Northmen, The Viking Saga 793-1241 AD

Introduction

ASGARD

THE VIKING WORLD VIEW

Life for most Viking Age Scandinavians involved hard work on the land, constant insecurity and an early death in their thirties or forties. For those Scandinavians who chose to become Vikings in the literal sense of the word, that is a pirate or a plunderer, or who set out on voyages of trade or colonisation, life could be shorter still. All faced the very real prospect of drowning at sea as their fragile ships foundered in a storm or were smashed to matchwood against a rocky shore. Merchants always ran the risk of being attacked by pirates and for every Viking warrior who went home with a sack of silver or won a farm for himself on newly conquered land, there must have been at least another who was hacked to pieces on a battlefield or died of disease in an unsanitary winter camp. Vikings clearly were willing to take incredible risks in the quest to acquire land, treasure and fame. This daring and enterprising society was underpinned by a world view which actively discouraged the avoidance of risk. The world the pagan Norse inhabited did not exist to fulfil any purpose and, if it was true that the gods had created humans, they did so only for their own benefit, so that there would be someone to sacrifice to them. If men’s lives were to have any meaning in this world, they had to provide it for themselves by achieving something for which they would be remembered.

The Norse believed that the centre of the universe was a vast evergreen ash tree called Yggdrasil whose branches overspread the heavens and linked together the separate worlds of the gods, frost giants, fire giants, elves, dwarfs, humans and the underworld. No myth tells of the origins of Yggdrasil or of its ultimate fate, its existence is taken for granted and it was perhaps thought to be eternal. Despite this, Yggdrasil does not feature at all in the Norse creation myth, in which the cosmos is born from the interaction of mutually hostile forces. At the beginning of time there were just two worlds, fiery Muspel in the south and freezing Niflheim in the north. Between the two worlds was the yawning void of Ginnungagap. Where the heat of Muspel met the ice of Niflheim, the ice began to melt and drip. The heat caused life to quicken in the drops and they took the form of a giant who was given the name Ymir. While Ymir slept, a male and a female giant formed from the sweat under his left armpit, and one of his legs fathered a son on his other leg. In this way Ymir became the ancestor of the race of frost giants. As the ice continued to melt a cow emerged. This cow was called Audhumla. Audhumla was nourished by licking the salty ice, and the four rivers of milk that flowed from her teats fed Ymir.

Audhumla’s licking revealed another giant, whose name was Búri. Big, strong and beautiful, Búri fathered a son called Bor – no mother is mentioned but she was presumably a frost giant as they were the only other beings around at the time apart from Audhumla. Bor took Bestla, the daughter of the frost giant Bölthorn, as his wife and together they had three sons, Odin, Vili and Vé, the first of the gods. Odin and his brothers killed Ymir and used his dead body to make the land, his blood to make the ocean. Then the gods took Ymir’s skull and set it up over the earth to make the sky. The gods caught some of the sparks and molten embers that were blowing out of Muspel and they set them in the sky to light the heavens and the Earth. The gods set the dark giantess Nótt (‘night’) and her bright and beautiful son Dag (‘day’) in the sky to follow each other around the world once every twenty-four hours. The gods took the beautiful brother and sister, Máni (‘moon’) and Sól (‘sun’), and set them in the sky also. By their movements, the days, months and years, could be counted.

The gods made the world a great circle. The part around the edges the gods gave to the giants as a home. This was Jotunheim, where the giants plotted vengeance for the slaying of Ymir. In the middle, surrounded by the ocean, the gods used Ymir’s eyelashes to build a fortress against the hostile giants. This they called Midgard, or ‘Middle Earth’. Finally, the gods took Ymir’s brains and cast them into the sky to make the clouds. With this, the gods completed their recycling of Ymir. Odin, Vili and Vé walked along the newly created seashore and found two logs. From these the gods created the first two humans, naming the man Ask (‘ash’) and the woman Embla (‘elm’), and from them all of the human race was descended. The gods gave Ask and Embla Midgard to live in. After they had created humans, the gods created their own realm of Asgard, a celestial city high above Midgard, and built the fiery rainbow bridge Bifröst to link the two realms so that they could pass to and fro between them. As to how long before their own day the Vikings believed these events to have taken place, the myths give no clue. Like most pre-literate peoples, the Vikings lacked formal dating methods and any events that had happened before the time of living memory probably existed in something akin to the Aboriginal Dreamtime.

Within Asgard’s walls are dozens of magnificent halls and temples where the gods feast and meet in council. From the throne in his silver-roofed hall Válaskjálf, Odin watches over the whole of creation, sending his ravens Hugin and Mumin out every dawn to gather news from the world. Like any Viking chieftain, Odin has his own retinue of household warriors, einherjar, who are chosen exclusively from the ranks of the bravest warriors who fell in battle. The einherjar dwell in Valhalla (‘the hall of the slain’), a vast hall with 540 doors each of which is so wide that 800 warriors can march through them abreast. Valhalla shines with gold, has spears for rafters and a roof made of shields and mail coats. Every morning, the einherjar march out of Valhalla to spend the day fighting. In the evening the fallen are miraculously healed and all return to Valhalla to spend the night feasting on pork and drinking mead. The einherjar are waited on by the valkyries (‘choosers of the slain’), beautiful supernatural females who wear armour and carry a shield and spear. At Odin’s command, valkyries ride swiftly through the air, descending on battlefields to decide the victors and choose the warriors who are to fall and conduct the bravest of them to Valhalla. There they will be welcomed with cups of mead and tumultuous table-thumping from the einherjar. Viking warriors knew that they had to earn their lord’s hospitality on the battlefield. For the einherjar the price of Odin’s hospitality was to fight for him at Ragnarök, a great battle which he knows is fated to happen at the end of time in which the gods and their implacable enemies, the giants, will annihilate one another with fire and flood and destroy the universe itself before a new cycle of creation begins.

In the myths they told about their gods, the Norse never held them up as examples of morality worth emulating. The Norse gods were above human morality, they happily cheated and lied if it suited them, especially in their dealings with the giants. Nor did the Norse claim divine authority for their law codes, maintaining an orderly society was a human responsibility and one they took seriously despite the mayhem they created abroad. Of the gods only Odin was seen as a source of wisdom. Odin gave humans the knowledge of runes, the gift of poetry, the battle fury of the berserker, and the dangerous magic called seiðr, which gave the gift of prophecy and other more sinister powers. Odin’s wisdom is embodied in Hávamál (‘The Sayings of the High One’), a collection of anonymous Viking Age gnomic verses supposed to have been composed by Odin and preserved in a single thirteenth century Icelandic manuscript. Hávamál is not concerned with metaphysical questions, only with the kind of pragmatic common-sense wisdom valued by practical people. Cultivate friendships, never take hospitality for granted and repay gifts with gifts. Do not make enemies unnecessarily or pick foolish fights. On campaign, keep your weapons close to hand. Do not drink too much mead or ale, it robs a man of his wits. If you do not know what you are talking about, keep quiet: it is better to listen. Exercise caution in business and always beware of treachery and double dealing. Always deal honestly yourself except with your enemies: deceive them if you can. The advice is sometimes contradictory: Hávamál berates the coward who thinks he will live forever if he avoids fighting while also declaring that it is better to be a live dog than a dead lion.

Like all pre-industrial farming peoples the Norse were desperately vulnerable to the vagaries of nature and they looked to their gods for help in their struggle to survive. The gods always needed to be propitiated and could only be won over with prayers and offerings. Central to worship were the sacrificial feasts, called a blót (‘blood-offering’), which were held in autumn, midwinter and spring. Norse paganism had no priesthood, so these sacrifices were presided over by the local king or chieftain. Pigs and horses were the animals most often sacrificed. The blood of the slaughtered victims, which was splashed on the idols of the gods, on the walls of temples and on the par​ticipants themselves, was believed to strengthen both gods and humans. Afterwards, the meat was boiled in great cauldrons and eaten at a sacred feast at which the gods were believed to be present. Prayers and toasts were offered for fertility, good health and prosperity. Human sacrifice, usually by hanging, was also sometimes practiced, particularly in honour of Odin, who had sacrificed himself by hanging from Yggdrasil for nine days to discover the secret of the runes. Cold and calculating, Odin was favoured by kings, warriors and poets, but he was feared rather than loved. The most popular god was probably Odin’s son, the mighty thunder god Thor. Thor was rather short-tempered and none too bright – most of the stories told about him humorously illustrate the limitations of brute strength – but he was unambiguously well-intentioned towards humans. Thor protected humans against the giants, who stood for chaos, smashing their brains out with his magic hammer, Mjöllnir. Farmers and seafarers prayed to him for good weather. Miniature Thor's hammers were worn as protective amulets by travellers, rather like Christian St Christopher medallions. The fertility god Freyr controlled the sun, rain and the fertility of the soil and was prayed to and sacrificed to by those seeking peace and a good harvest. Of the goddesses, Freyr’s sister Frejya, who was associated with sex and love, and Odin’s wife Frigg, invoked by women in childbirth, were probably the ones most actively worshipped. Sacrifices were also offered to the dísir, a group of nameless supernatural females who were associated with fertility and death. Dísir could assist at childbirth and each human family had its own protective dís. If angered, however, the dísir were dangerous so they were appeased by an annual feast and sacrifice known as dísablót, which took place at the beginning of winter in Norway and Denmark and in late winter in Sweden. Elves could make a nuisance of themselves in various ways and they were sometimes also appeased with blood sacrifices.

The promise of Valhalla did not, as might be supposed, make most Viking warriors reckless in battle. Although it may have been a comfort to a warrior facing death in battle, what he really wanted to do was live and enjoy the fruits of victory. Only for the berserkers, fanatical devotees of Odin, was death in battle actually desirable. Before going into battle, berserkers worked themselves into a trancelike rage (berserksgangr, ‘going berserk’), howling and biting their shields, which left them immune to the pain of wounds. They wore no armour and their complete disregard for their own safety made them terrifying opponents, but most inevitably found the violent death they craved. Aside from the concept of Valhalla, Norse beliefs about the afterlife were vague and mostly rather gloomy. The common practice of burying grave goods, sacrificed animals and even slaves with the deceased suggests that the Norse believed that the afterlife would resemble this life, complete with its distinctions of social status, and that the dead somehow lingered on as ghostly presences in their graves. Alongside this there was a belief that those who died of illness and old age, that is almost everyone, would go to the freezing-fog realm of Niflheim, where they would spend a cheerless afterlife sharing the meagre fare offered by the decaying goddess Hel. The souls of un-wed girls were claimed by Freyja, who took them to dwell in her own realm of Fólkvangr: Odin allowed her to take a share of his warriors to keep them company. Death by drowning was an obvious risk for a Viking warrior. The souls of the drowned were netted by Rán, who took them to dwell in Hlésey, the hall of her husband the sea god Aegir. Happily for those destined to spend their afterlives with him, he was the best brewer among the gods. Perhaps as a result of Christian influence during the Viking Age, Norse paganism developed a concept of reward and punishment in the afterlife, although this was a judgment of the dead without a judge. The souls of the righteous would dwell in the golden-roofed hall of Gimlé in Asgard. Or perhaps they would go instead to another hospitable hall, Sindri in the underworld’s Niðafjöll Mountains. Oath-breakers and murderers had the miserable time they deserved in Nástrandir, a frightful hall in Niflheim made of woven serpents dripping with venom. The most wicked souls were cast into the underworld well of Hvergelmir, to be fed on by the serpent Niðhöggr, the corpse-tearer. For most people these various afterlives offered nothing to come that was better than what they had in the here and now – even the most favoured warriors faced ultimate annihilation in a battle they could not win – so it was best to live for the present day.

Knowing that nothing was ever forever, not even the gods or the afterlife, gave the Viking Age Norse a fatalistic outlook and an indifference to death. The Viking warrior was expected to face death with a shrug of the shoulders and some black humour to show that he had kept his presence of mind and not given in to fear. Life was not so much to lose and if it was his fate to die, there was nothing he could do about it anyway.

The pagan Norse believed that female deities called Norns were present at the birth of every child to shape its life. Their fate-making was likened to spinning a thread or making a mark on wood and once a person’s fate had been decided it was unalterable. The Norns were the highest power in the universe and not even the gods could challenge their verdict. In some cultures such beliefs might have encouraged apathy. However, with the Norse they encouraged the spirit of risk-taking and enterprise without which the Viking Age would never have happened. For good or ill, the Norns determined a man’s fate but they did not determine how he faced it. He could play safe and keep as far away from danger as he could but this would not save his life: he would die at his appointed time whether he was snug in bed or in the thick of battle. The man who recognised and accepted this knew he had little to lose by taking risks. Death came to everyone and all that would survive of a man was his reputation, which, therefore, was far more important than his life. When a Viking warrior fought to the death alongside his lord and comrades, he did so not because he hoped to go to Valhalla but to protect his reputation from being dishonoured by the taint of cowardice. A man without honour was a niðingr, literally nothing, who would deservedly be forgotten even by his own family. The man who risked nothing achieved less than nothing. Better by far to be bold and adventurous and strive to win fame, wealth and glory by daring voyages and heroic deeds in battle. Such a man could die secure in the knowledge that the skalds (‘court poets’) would sing his praises in the feasting halls for generations to come: this was the only sure afterlife a man could hope for.