One of the podcasts for today's rowing sessions was from a recent WBUR On Point and an interview with Nancy Marie Brown and her new book on Snorri Sturluson and his influence on Western literature. (about 45 minutes audio). I'll probably get the book.
Long ago and far away, the old Norse tales and poems of Vikings and lore were fading. A young Norwegian king – fourteen – was enchanted by the English tales of King Arthur. A wayfaring storyteller from Iceland stepped into the breach. Spinning northern tales of Thor and Odin, dragon and dwarf, magic weapons and rings.
He may be the most influential medieval writer you’ve never heard of. But Tolkien did. And Wagner. And Neil Gaiman. And Michael Chabon.
This hour, On Point: the Homer of the north, and mythic storytelling out of Iceland.
-Tom Ashbrook
an excerpt from the book via On Point:
One
Odin’s Eye
Wisdom is memory.
—Snorri, Edda
I n the beginning, Snorri wr i tes, there was nothing. No sand, no
sea, no cooling wave. No earth, no heaven above. Nothing but the yawning
empty gap, Ginnungagap.
All was cold and grim.
Then came Surt with a crashing noise, bright and burning. He bore a flaming
sword. Rivers of fire flowed till they turned hard as slag from an iron maker’s
forge, then froze to ice.
The ice sheet grew, layer upon layer, till it bridged the mighty, magical gap.
Where the ice met sparks of flame and still-flowing lava from Surt’s home
in the South, it thawed, dripping like an icicle to form the first frost giant, Ymir,
and his cow.
Ymir drank the cow’s abundant milk. The cow licked the ice, which was
salty. It licked free a handsome god and his wife. They had three sons, one of
whom was Odin, the ruler of heaven and earth, the greatest and most glorious
of the gods: the All-Father.
Odin and his brothers killed Ymir. From his body they fashioned the world:
His flesh was the soil, his blood the sea. His bones and teeth became stones and
scree. His hair became trees, his skull was the sky, his brain, the clouds.
From his eyebrows they made Middle Earth, which they peopled with humans,
crafting the first man and woman from driftwood they found on the
seashore.
10 Song of the Vikings
So Snorri explains the creation of the world in the beginning of his Edda.
Partly he is quoting an older poem, “Song of the Sibyl,” whose author he does
not name. Partly he is making it up—especially the bit about the world forming
in a kind of volcanic eruption and then freezing to ice. If this myth were
truly ancient, there would be no volcano. Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, the
Scandinavian homelands, are not volcanic. Only Iceland—discovered in 870,
when Norse paganism was already on the wane—is geologically active. In medieval
times Iceland’s volcanoes erupted ten or a dozen times a century, often
burning through thick glaciers. Nothing is as characteristic of Iceland’s landscape
as the clash between fire and ice.
Ymir’s cow may be Snorri’s invention, too. No other source mentions this
monstrous cow, nor what the giant Ymir lived on, but like all wealthy Icelanders,
Snorri was a dairyman. He was also a Christian. It suits his wry sense of humor
for the first pagan god to be born from a salt lick.
Snorri goes on: Odin established the godly city of Asgard. There he built
his feast hall, Valhalla, with its roof of golden shields and 540 doors. In a silverroofed
palace nearby sat his throne, from which he watched over all the nine
worlds, from the highest bright heaven to the damp, dark underworld called
Hel. He could see the lands of the Aesir gods (like him) and the Vanir gods (enemies
at first, then in-laws and allies), the lands of the frost giants like Ymir and
fire giants like Surt, the lands of the light elves and dark elves, of the dwarfs in
their halls of stone, and Middle Earth, the land where humans lived.
Odin could see what everyone was doing everywhere. In case he missed
something, his ravens, Thought and Memory, flew over all the nine worlds each
day collecting news. Sometimes Odin wandered the nine worlds himself. One
of his first quests was to search out the well of wisdom: He traded an eye for a
single sip of enlightenment.
Odin One-Eye was Snorri’s favorite of all the Norse gods and goddesses.
Following tradition, he placed Odin, god of Wednesday (from the Old English
spelling, Woden’s Day), at the head of the Viking pantheon of twelve gods and
twelve goddesses. Then Snorri increased Odin’s power. Rather like the Christian
God the Father, Snorri’s Odin All-Father governed all things great and small.
Icelanders had in fact long favored Thor, the god of Thursday. They named
their children after the mighty thunder god: In a twelfth-century record of
Iceland’s first settlers, a thousand people bear names beginning with Thor.
None is named for Odin. Nor did the first Christian missionaries to Iceland
Odin’s Eye 11
find cults of Odin. Odin is rarely mentioned in the sagas. For a good sailing
wind Icelanders called on Thor. But Snorri wasn’t fond of Thor—except as
comic relief. Thor was the god of farmers.
Odin was a god for aristocrats—not just the king of gods but the god of
kings. He had the best horse, eight-legged Sleipnir; Snorri told two memorable
tales about Odin’s horse. Odin had a gold helmet and a fine coat of mail, a
spear, and a gold ring that magically dripped eight matching rings every ninth
night. No problem for him to be a generous lord, a gold giver. Finally Odin gave
men the gift of poetry. At least in Snorri’s mythology he did. Snorri’s tale of the
divine mead that turns all drinkers into poets is dismissed by modern critics as
“one of his more imaginative efforts.”
The story begins with the feud between the Aesir gods and the Vanir.
They declared a truce, and gods from each side spat into a crock to mark the
peace. Odin took the spittle and made it into a man. Truce Man traveled far
and wide, teaching humans wisdom, until he was killed by the dwarfs. (They
told Odin that Truce Man had choked on his own learning.) The dwarfs
poured Truce Man’s blood into a kettle and two crocks, mixed it with honey,
and made the mead of poetry. To end a feud, the dwarfs gave the mead to the
giant Suttung, who hid it in the depths of a mountain with his daughter as its
guard. Odin set out to fetch the mead. He tricked Suttung’s brother into helping
him, and they bored a hole through the mountain. Odin changed into a
snake and slithered in, returning to his glorious god form to seduce Suttung’s
lonely daughter. He lay with her for three nights; for each night she paid him
a sip of mead. On the first sip he drank the kettle dry. With the next two sips
he emptied the crocks. Then he transformed himself into an eagle and took
off. Suttung spied the fleeing bird. Suspicious, he changed into his giant eagle
form and made chase. It was a near thing. To clear the wall of Asgard, Odin
had to squirt some of the mead out backward—the men who licked it up can
write only doggerel. The rest of the mead he spat into vessels the gods had set
out when they saw him coming. He shared this mead with certain exceptional
men; they are called poets.
Though Odin is sneaky, two faced, arrogant, and avaricious in Snorri’s
tales, he is no dim-witted muscleman like Thor, no flirtatious mare like the
trickster god, Loki. In all his writings Snorri never once made Odin look ridiculous.
Perhaps that’s because Snorri’s own father, Sturla of Hvamm, was once
likened to the one-eyed god.
