The Vikings (5 page)

Proudly Odin relates the advances that his suffering has paid for:

These skills were duly passed on to the inhabitants of Midgard. The story emphasizes the thirst for knowledge that was one of the most striking of Odin’s characteristics, and the lengths he would go to in order to get it. In another story Odin requested a drink from a well of wisdom maintained by a mysterious giant named Mimir. When Mimir suggested an eye as the price of his assent Odin did not hesitate to pay. Odin’s curiosity about the world, and his willingness to take enormous risks to satisfy it, are among the characteristics that distinguish him most sharply from the omniscient and omnipotent God of the Christian conception. Another is that the Aesir knew they were mortal. Odin’s search for knowledge was very often a driven curiosity aimed at finding out more about how their deaths would occur.

Above
: The older futhark, consisting of 24 runes, was in use for about 700 years after the birth of Christ.
Below
: A rationalized form using only 16 runes was in use by the end of the eighth century.

In some cases these tales of the gods on their forays into Utgard to outwit the giants and wrest secrets and treasures from them also give an insight into the lost astronomy of the Viking Age. Odin’s sacrifice of an eye is likely the remnant of a story once told to explain why the sky only has one eye, in the form of the sun. The sibyl in this verse from ‘The Seeress’s Prophecy’ seems to be referring to the rising of the morning sun:

More directly explanatory is a story of the constellation known to the Vikings as ‘Thiazzi’s Eyes’. As a result of a piece of intemperate behaviour by Loki, the gods’ apples of eternal youth fell into the hands of a giant named Thiazzi, whom they had to kill in order to recover them. When Thiazzi’s daughter Skadi turned up at Asgard looking for revenge for the killing, Odin offered her compensation in the form of celestial immortality for her father, throwing his eyes into the night sky where they became stars to which he gave the name ‘Thiazzi’s Eyes’. These two stars are probably to be identified with Castor and Pollux in the constellation Gemini of our own astronomy.
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The tale of Thor’s duel with the giant Hrungnir is another myth with astronomical content. Following his success in the duel, Thor helped out a dwarf named Aurvandil by carrying him across the primordial river Élivagar in a basket on his back. When Aurvandil complained of frostbite in one of his toes Thor broke it off and threw it into the sky, where it became the star known as ‘Aurvandil’s Toe’, corresponding in our astronomy to Alcor in Ursa Major.
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Thor told the story to Aurvandil’s wife Groa as she worked to remove a splinter of broken whetstone lodged in Thor’s head after the duel. Groa became so excited at his news that she abandoned the job and never returned to it, leaving poor Thor with a chronic headache. This whetstone splinter in his head was said to be the nail that held Yggdrasil fixed to the sky. Its modern astronomical correspondent is probably our Polaris, the North Star in Ursa Minor, then as now the star around which the whole of the northern night sky seems to revolve. Viking Age Scandinavians must have had many more such explanatory tales, but the early scribes of the Christian era who had occasion to mention the stars and constellations in their writings preferred to use the Latin names, with the result that the native names disappeared, all but those few which survived down into Snorri’s time, securely embedded in the Eddic poetry.

Probably as a result of his pre-eminence as the god of poets, Odin had over 150 names, but the most significant of them was simply ‘All-Father’. Most of the gods were his children by various mothers. Some of them were Aesir, like himself. Others, like Thor’s mother Jord (‘Earth’), were giantesses from Utgard. That the gods of Asgard were willing to engage in such fraught unions with their enemies underscores Midgard’s perception that social and technological advances could only be achieved by risk-taking. Among Frey’s significant earthly progeny was his son by the giantess Gerd, who became the first king of the Yngling dynasty that ruled over the Swedes and, in later, historical time, over the Norwegians of the Vestfold region in the south of the country; Sæming, founding father of the long line of powerful chieftains who ruled over the Lade district in the region of Trondheim in present-day Norway, was likewise the son of a union between a god and a giant, as was Skjold, the legendary first king of the Danes. This genealogical link back to divinity was important because it legitimized the claims to power of the Scandinavian kings who ruled in later, historical times.
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This world of Asgard, Midgard and Utgard, with Yggdrasil at its centre, can be seen as a macrocosmic image of the world of a typical, Viking Age homestead. At the centre stood the main farmhouse building and outhouses, ringed around by a belt of cultivated land and pasture. Beyond this lay the rimmed horizon of uncultivated wilderness. Close by the main house stood a tree, known in Sweden as a
vårdträdet
and in Norway as a
tuntreet
or ‘house-tree’. Each family cultivated a mystical association with its ‘house-tree’ that served as a symbol of continuity through the generations.
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The circle in the physical form of a ring had particular significance in Viking Heathen culture. As a symbol of loyalty and honesty it appears in an entry in the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
for 876, noting a settlement between the Christian King Alfred of Wessex and three Viking chieftains. The
Chronicle
tells us that the chieftains ‘swore him oaths on the sacred ring’ that they would leave his kingdom at once, and that this was ‘a thing which they would not do before for any other nation’.
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A verse in ‘The Sayings of the High One’ expresses in negative fashion the binding gravity of such an oath:

The reference here is to the story of how Odin obtained the mead of poetry from the giant Suttung, having seduced his daughter Gunnlod, to whom Suttung had entrusted the mead. This, like the secret of the runes, is another example of a treasure stolen by an inhabitant of Asgard from the hazardous mental region of Utgard for the benefit of the humans of Midgard. Odin broke his word to Gunnlod because the consuming need for poetry justified any means to gain possession of it. This ruthlessness in pursuit of his own ends made Odin feared and admired among his followers and, as we shall see, Viking warriors abroad would very often take their cue from him in their dealings with the Christian kings of England and Francia.

The ring seems also to have been a symbol of eternal recurrence, illustrated by one of Odin’s magical treasures, the ring Draupnir, made for him by the dwarves of Utgard, that dripped eight new rings every ninth night. The ring also played an important role in the sanctification of Heathen gatherings. According to the
Book of the Settlements
, a ring was to lie on the altar of every Icelandic chieftain and he was obliged to wear it on his arm at every assembly meeting over which he presided as chieftain-priest. The same obligation is also referred to in a description of a chieftain-priest’s temple contained in the
Eyrbyggja Saga
.
¹⁴
This is a late source, probably composed about the middle of the thirteenth century, and though the usual reservations about reliability have to be made it is evidently the work of an author with a great interest in the early history of his own country. He mentions a table in the centre of the temple with a ring lying on it. Sacrifice, varying in intensity from fruit to the offering of a life, was a central means of communication between followers and gods, and beside the ring stood a bowl in which the blood of a sacrificed animal would be collected. Next to it lay a twig that may have been dipped into the bowl and shaken over the gathering as a way of binding it together, much as Moses is said to have done in the Old Testament.
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It may also have been used to create a random pattern of blood-spots in which the chieftain-priest might read the oracular response to an important question.

The sites of two major festivals are known, one at Leire in Zealand, in Denmark, and the other at Uppsala in Sweden. Both were enneadic events, announcing a mystical attachment to the number nine. At the festivals at Leire ninety-nine humans and as many horses, dogs and roosters were sacrificed. Though he did not see the building himself, Adam of Bremen reported a description of the temple at Uppsala in his
Gesta Hammaburgensis
as a sumptuous palace, richly decorated in gold, where people gathered to make sacrificial offerings before a trio of images, with Thor at the centre, flanked on either side by Odin and Frey. Each day for nine days the males of nine species, including humans, were sacrificed by hanging from trees in a small copse not far from the temple. One of the textile remains from the Oseberg burial appears to show such a scene, with numerous bodies dangling from the branches of a large tree. From Saxo’s passing reference to ‘the clatter of actors on the stage’ it seems the rituals also involved the performance of some kind of cult drama.
¹⁶
Songs were chanted at the Uppsala festivals which were reported to Adam of Bremen by his informant but which the cleric found so obscene he declined to record them.
¹⁷
‘Haustlong’, by the late ninth-century Norwegian Tjodolf of Hvin, is a rare example of a skaldic poem that incorporates lines of spoken dialogue which may have been part of such a cult drama.
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Of the actual formalities of worship, however, we know little. The only prayer of direct address to the gods is the brief invocation in ‘The Lay of Sigrdrifa’:

Archaeological evidence that human sacrifice was practised does exist, but is not extensive. Much depends on the interpretation of the finds. In the 1990s excavations were carried out by a team under Lars Jørgensen of the National Museum of Denmark on what was originally thought to be the rubbish dump of a chieftain’s farm on a site at Lake Tissø, in Western Zealand. The team unearthed an increasingly confusing mixture of buried silver, gold, and animal and human bones, which eventually, along with the illogical location of the dump on a hilltop, persuaded them to reinterpret the site as a place of sacrifice.
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At Lillmyr in Barlingbo, on Gotland, close to the modern town of Roma and near to where the island’s main assembly formerly met, an excavated pit that contained the mingled remains of humans, horses and sheep has been tentatively identified as a place of human sacrifice.
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There is more potential evidence in scenes depicted on the Hammars picture-stone from Lärbro on Gotland, dated to 700-800.
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A man carrying a shield seems to be tied by his neck to the branch of a tree which has been tethered down. When the tree is released he will be jerked from his feet. The main focus of the scene, however, is the small figure, perhaps a dwarf or child in the centre of the panel, who lies face downward upon a platform of some kind. Above the figure hangs a
valknut
, three triangles that mark the victim as dedicated to Odin, bound in the same impossible perspectual framework that so fascinated the Dutch graphic artist M. C. Escher.

A separate category of human sacrifice involved the killing of slaves to serve their dead masters in the afterlife. Ibn Fadlan’s account of the funeral on the Volga to which we referred earlier included a description in pathetic detail of the fate of such a slave, cajoled into volunteering to join her owner in his funeral ship with the promise of a few days of special treatment and a great deal of alcohol. After her ritual rape by the chieftains’ companions she was handed over to an old woman known as the ‘Angel of Death’ to be strangled and stabbed before being carried on to the funeral ship beside him, along with his shoes, his weapons and the other items he would need in his next life. Most double graves from the Viking Age which show an apparent inequality in the status of the dead are interpreted as being those of master or mistress and slave. Of two male skeletons found in a single grave at Stengade, in Langeland in Denmark, one was buried with a spear and the other, bound and decapitated, has been identified as his slave. The Viking Age grave at Ballateare, on the Isle of Man, also contains two bodies, one a male buried with his sword, shield and three spearheads, the other a female with the top of her head sliced off, the mark of a ritual death.
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Sacrifice was so central to the practice of Heathendom that the law codes of the Christian-era culture that eventually displaced it in the Scandinavian lands found it necessary expressly to forbid the practice: ‘Nor may we sacrifice,’ said the Norwegian Gulathing Law, ‘not to Heathen gods nor to mounds nor piles of stones.’
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The Gotland Gutalagen was similarly trenchant: ‘All sacrificing is strictly forbidden as are all practices formerly connected with Heathendom.’
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Equally dogmatic was the Uppland Law of the eastern Swedes: ‘No one shall sacrifice to false gods, nor worship groves nor stones.’