and use it to drag the river, eventually deciding to weigh it down so that Loki cannot hide in the stones of the riverbed. When Loki tries to jump over the net, Thor grabs him by the tail so that he can't slip away. The end result is that Loki, despite his anti-heroic nature, is what Hilda Ellis Davidson calls a "culture hero, who provides mankind with benefits" – in this case, the invention of the fishing net and the idea of dragging a river bottom. He also provides comical Just-So Stories; after Thor catches hold of the wriggling fish, Snorri concludes, "And it is for this reason that the salmon tapers towards the tail."

The Gods and Goddesses, Part Four

In his Geographica of 23 AD, the encyclopedia written in Greek by the Roman Strabo, the author writes of the priestesses of the Cimbri, a Germanic tribe located in what is now Denmark. "Their wives," he writes, "who would accompany them on their expeditions, were attended by priestesses who were seers; these were grey-haired, clad in white, with flaxen cloaks fastened on with clasps, girt with girdles of bronze, and bare-footed; now sword in hand these priestesses would meet with the prisoners of war throughout the camp, and having first crowned them with wreaths would lead them to a brazen vessel of about twenty amphorae; and they had a raised platform which the priestess would mount, and then, bending over the kettle, would cut the throat of each prisoner after he had been lifted up; and from the blood that poured forth into the vessel some of the priestesses would draw a prophecy, while still others would split open the body and from an inspection of the entrails would utter a prophecy of victory for their own people; and during the battles they would beat on the hides that were stretched over the wicker-bodies of the wagons and in this way produce an unearthly noise."

Valkyrie by Peter Nicolai Arbo (1869)

There is further historical evidence of these ritual leaders. The Arab writer Ibn Fadlan described a viking funeral rite that he witnessed in 921 AD on the shore of the Volga River in Russia. He writes of the "Angel of Death" who presides over the proceedings, including the killing of a young slave girl who is burned with the dead chieftain. The older woman is "in charge of the whole ceremony, from the dressing of the cadaver to the execution of the slave." She was "a strapping woman, massively built and austere of countenance." When the final moments come, "the men began to beat their shields with wooden sticks, to stifle the cries of the slave girl, so that other girls would not take fright and refuse to die with their masters." This noise-making echoes that of the Cimbri priestesses almost a thousand years earlier. The grisly ritual reaches its climax when the men involved in the ceremony "made her lie at the side of her dead master. Two held her hands and two her feet, and the Angel of Death wound a noose around her neck ending in a knot at both ends which she placed in the hands of two men, for them to pull. She then advanced with a broad-bladed dagger which she plunged repeatedly between the ribs of the girl while the men strangled her until she was dead." The role of the Germanic priestess either changed over time, was different in different tribes, or had a complex makeup that included both prophecy from the high-seat and a leadership role in ritual sacrifice. Ibn Fadlan worked with an interpreter, and it seems clear that his "Angel of Death" is the same as the Norse "chooser of the slain."

In 1014, the Anglo-Saxon bishop named Wulfstan published his Sermo Lupi ad Anglos ("Sermon of the Wolf to the English"). In a time-honored tradition that continues to this day, he blamed a great calamity (in this case, thirty years of viking raids) on his own country's lack of moral fiber. He lists a catalog of the most grievous types of sinners that surrounded him, including "wiccan and wælcyrian" – witches and valkyries. This is not a mystical list of devils, but a human list that includes murderers and robbers. Evidently, there were still active wise women and prophetesses at this late date.

These women were, for obvious reasons, bloody and terrifying. It is understandable that whispered tales would grow up around them, especially given the idea in Germanic society that women had mysterious powers to begin with. This gave rise to the mythological concept of the valkyrie as magical maiden that flies above the battlefield, choosing the slain in a mystic sense by marking certain warriors for death in battle. The earthly woman who chooses those who are to be sacrificed evolved into the heavenly war-maiden who magically marks those who are doomed to die on the battlefield. The physical appearance of the original human figures – cloaked, wearing a girdle of bronze, and carrying a sword – is replicated in the mythological descriptions of the warrior-goddesses. Freya in her falcon cloak can be seen as a super-valkyrie, as a primal version of the horse-riding warrior goddesses of the late mythology.

The Gods and Goddesses, Part Three

Like Odin, Freya receives the dead. In Grímnismál, Odin describes Fólkvang ("field of the people"), Freya’s dwelling in the realm of the gods. The very name of her home points to the slain, as the "field of the people" can be seen as a kenning for "battlefield" (field where the fallen lie) or "cemetary" (field where the dead are buried). The poem states,

Fólkvang is the ninth, and there Freyia arranges
the choice of seats in the hall;
half the slain she chooses every day,
and half Odin owns.

Acting as a valkyrie, a "chooser of the slain," she helps to collect those who die in battle and bring them to Asgard, the home of the gods. Odin welcomes the dead warriors he selects to his hall, Valhalla ("Hall of the Slain"), gathering them together to build an army for the final battle at Ragnarök. What Freya does with her dead is never mentioned.

Why is a goddess of love also a goddess of death? The answer can be seen in her connection to gold, the wealth that must be dug out of the ground. Freya is fundamentally connected to the earth, from which all life comes, and to which all life must someday return. The contemporary, popular culture characterization of Freya as the "goddess of love" is a great oversimplification of her character that tries to line her up with the Roman Venus. The Norse mythological corpus, however, gives a far more complex and nuanced characterization of a goddess whose domain seems to be the totality of experience through life and death.

In the later period of the pagan era, Freya came to represent the magical and sexual sides of the Germanic concept of womanhood, and Frigg was given the matrimonial and maternal aspects. When they are brought back together, they represent a conception that is as rich and multifaceted as that of Odin himself – an Allmother to match the Allfather. With the coming of Christianity, the two aspects were exaggerated and separated even further by the scholars who wrote down and organized the mythology.

Mary's tears of gold by Robert Rumas (2000)

The positive aspects of the Germanic goddess were transferred to the Virgin Mary; she is portrayed as Our Lady of Sorrows weeping for her lost son as Freya weeps for her missing husband. Mary also fills the role of Frigg, the mother goddess who intercedes with the father god on behalf of supplicant humans; Frigg plays this role in many tales from the myths and sagas.

Margaret Hamilton as the Wicked Witch (1939)

In the medieval period, the aspects of the character that were seen as negative were transferred away from godhood and down into witches. Second sight and arcane knowledge became unholy, and the wise women of pagan times became the outcast witches of Christian times. What was once a social and spiritual role held by the women of the family now became a forbidden and dirty thing. Snorri, writing in a medieval and Christian Iceland, presents a version of Freya that is midway between goddess and witch, and her Earth Mother fecundity (as represented by her cat-drawn wagon) is portrayed as a sort of sexual looseness and depravity.

Freya, cats, and babies by N.J.O. Blommer (1852)

It is clear that the arrival of Christianity brought a change in the status of women in the Germanic world. In the pagan era, women were spiritual leaders and played in major role in the religious and social life of their family and community; often religious/social and family/community amounted to the same thing. What Hilda Ellis Davidson writes of the druids can also be applied to the wise women: "They encouraged and preserved religious learning, and were also associated with divination and prophecy. They undoubtedly played an important political role also, thus paving the way for their own suppression, but it was difficult in any case in the pre-Christian era to separate the religious and secular sides of life."

The term valkyrie literally means "chooser of the slain." This seems to be a concept that descends from ritual to myth to legend to tale. Originally, the valkyries were women who led the ritual sacrifice of human prisoners. They went amongst the captured and literally "chose the slain" – picked out those who they subsequently sacrificed.

The Gods and Goddesses, Part Two

As with the myriad aspects of Odin, each with its own set of attributes, Freya is portrayed in many different guises in the mythology. In the Völuspá version, she is unbreakable, as elemental and powerful as gold and magic. As we come through the medieval period and into early modern times, she merges into the folk tale figure of Frau Holle. In Wagner's Rhinegold, his character Freia is sometimes referred to by the name Holda; the composer is conflating two goddesses. The name of the goddess Holda comes from the Gothic word Hold ("favor" or "grace"). She was a goddess of the Suebi tribe and was, according to Jacob Grimm, a "kind, benignant, merciful goddess or lady."

Frau Holle by Stefula (1967 stamp, Germany)

Holda survived into the age of folk and fairy tales, and was still present in local German traditions in the 19th century as Frau Holda, Hulde, Holle, Hulle, and Holl. She is a kindly figure who lives in the sky and is helpful to humanity; she is only upset "when she notices disorder in household affairs." During the winters of my childhood, my father told me of the German folk tradition that, when Frau Holle made her bed in the sky, she would shake out her comforter, and the downy feathers would fall to the earth as snow.

Frau Holle by Otto Ubbelohde (1900)

The earlier goddess Holda, like Freya and the Germanic earth goddess Nerthus, drives in a wagon or cart. There are darker, probably earlier aspects to her character; she is as complicated and multifaceted as the other gods of the Norse pantheon. Like Odin, she rides the storm as part of the Raging Host – a role that lines up with the role of Freya as a sort of super-valkyrie. Holda appears in a 14th century Icelandic saga as a prophetess or wise woman named Huldr, and she is mentioned as a beloved of Odin and mother by him to the half-goddesses Thorgerđr and Irpa. As we will see in a moment, several versions of the female goddess – as Freya, Holda, and other forms – have points of connection through their relationship to Odin. All of these goddesses can be seen as aspects of a larger, more all-encompassing female divinity.

Idunn by Carl Emil Doepler (1882)

Freya is also connected with another goddess, Idunn ("rejuvenator"). In the Norse myths, Idunn, like Freya, is lusted after by giants. In the Norwegian poem Haustlöng ("autumn-long"), composed at the turn of the 10th century, Loki helps the giant Thjazi steal away the goddess and her mystic apples. The gods are kept forever young and strong by the power of these apples, and they quickly begin to feel the effects of age in their absence. They compel Loki to make good for his tricks, so he transforms himself into a falcon (with the aid of Freya’s magic cloak), sneaks into the giant’s home, transforms the captive goddess into a nut, and carries her back to the gods. Like Thor's wife Sif, Idunn seems to be a harvest or spring goddess who only survives in the mythological corpus through, basically, a single tale. Like Sif, she may have once been a more all-encompassing Earth goddess, or she may have been one aspect of Freya or some other, more complex female figure.

Frigg by Johannes Gehrts (1901)

A more important figure connected to Freya is Frigg, the wife of Odin and the queen of the gods. If we go back far enough in time, it is possible that Freya and Frigg were originally the same figure, but somehow split into separate characters at some point. For a mythological conception of godhood where individual gods have so many, often contradictory aspects, it is not hard to imagine that, over time, certain aspects could split off into a wholly separate figure.

Freya and Ód by Lorenz Frølich (1895)

That being said, Freya (meaning "woman") and Frigg (meaning "lady") may have been originally identical. As mentioned previously, Freya weeps tears of gold for her missing husband, and she herself travels the world in search of him. His name is Ód ("frenzy"), seemingly the same name as Odin, which translates the same; both names derive from the Germanic wüten ("to rage"). The name changed as it moved North, dropping the w in Wodan to form Odin; here the ending has also dropped off to form Ód. In the few surviving texts that mention the Ód figure, he is travelling the worlds as a wanderer – perhaps the Wanderer (with a capital W) aspect of Odin himself reduced to a character with only that one attribute.

Freya has a special relationship with Odin that is very understandable when we realize that she parallels Frigg, his wife. Odin sends his thoughts out in the form of ravens, and Freya puts on a cloak of falcon feathers to soar through the skies. Odin sits on Hliðskjálf and sends his ravens out into the world, as the seid prophetesses mentioned earlier make their mystic statements while sitting on high seats; clearly, there is a connection between Odin and the female figures based on shamanistic practice. Notably, Freya's hall in the godly realm is known as Sessrumnir ("seat-room"), a name that can be easily connected to the high seat of the prophetess. Freya also has connections to the wisdom-seeking aspect of Odin. Like him, she engages in wisdom contests with mystical figures, as in the Eddic poem Hyndluljóð ("song of Hyndla"), in which she verbally spars with the giantess and prophetess named Hyndla.

The Gods and Goddesses, Part One

There is a diverse and complicated pantheon of gods and goddesses in the Norse mythological cosmology, and two of the most intriguing figures are those of Freya and Loki. A detailed examination of their many aspects and tales will intersect with many other gods, goddesses, and mythic figures.

Of all the goddesses, Freya is probably the most complex and enigmatic. Her name simply means "woman" and leads etymologically to the modern German word Frau. After examining both her Scandinavian and her German characterizations, it will become clear that she synthesizes several elements of the early Germanic view of womanhood. Much as Odin has his many names and aspects, Freya appears in various guises throughout the mythic corpus.

Freya is often identified with Gullveig ("gold-draught"), a character who appears in the section of the Eddic poem Völuspá ("Prophecy of the Seeress") that immediately precedes a description of the first war in the world - the conflict between the Æsir (the war gods) and the Vanir (the fertility gods).

She [the prophetess who narrates the poem] remembers the first war in the world,
when they buttressed Gullveig with spears
and in One-eye’s hall they burned her;
three times they burned her, three times she was reborn,
over and over, yet she lives still.

Smelting gold with crucible and tongs

On the surface, this seems a bit brutal. However, the strange imagery becomes more intelligible when the name of the goddess is examined. As Odin's many names elucidate facets of his complicated character, so do Freya's. She is, at this point, called "gold-draught." If she is seen as a personification of gold in the way that, say, Thor is a personification of thunder, the episode becomes clear as a representation of the purification of gold through repeated smelting. The spears are the tongs to hold the gold over the smithy's fire, and the repeated burning is the heating of the gold to burn out impurities.

Freya by James Doyle Penrose (1890)

Throughout the mythology, Freya is associated with gold. When her husband leaves her to wander the Earth (more on him below), she cries tears of gold. Because of this story, "Freya’s tears" became a kenning, or poetic circumlocution, used to represent the word "gold" in Norse poetry. Freya's golden necklace Brísingamen ("flaming necklace") appears in connection with the goddess in several Eddic tales. According to Snorri Sturluson, the terms "flame" and "fire" are often connected with gold in poetry of the North "since it is red," so it should not be assumed that Freya's necklace was a thing of fire, but that it was simply made of her favorite metal.

Völuspá continues:

Heid they called her, wherever she came to houses,
the seer with pleasing prophecies, she charmed them with spells;
she practiced seid wherever she could, with seid she played with minds,
she was always the favourite of wicked women.

The proper name Heid means "brightness” and reinforces the identification of Freya with gold. Seid is a form of magic or sorcery associated with female practitioners in the Eddas and sagas. Its only male practitioner was Odin, and there are several instances where he is accused on unmanliness on account of his practice of it. From various accounts in the Icelandic sagas, seid was a sort of shamanistic practice that involved a costumed prophetess sitting on a high seat and delivering responses to questions about the future, much as the prophetesses of Völuspá and Baldrs draumar ("Baldur's Dreams") answer the questions of Odin.

Veleda in Walhalla Temple (circa 1842, Germany)

Ritual powers of prophecy are associated with women in the early Germanic world, both in mythological and historical records, and the women who exhibited second sight held positions of great influence in their communities. Tacitus wrote in 98 AD that the Germans of his era "believe that there resides in women an element of holiness and a gift of prophecy; and so they do not scorn to ask their advice, or lightly disregard their replies. In the reign of the emperor Vespasian we saw Veleda long honoured by many Germans as a divinity; and even earlier they showed a similar reverence for Aurinia and a number of others." The prophetess Veleda that he mentions was a leader of the Rhineland tribe of the Bructeri. She led in political as well as spiritual matters, serving as an arbiter during negotiations between Rome and Cologne.

How does Freya help to bring about the first war? She introduces desire to the gods. Prior to her arrival, they apparently existed in a blissful state. Unlike the Biblical Eve, however, Freya is not portrayed (at this point in the mythology) as a temptress who uses her wiles to manipulate in pursuit of her own goals. It is, instead, her innate desirability that brings out the weakness and lust of the other gods. By personifying gold and magic, she represents both wealth and power, and the uncontrollable desire for these two forces is what sets in motion the events that, inexorably, lead to Ragnarök. The seeds of destruction appear very early in the mythological time-line; the gods, it seems, are doomed by their own failings almost from their very beginning.

Wolfingen / Karavukovo town center

The notion of womanly magic is a particularly powerful concept in the Germanic world, and it lasted well past the end of the pagan era. In the 1930s, my father grew up in Wolfingen, a German farm colony in what was later known as Yugoslavia. It had been settled in the 1700s by the Donauschwaben ("Danube Swabians"), Germans who followed the Danube down into the rich farmland to the south. Schwaben is a modern term for those who descended from the Suebi, an ancient Germanic tribe who were already well-established when they were encountered by an invading Julius Caesar in the year 58 AD. In my father's village, isolated from Germany itself, folk traditions and practices dating back to at least the 1700s were kept alive. Women in our family were said to possess a sort of second sight – a prophetic power that is at the heart of the concept of seid from the stories of Freya. Of course, nobody was literally practicing ancient pagan magic in the 1930s; the old concept of seid had basically degenerated down to "womanly intuition," which may have been where the concept originated in pre-Christian times. We have evidence, then, that this tradition – specifically connecting women with prophetic powers – lasted at least from 69 AD (the year the prophetess Veleda first came into the historical record) to the 1940s (when the Germans were driven from Wolfingen during the Second World War).

In light of the connection of hanging with Wodan, the primary god of the continental Germans, it is also interesting to note that there were instances of suicide by hanging in our family, the last one occurring in the 1990s. Maybe Carl Jung is right when he argues that there is a collective memory of a people – that certain psychological concepts survive throughout the ages. We have to wonder whether psychological makeup is expressed in religion, or whether religious concepts determine individual psychology.

The Mighty Thor, Part Three

Thor, as he wields the mighty Hammer of the Gods, fights the enemies of the Æsir (the Norse name for the gods), both external and internal. He smites the endless parade of giants who seek to carry off the goddesses; Freya and Idunn are the usual targets. For those who tend to see all myth as nature allegory, the giants are either darkness or winter, and the goddesses are either light or summer. Thor, in this view, is clearly on the side of the fertility gods (more on this later), yet Scandinavian sources usually situate him as a war god.

On a human, ceremonial level, Thor was invoked to keep sacred and legal order. Men of the North blessed with the sign of the hammer before they were taught to do so with that of the cross. Small human representations of his hammer were used for many rites of blessing, including infant name-giving ceremonies and to consecrate the thresholds of new houses. A hammer was thrown to ratify the acquisition of property, and it was used to drive in boundary stakes that marked the edges of land ownership; the removal of these hammer-driven stakes was considered sacrilegious. Thor was the spiritual patron of the Althing, the ancient general assembly of the North, and the use of the judge's gavel to formalize a legal ruling can be traced back to this remote period.

Thor in (shredded) bridal gown by Willy Pogany (1920)

A ceremonial Thor's hammer was also used to consecrate a bride at her marriage. This is seen mythically in the Eddic poem Thrymskviða, in which (as mentioned previously) Thor's hammer is stolen by the giant Thrym, who, as giants are wont to do, demands the hand of Freya as ransom for the mystic weapon. Loki, the Trickster God, convinces Thor to do himself up in drag and go to the giant's home disguised as the goddess. Cross-dressing hilarity ensues. Finally, the giant places the hammer in the disguised Thunder God's lap to sanctify and consecrate his supposed bride. Predictably, Thor grabs the hammer and proceeds to smite everyone in his righteous wrath. For scholars attempting to reconstruct everyday life in pre-Christian times, this is often seen as a mythic version of true wedding ritual, and of the hammer's consecrating power – as reflected in the runic name Wigiþonar ("blessing-Thor") from the 6th century Nordendorf Fibula.

The story can also be seen as evidence that Thor, despite his fierceness, had strong fertility-god aspects. We have already seen that his thunder brings rain to the fields of the farmer, but here the hammer can be seen as a symbol of love and fertility. It may have also functioned as a primitive phallic symbol. The design of English pendants designed to represent the hammer of Thunor (the Anglo-Saxon version of the god) seem to lean toward this interpretation. The metaphorical image of lightning as the sky god thrusting his hammer into the fertile earth is fairly obvious. It also shows that the Eddic linkage of Odin and Jörd giving birth to Thor must be a later version of the relationship, as the pairing of Thor (sky) and Jörd (earth) actually makes more sense in the science of religion. In this context, the tale of Thor's stolen hammer has an undertone of lost or threatened manhood, as well.

Sif by Thormod Kidde (1963)

The Eddas retain Thor's connection to agrarian fertility in a different manner by pairing him with the goddess Sif. As a prank, Loki cuts off her beautiful blonde hair while she sleeps, leaving her with a shameful head of stubble. Her husband Thor, greatly enraged, forces Loki to restore her hair. The Trickster convinces a pair of very talented dwarves to forge her a new set of locks made from the finest gold. This mystically-wrought hair magically attaches to her head and grows anew. It is not very difficult to see Sif as a harvest goddess and to see her hair as the golden stalks of grain that are shorn to stubble on the fields at harvest-time, only to grow once more at the intervention of the Thunder God, who brings the springtime rains. She is, in this light, a fitting mate for the patron god of the farmers.

The etymology of the goddess's name brings out a more complex character. Sif can be traced back to the Old High German Sibba, which appears in modern German as Sippe ("family" or "kin," as in the English "sibling"). In light of this, and in connection with the harvest myth just discussed, it seems that she was originally a more all-encompassing Female Spirit that presided over both agricultural and human fertility.

Thor gives way to Odin as chief god in societies that are based on a relationship of lord and warrior. Odin is the great general and leader, and he is therefore more attractive to these courtly groups. This role for the Allfather is itself a sort of diminution; the god once conceived of as rage and passion personified devolves into the patron of military leaders engaged in merely human struggles. Over changes in time and place, Thor shed his associations with fertility and came to be thought of more and more as a war god, diverging and merging aspects with Odin as time went on.

The Mighty Thor, Part Two

Two points of etymology connect the German tradition to the English and the Scandinavian. First, the weapon of the English Thunor is fundamentally the same as that of the German Donar; the thunder-stone was known in English as the "thunder-bolt"; the image again is that of a physical object thrown from the skies by the god. This close relationship between the English and the German versions is understandable when one remembers that the early English were (largely and generally) Saxons who emigrated from the mainland. Second, the mystic hammer of the Norse god is intimately connected to the thunder-stone of the German one; the word Hamar or Hamarr had two meanings – (1) a stone or rock and (2) the tool made from it. The thrown rocks of the older, more primitive Donar evolve into the dwarf-fashioned magic hammer of the later, (relatively) more sophisticated Thor as the natural rock, once used as a simple blunt instrument, evolves into the carefully-crafted hammer.

Hercules by Jan van Nost (early 18C)

All this being said, it is interesting to note that the Roman Tacitus, in his Germania of 98 AD, reported that the continental Germans made animal sacrifices to Hercules. It is generally accepted that he is referring to Donar, and that the reason he makes the connection with the Roman demigod is because Donar's weapon reminds him of Hercules' club. Saxo Grammaticus, the 13th century chronicler of the Danes, described the tool as a club without a handle - an instrument midway between a thunder-stone and a magic hammer. What exactly did German representations of the 1st century show?

Thor was seen as a force for good, a fighter for Order and Trust. On the mystic, metaphorical level, he fights giants, trolls, and monsters as he protects humanity from otherworldly forces that are beyond their comprehension. These monsters are actually more super-worldly than other-worldly. Giants are always paired with large-scale natural phenomena like impassable mountains, huge boulders, or winter's frost. Thor's archenemy, the World Serpent, is a great undersea creature that hides beneath the surface of the vast, terrifying, and unknowable oceans. Taken together, Thor's adversaries represent the terrifying natural forces that humanity faced in those long-ago times. Thor is a bulwark against these forces of Chaos, and he is posited as the protector of not just the gods, but of humanity, as well.

In one of Thor's Eddic adventures, he struggles to cross a river than threatens to engulf him and Loki (or, in some versions, Thor's human companion Thjalfi), who hangs on to Thor's belt. He declares, "Rise not thou now, Vimur [the river], since I desire to wade thee into the giants' courts. Know thou that if thou risest then will rise the As-strength [god-strength] in me up as high as heaven." Snorri continues, "Then Thor saw up in a certain cleft that Geirrod's daughter Gialp [a giantess] was standing astride the river and she was causing it to rise. Then Thor took up out of the river a great stone and threw it at her and said: 'At its outlet must a river be stemmed.'" Note the remnant of Germanic tradition: Thor throws a stone, in the manner of Donar, rather than his Nordic hammer.

Hilda Ellis Davidson interprets the scene as the giantess "standing astride the river and urinating into it," a powerful enough image, and argues that it emphasizes the link between the giant women and the natural world. Thórsdrápa ("Thor's Hymn"), Snorri's source, calls the river "the water of the women of the giant" – further evidence that the giants (male and female) personify the dangerous forces of nature. Thor's initial bragging challenge is to the river itself, which (naturally) gives no reply. It is only when the river is given a corporeal form that the god is able to act, defending himself and his companion (who may represent the ordinary people under Thor's protection) against a monstrous creature that gives coherent form to inherently incomprehensible natural forces.

Thor and the Serpent by H.L.M. (1901)

As he fights the World Serpent, Thor is the original dragon-slayer, and his character merges into that of both Siegfried and Beowulf, who can be seen as human versions of the Thunder God, his attributes lowered from the godly plane to the mortal one. In the surviving mythological corpus, Thor has several run-ins with the Ur-Dragon, the Über-Dragon, the undersea World Serpent so large that it encircles the entire world, lying on the ocean floor, biting its own tail. Its thrashing causes huge waves on the water's surface. No mention of the creature survives in the lore of the forest-dwelling continental Germans, but the monster that represents the terrifying aspects of the oceans is a recurring character in the poems, tales, and art of the sea-faring Scandinavians. At Ragnarök, the final battle between the gods and the giants (and assorted monsters), Thor will face his nemesis one final time and slay it with his hammer. As he turns to walk away, the snake will spew forth its venom as it dies, engulfing the Thunder God and sealing his doom.

Serpent and Thor at Ragnarök by Emil Doepler (1900)

This mutually-assured destruction is clearly replicated in the death of Beowulf in the Old English epic poem. The aged warrior, knowing that he has come to the end of his days (as the gods know that they have come to their twilight), faces the dragon in its lair. He manages to slay it, but is mortally wounded in the process. Siegfried also embodies the Germanic dragon-slayer, but manages to not only survive, but to benefit from the encounter – for a time, at least. He does not die immediately, but the killing of the dragon sets in motion the events that lead to his demise, reflecting the gloomy Norse outlook seen in tales of Odin and inescapable doom. In the transferring of aspect from god to hero, we see the descent from religious myth to heroic tale.

The Mighty Thor, Part One

In the Eddic version of the mythology, Thor is the son of Odin by Jörd, the Scandinavian version of the Germanic Erde, the Earth herself. The relationship of son to father was not always so. Medieval German chronicler Adam of Bremen's description of the pagan temple of Uppsala (in what is now Sweden) places Thor in the central role; a statue of the mighty Thunderer sits at the center, and Odin and Frey sit at his sides. Thor is clearly the main god of the group, with the other two serving as members of his pantheon.

Thunor by John Michael Rysbraeck (circa 1730)

Different Germanic tribal societies placed different gods in the center of their religious world. Agrarian societies venerated Thor above all others, as the Thunder God brought the rain that kept the crops growing. He was portrayed as an idealized self-image of the hardworking freeman. Rough and ready, honest and hardworking, he embodied the qualities that the Salt of the Earth types saw in themselves.

The old German name for Thor is Donar ("thunder"), related to the Norse Thor and the Anglo-Saxon Thunor. Our modern English "Thursday" derives from the Anglo-Saxon "Thunor's Day," and the modern German noun Donner is, obviously, derived from the original Donar, but refers to the natural phenomenon, not the mythical figure (except in the works of Richard Wagner, in which the Thunder God appears as "Donner").

Thor with crown of stars (19th century)

The surviving records of the continental form of the Thunderer are quite different from the later Scandinavian version. He wears a golden crown that is alive with sparking electricity – a clear sign that he was once the primary tribal sky god with, perhaps, a crown of stars to signify his dominion over the heavens. The Eddas describe Thor as driving a mystic chariot drawn by two supernatural mountain goats, but they lack a characteristically German detail that explains the sound of the thunder-crash. According to Helene Adeline Guerber, "in Southern Germany the people, fancying a brazen chariot alone inadequate to furnish all the noise they heard, declared it was loaded with copper kettles, which rattled and clashed, and therefore often called him, with disrespectful familiarity, the kettle-vendor." This familiarity may have not been disrespectful, but a sign of the fondness with which the common folk held the Thunder God. What makes the sound of thunder? A chariot full of kettles. Why would Thor fill his chariot with a bunch of kettles? To make the sound of thunder. This is a clearly a closed circle of perfect logic.

Thor and goats by Haukur Halldórsson (Straumur, Iceland)

Notably absent from the German version of the god is his mystic hammer, Mjölnir ("mauler" or "crusher") which, in the Nordic tales, represents the lightning as he throws it and it returns magically to his hand, just as the natural lightning appears to strike the earth and then fly back to the skies. In modern terminology, these two parts of the lightning flash are the leader (sky to ground) and return stroke (ground to sky); the myth anticipates the science.

Instead of the hammer, the German Donar throws stones from the sky. These flinty wedges crash to earth, accompanied by the flash of lightning, and bury themselves in the ground "as deep as the highest church-tower is high" or "as far as a hare can run in a hundred years" (obviously there is some variation in these measurements). This burying of the god's weapon can be seen reflected in Thrymskvida ("Thrym's Poem"), when the eponymous giant steals the mystic hammer and declares,

I have hidden Thor's hammer
eight leagues under the earth;
no man will ever take it back again,
unless I am brought Freya as my wife.

The hammer is buried through the agency of an enemy and held for ransom, but the concept of the weapon buried deep in the ground is the same.

Thunder-stone found in Viking grave (600-1000 CE)

According to the folk-tradition research of Jacob Grimm, "every time it thunders again, [the thunder-stone] begins to rise nearer to the surface, and after seven years you may find it above ground. Any house in which it is preserved, is proof against damage by lightning; when a thunder-storm is coming on, it begins to sweat." These Donnersteine ("thunder-stones") that magically rise from the ground over a long period may, in fact, be stones left behind by the retreating glaciers of previous ice ages. The stones are gradually exposed as the soil covering them erodes, and they appear to rise to the surface. They are also a great nuisance to farmers in northern climates, who must clear them from any field they hope to till. The fact that thunder-stones "sweat" when a storm approaches can be attributed to the rise in humidity that precedes the rainstorm; this same phenomenon is at work in the so-called "Thor's Weather Stick," which reacts to humidity to predict the coming of stormy weather.

Odin and the Runes, Part Five

The best-known of Odin’s mystic discussions with the deceased occurs in the Eddic poem Völuspá. He raises a dead prophetess to gain knowledge of the world as it was, is, and will be. Her answers range from an explication of the world's beginning to a prophecy of the end of the gods. At the conclusion of her wisdom performance, she says, “now she must sink down” as she returns to her grave.

Odin and the Prophetess by Emil Doepler (1900)

In another Eddic poem, Baldrs draumar (“Balder’s Dreams”), Odin rides down into the world of the dead, again raising a deceased prophetess in his effort to gain knowledge of the end-times. It is from this poem that the name Vegtam originates; Odin is “way-tame” – accustomed to travelling the roads, the Wanderer of Wagner’s Ring and Gandalf the Grey of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. According to the Edda of Snorri, Odin also sends his son (or possibly his servant) Hermód on a journey into Hel, the land of the dead, loaning him his mystical eight-legged horse Sleipnir so that he can travel there to seek the release of Baldur, the murdered god of light.

Odin is also known as Gizurr (“riddler”), since he not only questions the dead, but also engages in wisdom contests with giants and the god Thor, who himself has a battle of wits with a dwarf. In the Eddic poem Vafþrúðnismál (“Vafthrudnir’s Sayings”), the eponymous giant tells Odin,

Wise you are, guest, come to the giant’s bench,
and we will speak together in the seat;
we shall wager our heads in the hall, guest, on our wisdom.

The giant loses the contest when he is unable to answer Odin’s final question.

In Harbardsljód (“The Song of Grey-Beard”), Odin matches wits with Thor in a flyting – a verbal battle that occurs often in the Germanic literature of this period. Their pairing is analogous to that of the World’s Finest in DC Comics, the pairing of Batman and Superman. One is brilliant and devious, the other is really just kind of strong. This poem is clearly written from the perspective of a poet in service to a societal group of lords and warriors dedicated to Odin, as opposed to the farmer class that usually elevated Thor to the central position.

Odin's "ecstatic wisdom peformance" by Emil Doepler (1900)

In addition to these verbal contests, Odin expresses himself as Fjölnir (“Much-wise”) and engages in “ecstatic wisdom performances.” Most notable of these occurs in Grímnismál, in which the god, disguised in human form, is bound and set on fire by his backstabbing host. As the flames climb higher, he gives a recital of Norse cosmogony and cosmology very similar to that given by the prophetess of Völuspá. Again, this can be seen as a mythic representation of human ritual practice, in which the poet, bard, or skald of the Nordic world recites the religious knowledge of the tribe. In light of Odin’s association with the lordly caste, it is notable that Odin is passing on his wisdom to a young protégé who goes on to become a king.

Two paired names for Wotan, Haptaguð and Haptsœnir (“Fetter-god” and “Fetter-loosener”) seem at first contradictory, but actually together form an important aspect of the Norse conception of the god. In Hávamál, Odin describes more of his runic abilities:

I know a third one which is very useful to me,
which fetters my enemy;
the edges of my foes I can blunt,
neither weapon nor club will bite for them.

I know a fourth one if men put
chains upon my limbs;
I can chant so that I can walk away,
fetters spring from my feet,
and bonds from my hands.

Odin is able to “bind” the minds of his enemies. This is a metaphorical construct for the war-terror that grips soldiers on the field of battle, the same paralyzing fear that was described by boxers who faced Mike Tyson in the ring. As the god of war, Wotan can bind the minds of his enemies so that they are incapable of fighting.

As the god of poetic inspiration (more on this later), he can “unbind” the minds of poets so that they can create freely. Through his gift of mead and other alcoholic beverages, he can also unbind the mind so that one is unencumbered by the fetters of conscious thought. These two senses of fetter – positive and negative – are united in the god, and are reflected in Tacitus’s description of the religious practices of the Germanic Semnones, a subset of the Suebi tribe. They would ritualistically bind themselves with cords before entering a sacred grove for their rites – a practice that brings together imagery of both Wotan’s binding powers and his relationship to the World Tree. In this context, it is noteworthy that Adam of Bremen's description of the pagan temple at Uppsala states that "a golden chain encircles that temple and hangs over the gables of the building." Given the Odinnic sacrifices that occurred at the temple, it is possible that this chain was symbolic of the god's binding powers.

Hammars Stone in Sweden (8th century)

In several ancient carvings from England, Norway, and Sweden, representations of Odin are paired with the symbol now known as the Valknut (“knot of the slain”). This pictogram of three interlocking triangles has been interepreted by Hilda Ellis Davidson as a symbolic representation of the binding power of Odin. It may also be a "cousin" to the so-called Celtic knot. Today, the Swedish pulp and paper manufacturer Svenska Cellulosa Aktiebolaget uses the symbol as its logo, the three interlocking triangles pointing up over the letters SCA.

Odin captures the Mead of Poetry by Emil Doepler (1900)

As Fimbulþulr (“mighty poet”), Odin is the source of poetic inspiration and creative frenzy. Note that he is not the god of poetry; that distinction goes to Bragi, whose name literally means “poetry,” and who may or may not have been an actual poet of the 9th century who was later elevated to godly status. Odin, instead, is the prime mover of the poetic impulse. Several Eddic sources refer to the tale of how he captured the Mead of Poetry and shared it with human poets; the mead is a metaphor for the inspiration that "possesses" creative artists. As with the “ecstatic wisdom performances” mentioned earlier, not just poetry, but religious frenzy can be seen as emanating from the god – a sort of Nordic speaking in tongues.

Odin is also known as Skollvaldr (“treachery ruler”). He is undependable; he’s on your side until he’s not. This is understandable when we view him as many of his followers did – as a god of war. The unpredictability of the god reflects the uncertainty of life in a violent age. He protects those whom he destines to succeed in battle, and they survive war and strife. Then, one day, and for no apparent reason, he switches sides and his hero falls. Where a modern Christian may ask, “Why does God do bad things to good people?” an ancient pagan may have merely shrugged and said, “We can’t predict or understand what the powers do.” I say “powers” because that is how they were conceived. A truer translation from the Old Norse “Ragnarök” than “Twilight of the Gods” is “Doom of the Powers.” Snorri seems to have confused Ragnarök (“the doom of the powers”) with Ragnarøkkr (“the twilight of the gods”). What a difference a letter makes.

Odin and the Runes, Part Four

There are also strong arguments against the mystic interpretation of the runes as magical symbols. I have been advised by an Icelandic colleague that something has been garbled in translation.

The original, Old Norse phrase from Odin's self-hanging episode that is usually translated as "I took up the runes" reads, "upp nam ek rúnar." The word nám can mean either "to learn" or "to pick something up." The Icelandic words nám ("studying") and nemandi ("student") are both related to the word nema ("to learn"). The word rún means "secret," and the meaning of the Icelandic personal names Rún and Rúnar are "friend you tell your secrets to." During the time period the poem's composition is ascribed to, the words for alphabetical symbols were letur ("letter") and stafur ("stave"). Only in later ages did the word rún come to be used for the old symbol system of Germanic letters. This all points to a translation of the Old Norse as "I learned the secrets" – mystical secrets, to be sure, but to be understood as spells or incantations, not as runic letters.

The importance of runic characters as a secular alphabet is also evidenced by modern linguistic echoes of their use. Runic letters were, generally speaking, engraved into stone or cut into wood. Beech-wood was most often used for inscribing runic messages, due to its softness and ease of cutting. The modern German word for beech-tree (Buche) gives us the word for book (Buch) and letter (Buchstaben – literally, a beech-stick). These wooden and stone inscriptions, throughout the Germanic world, were used for a wide variety of communicative purposes – to send messages of war and love, to record laws, to memorialize the deceased, to announce property ownership. In other words, they were an alphabet that was used for anything that needed to be written down, and not just for magic spells.

In trying to decide whether runes were used for magical use or for practical use, we have poetry and etymology at war with each other. The more one dives into the existing scholarship on the subject, the clearer it becomes that the background discipline of the scholar tends to determine which side of the argument they take.

Mimir and Odin by Willy Pogany (1920)

In any case, the self-hanging episode gives rise to another name for Odin: Hangatyr ("god of the hanged"). This name underscores two aspects of the god - as the wise one who is ready to sacrifice all for knowledge, and as a god who has a special relationship with the hanged. Aside from the self-sacrifice that gained him esoteric rune lore, the best-known instance of Odin sacrificing for knowledge is his giving up of one of his eyes to the enigmatic figure Mimir ("wisdom") for a drink from his well, which is a symbolic draught of knowledge itself.

As for Odin's special relationship to the hanged, this can be traced back to two major historical sources. In the 11th century, the German chronicler Adam of Bremen described the pagan temple at Uppsala, located in what is now modern-day Sweden. He writes of a rite that occurred every nine years – nine being a sacred number in the Norse conception, as there are nine worlds in their mythological construct. Nine members of every species of animal were sacrificed, including human victims. They were hung on trees in a sacred grove: "Now this grove is so sacred in the eyes of the heathen that each and every tree in it is believed divine because of the death or putrefaction of the victims."

This ritual practice of human sacrifice on earthly trees seems to reflect the mythological tale of Odin and his self-sacrifice on the World Tree. In 98 AD, the Roman Tacitus wrote of the continental Germans, "Above all other gods they worship Mercury [his Roman interpretation of Wodan], and count it no sin, on certain feast-days, to include human sacrifices in the victims offered to him." Clearly, the Swedish sacrifice reported by Adam of Bremen had roots in older Germanic ritual.

In 921 AD, the Arab travel writer Ibn Fadlan described a Viking funeral ritual that he witnessed on the banks of the Volga. Among the grisly rites that accompanied the cremation, a young slave girl was killed and burned with the deceased warrior chief so that she could join and serve him in the next world. Fadlan writes, "Two held her hands and two her feet, and the Angel of Death wound a noose around her neck ending in a knot at both ends which she placed in the hands of two men, for them to pull. She then advanced with a broad-bladed dagger which she plunged repeatedly between the ribs of the girl while the men strangled her until she was dead." This repulsive act could not better illustrate the ritual origins of the Odin hanging myth; the victim is both strangled and stabbed, just as the god hung and stabbed himself. Unaware of the mythology and the role of Odin as the ruler over Valhalla ("hall of the slain"), the Arab writer found no meaning in the bloody act. That he described the woman running the ritual as the "Angel of Death" is evidence for the existence of the female ritual leaders known as "choosers of the slain" – the valkyries in their original, pre-mythologized form.

Haraldskær Woman

Two ancient bodies have been discovered preserved in the bogs of Denmark that both testify to this method of sacrifice to Odin. The so-called Tollund Man and Haraldskær Woman both show proof of death by hanging, and they are generally accepted as human sacrifices. Most tellingly, the female body shows evidence of both hanging and a puncture wound. The dating of the man to the 4th century BC and the woman to the 5th century BC provides physical evidence of the ancient origins of the Norse religion. In 98 AD, Tacitus writes, "Traitors and deserters are hanged on trees; cowards, shirkers and sodomites are pressed down under a wicker hurdle into the slimy mud of a bog." This brief passage ties together the use of hanging and the bog in sacrificial rites.

In Hávamál, one of the runes that Odin knows enables him to speak with the hanged dead. He says,

I know a twelfth one if I see, up in a tree,
a dangling corpse in a noose:
I can so carve and colour the runes
that the man walks
and talks with me.

Clearly, the hanged dead have a special relationship with Odin. Known as Dragudróttin ("lord of the dead"), Odin's dealing with the departed goes beyond merely those who have died by hanging. In his endless quest for knowledge of the future, he several times quizzes the dead for information.