Tales of Valhalla Read online

  Tales

  of

  Valhalla

  NORSE MYTHS & LEGENDS

  MARTYN WHITTOCK AND HANNAH WHITTOCK

  PEGASUS BOOKS

  NEW YORK

  To Neal, Elizabeth, Lesley and Debbie.

  Remembering our fun times in Brussels. HEW

  Contents

  Introduction

  1Who were the ‘Norse’?

  2The impact of Christianity on Norse mythology

  Part One: Norse Myths

  3The origins of the world

  4The order of things

  5Loki the trickster and his children

  6The goddesses of the Asyniur, the valkyries and the wife of Freyr

  7The cunning of Loki and the adventures of Thor

  8The killing of Baldr and the punishing of Loki

  9The kidnapping of Idunn and the origins of poetry

  10Adventures in Giantland

  11Stories of gold and of gods

  12The sayings of Odin

  13The rivalry of Odin and Frigg over the sons of King Hraudung

  14The conflict at the ferry place

  15Thor and Tyr fetch a giant cauldron from Giantland, and Loki insults the gods and goddesses in the hall of Aegir

  16Thor dresses as a woman in order to retrieve his hammer from the giants

  17The ‘history’ of gods and people, The Seeress’ Prophecy

  18Ragnarok and the end of the world

  Part Two: Norse Legends

  19The Saga of the Volsungs and the story of Sigurd, the dragon-slayer

  20Legendary rulers of men

  21Ynglinga Saga and the ‘history’ of gods and kings

  22The magic sword called Tyrfing

  23The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki

  24Journeys to Vinland

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Index

  Introduction

  THE NORSE MYTHS have gained widespread attention in the English-speaking world. This is largely due to a great interest in the myths and legends that lie behind the world of the Vikings (the Norse) and also through a Scandinavian diaspora (especially in the United States), which has communicated these myths to the wider world.

  That there is such a widespread interest is demonstrated by the appearance of Norse mythological themes in popular culture. Films such as Thor (2011), Thor: The Dark World (2013) and the Avengers films featuring Thor (the latest being Avengers: Age of Ultron, 2015) demonstrate the enduring interest in reworkings of – and spin-offs from – Norse mythology. These particular films are adapted from the Marvel Comics superhero, whose creators (Stan Lee and Jack Kirby) based their character of Thor on the Norse mythology of the thunder god. Furthermore, the ‘Middle Earth’ of Tolkien (as seen in both The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit) is heavily indebted to Norse/Germanic mythology.

  This is nothing new, since these stories have been ‘quarried’ and adapted across time and culture. From medieval Icelanders celebrating their Viking roots as they recorded these myths, to William Morris’s poem, Sigurd the Volsung. From Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung), to J. K. Rowling’s werewolf, Fenrir Greyback. From the twentieth-century manipulation of Norse mythology by the Nazis and their allies, to modern commercial and cultural references to Norse myths in order to promote sports teams, beer, restaurants and much else. Clearly, Norse mythology continues to influence a range of aspects of modern culture.

  The question is: what are the ancient stories that lie behind these later recreations and reinterpretations? This books aims to both provide a retelling of these dramatic stories and also set them in context so that their place within the ‘Viking worldview’ can be understood. These are not new translations of the myths and legends. This is because there already exists a number of academic translations from the Old Norse language; and also because the accounts – even when expertly translated – can still be difficult to follow. Instead, these are freely worded retellings that are based on the original accounts but which present them in an accessible way as stories that can simply be read as such. They have been chipped out of the matrix of (mostly Icelandic) medieval accounts, in much the same way that a fossil-hunter disentangles one dinosaur fossil from the bones held within a mass of rock. As a result, the single stories and accounts can then be explored by a modern reader.

  The stories in question are Norse myths (stories, usually religious, that explain origins, why things are as they are, the nature of the spiritual) and, to a lesser extent, legends (stories that attempt to explain historical events and that may involve historical characters, but are told in a non-historical way and often include supernatural aspects). Between them they take us into the mental world of the early medieval Viking Age.

  With regard to language, Old Norse used letters that are no longer used in Modern English. In almost all cases we have translated these letters into modern English ones. So, to give an obvious example, we have anglicised Óðinn to the more familiar form of Odin. However, very occasionally, they will appear when referring to a source, personal name or place name that employs these, along with modern Scandinavian letters not used in English when they appear in modern place names, etc. The one exception is Æsir (one of the two families of Norse gods), where we have used this form due to its frequent use in many modern sources, rather than the anglicised form of Aesir.

  With regard to written sources, we have referred to them in an anglicised form, so Grimnir’s Sayings rather than Grímnismál. Where a word, phrase or source is given in Old Norse it is always accompanied by a translation such as: Heimskringla (Circle of the World) or the personal name Bodvar Bjarki (bjarki means ‘little bear’). Occasionally a medieval manuscript’s name is given without translation (such as the Codex Regius) because this is the usual convention.

  In 2013 and 2014, co-author Martyn Whittock visited Iceland, Denmark, Norway and Sweden as part of the research for this book (including exploring the manuscript evidence in the Culture House exhibition in Reykjavik). Hannah Whittock (with a First and an MPhil. from Cambridge in Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic studies) has brought a detailed knowledge of the Old Norse texts and their themes to the project, along with skills in reading Old Norse (the language of the original accounts).

  We are much indebted to the scholars, whose expert translations have assisted us in our own freely worded retellings of these myths and legends, and a selection of these are listed in a Select Bibliography at the end of this book. Readers who wish to study these myths in the context of the literature within which they were first recorded can access them in these translations.

  Any errors, of course, are our own.

  Martyn and Hannah Whittock

  1

  Who were the ‘Norse’?

  BEFORE WE EXPLORE a selection of Norse myths and legends, it is helpful to understand something about what is covered by the term ‘Norse’. Where and when did they live and what was the geographical spread of their influence?

  The term ‘Norse’ is used to describe the various peoples of Scandinavia who spoke the Old Norse language between the eighth and thirteenth centuries AD. While it had eastern and western dialects it would have been generally mutually understood across the range of areas within which it was spoken. A third recognisable form was spoken on the island of Gotland.

  The Old Norse language later developed into modern Danish, Faroese, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish. In addition, there once existed the so-called Norn languages of Orkney and Shetland that are now extinct. It was, essentially, the language of the Vikings. Consequently, this book is basically about the myths and legends of the Vikings.

  The Vikings and the extent of their settlement

>   The term ‘Viking’ is itself a controversial one. At the time, it described more of what one did (raiding, pirating, adventuring) than what one was.1 The later Old Icelandic verb used to describe ‘moving, turning aside’ was víkja and this word in Old Norse may have developed the sense of ‘seafarers far from home’. Old Norse Scandinavian written sources describe a pirate raider as a víkingr and a raiding expedition as a víking.2 It did not originally have an ethnic meaning but it has come to have that in modern usage. Consequently, today we use the term ‘Viking’ to describe Scandinavians of the so-called ‘Viking Age’. It is in that sense that we will use it in this book.

  The Viking Age lasted from the late eighth century until about 1100. It was in this period of time that people from Scandinavia first raided and then settled in a wide arc of territory that stretched from Russia in the east to Greenland and the coast of North America in the west. They raided both sides of the English Channel and settled in Normandy, eastern and northern England and the northern and western isles of Scotland, and established a Viking kingdom in Dublin. It was these peoples who colonised Iceland, the Faroes and parts of Greenland. More distant raids even reached Spain and into the Mediterranean.

  From the tenth century onwards, we see the emergence of kingdoms in Denmark, Norway and finally Sweden but nation-building took time and borders were fluid and changeable for many generations. For this reason, when we use the terms ‘Denmark’, ‘Norway’ and ‘Sweden’ it is to describe loose early political units, not the distinct nation states with which we are now familiar.

  With regard to North America, the sagas refer to exploration of a region called ‘Vinland’; although there is some debate about whether the references to ‘vínber’ (‘wine berries’) indicate wild grapes or other plants. The name ‘Vinland’ is first recorded in the writings of the German medieval chronicler named Adam of Bremen, in his Description of the Northern Islands (written c.1075), in the German form ‘Winland ’. He implied that it referred to ‘wine’, hence ‘grapes’. This name then appears in the thirteenth-century account in The Saga of the Greenlanders. Its use there suggests that what was in mind was vínber, a term used variously for grapes, currants and, perhaps, bilberries. In addition, it has been suggested that the term ‘vínviður’ (‘grapevines’) mentioned in The Saga of the Greenlanders should actually have been ‘viður’ (‘wood’), in which case ‘vínber’ need not have referred to grapes but, rather, to berries growing on trees.3 This leaves the matter open of whether the thirteenth-century Norse accounts refer to ‘wild grapes’ (the wine-making plants of Adam of Bremen’s earlier account) or some other wild berry that could be fermented in order to make wine. This is important because it may help explain exactly how far south along the eastern seaboard of North America the eleventh-century explorers reached. Clearly, they did not find wild grapes growing at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, which currently is the only archaeologically attested Norse site on the North American continent.4 This is why it is certain that L’Anse aux Meadows was not Vinland. However, that site did contain clues pointing to more southerly explorations carried out by the Norse settlers who built the houses discovered there. These clues were in the form of butternuts (or white walnuts) found at the site. Since these are native to the eastern United States and south-east Canada, it suggests that Vinland may have been as far south as the St Lawrence River and parts of New Brunswick, since this is the northern limit for both butternuts and wild grapes.

  There is one other possible literary reference to Vinland in the form of a line on the Hønen Runestone from Norderhov, Norway (sadly now lost). The line in question reads in a runic inscription in Old Norse: ‘Vínlandi á ísa’ (‘from Vinland over ice’). However, it may be better interpreted as representing: ‘vindkalda á ísa’ (‘over the wind-cold ice’).5 Either way, it does not give us a geographical fix on the actual location of the Vinland mentioned in the thirteenth-century sagas.

  What seems clear, though, is that other evidence for Norse activity in North America is either a hoax or based on material (i.e. coins) that reached North America long after the Viking Age and tells us nothing about the places visited by real Norse explorers centuries earlier. It seems that, later, some settlers of Scandinavian origin (for example, in Minnesota) were so keen to publicise their Scandinavian roots – and celebrate earlier medieval connections to their new home – that some of them fabricated ‘evidence’ in order to proclaim it. The Kensington Runestone, from Minnesota, is in this category. However, we may surmise that in the future further, legitimate archaeological evidence for Norse settlement on the eastern seaboard will be revealed and this will add to the persuasive evidence already amassed from L’Anse aux Meadows.

  The evidence for Norse mythology: literature

  Most of what we know about Norse myths comes from two later medieval sources: the thirteenth-century Prose Edda and the Poetic Edda.6 The term ‘Edda’ may be derived either from the Old Norse word óðr (poetry) or the name of a character found in one of the poems in the Poetic Edda or from the Latin edo (I compose). Its use in the titles of these two collections is due to terminology employed by later scholars. These two sources tell us most of what we now know about Norse mythology. The clues found in skaldic poetry, sagas and place names will also be assessed and compared with the evidence in the Eddas. For Norse legends, we depend on sagas, again mostly from thirteenth-century Iceland.

  The Prose Edda (also known as Snorra Edda or the Younger Edda) is widely believed to have been written by Snorri Sturluson, an Icelandic chieftain, in the early thirteenth century. Snorri is also the author of Heimskringla (Circle of the World), a collection of sagas about the Norwegian kings. These sagas contain a large amount of skaldic poetry – especially skaldic praise poetry – and are an important source for this type of poetry. Skaldic poetry is one of the two main forms of Old Norse poetry and is a highly complicated poetic form usually reserved for writing historical or praise poems. Unlike other forms of poetry from this period, skaldic verse is very much attributable to specific poets or skalds. Skaldic poetry makes extensive use of kennings, which are a poetic tool whereby figurative language is used in place of a more concrete single-word noun. These figurative compounds often contain references to the Norse mythological world. Snorri also makes reference to a large number of kennings and explains their origins in his Edda.

  The Prose Edda was written in Icelandic and is unusual for early medieval treaties on poetry in that it is written in the vernacular and is also about poetry that itself was written in the vernacular. There are seven surviving manuscripts. Of these, six are from the Middle Ages and the seventh dates from around 1600. None of these manuscripts is the same, with each having different variations, and all of them to some extent are incomplete. The four main manuscripts are: the Codex Upsaliensis, Codex Regius, Codex Wormianus and Codex Trajectinus.

  The first three of the four main manuscripts were composed in the fourteenth century. The Codex Upsaliensis is the oldest surviving manuscript and was written in the early fourteenth century. This manuscript has the only reference to the title of the first part of the Prose Edda, Gylfaginning (The Tricking of Gylfi) in Old Norse, which we will later come across as we explore the myths. It is also an illustrated text. The Codex Regius is a little later and was written in the first half of the fourteenth century. It is the most complete of the four manuscripts, and seems the closest to the original. For this reason, it is used as the basis for most editions and translations of the Prose Edda. The Codex Wormianus was written in the mid-fourteenth century. This manuscript also contains several other pieces of work on poetics including the First Grammatical Treatise, which is a twelfth-century work on the phonology of Old Norse, and The List of Rig, which is an Eddic poem. The sixteenth-century Codex Trajectinus is the final manuscript and is a copy of an earlier thirteenth-century manuscript.

  The Poetic Edda is a collection of anonymous Old Norse poems that focus on Norse mythology and the Germanic heroic world. T
hese are all Eddic poems – the second main form of Old Norse poetry. This poetic form is generally looser than skaldic verse, although it does employ alliterative verse and some kennings. The majority of Eddic poems are contained in the Codex Regius and many of the poems it contains are only found in this manuscript. The Prose Edda does quote some of these poems – such as The Seeress’ Prophecy – but these are only fragments and do not feature the poems in their entirety. Although this manuscript was not written until the 1270s in Iceland, it is widely accepted that it records poems from before the conversion to Christianity. However, these poems can be very difficult to date, particularly in relation to each other, and it has also proved difficult to ascertain exactly where they were originally composed.7

  Another source of Old Norse poetry is ‘manuscript AM 748 I 4to’,8 which is a fourteenth-century vellum manuscript containing a number of poems, including Baldr’s Dream. Other than Baldr’s Dream, the other poems it contains are also found in the Codex Regius.

  Finally, a rich source of Old Norse literature is the sagas.9 The Norse sagas are generally classified using titles that indicate their thematic content: ‘The Kings’ Sagas’; ‘Sagas of Icelanders’; ‘Short Tales of Icelanders’; ‘Contemporary Sagas’; ‘Legendary Sagas’; ‘Chivalric Sagas’; ‘Saints’ Sagas’; and ‘Bishops’ Sagas’. These were written in Iceland and are mainly in prose, although some of them do contain both skaldic and Eddic poetry embedded in the text. Apart from the ‘Legendary Sagas’, such as The Saga of the Volsungs, these are often realistic and at least loosely based on real individuals living in Iceland. They feature tales about the migration to Iceland, early Viking voyages and raids, and feuds and disputes in Iceland. The characters in these stories are often very human in their portrayal and, despite the extreme situations they find themselves in, relatable. As we will see, they include some legendary material that appears later in this book.