The Norse Mythology Blog

Signed title page of Runemarks by Joanne Harris

English author Joanne Harris studied Modern and Medieval Languages at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, before spending fifteen years teaching language and literature. Her debut as a novelist was The Evil Seed (1989), but it was her third novel that propelled her to international stardom; Chocolat earned the number one spot on the Sunday Times bestseller list, and the film adaption (with Johnny Depp and Juliette Binoche) was a commercial and critical success. Since that first breakthrough, Harris has written a series of bestselling novels including Holy Fools and The Lollipop Shoes. Two of her sixteen published books are French cookbooks, and her short stories have been featured in numerous collections.

In Runemarks(2007), Harris imagines the aftermath of Ragnarök, “five hundred years after the End of the World.” It’s a world quite different from the one suggested in the Eddas, but it has deep roots in Norse mythology. The old gods have fallen and a new religion has risen. A young girl named Maddy is born with a “runemark” – a rune on her skin that marks her as a relation of the Norse gods and invests her with mystic power. Over the course of the novel, she befriends Odin (as much as one can be a friend with the Furious One), travels with Loki, and becomes embroiled in a struggle involving the resurgent Æsir and Vanir and the minions of the new religion known as the Order.

Maddy & Sugar on the cover of Runemarks

Harris followed up with Runelight(2011), which takes place three years after the first novel. Maddy discovers her twin sister Maggie, and the two young women find themselves on opposite sides of Odin’s fight to rebuild fallen Asgard. This second book greatly enlarges the mythical cast of the first novel with the addition of several other characters from Norse myth, most notably Angrboda (here known familiarly as Angie) and the wolves Fenris, Skól and Haiti (the spelling is Harris’s).

Full disclosure: I absolutely love these books. Someday, I’ll have a daughter, and I want her to be just like Maddy (but I’ll call her Freya, if I can convince my wife about the name). The novels are absolutely brilliant in their transformative use of Norse mythology. Rather than using the myths as background inspiration (as Tolkien did, for example), Harris makes the daring choice of having the Norse gods appear as characters. She pulls it off. Runemarks and Runelight are wonderfully written and unpredictable page-turners.

For readers who may be unfamiliar with Runemarks and Runelight– or with the intricacies of Norse mythology and Norse religion – I’ve included explanatory information in my interview questions. In some instances, my preambles are longer than Ms. Harris’ answers. I hope the gentle reader will forgive this, as my only goal was to lay out a welcome mat for readers who are new to these subjects.

Aerial view of the Uffington White Horse

KS – What we call Norse mythology is sometimes thought to be purely Scandinavian property, but the old gods are documented in various forms in Europe and the British Isles. Your books have a distinctly British feel. The Old English runes represent the “New Script” in your novels; the Old English rune poem provides lines for the cantrips spoken by your characters – cantrip itself being an archaic English and Scottish word for spell or incantation. In the Runemarks world, Red Horse Hill is rumored to have been a place of heathen sacrifice or a burial mound, and it has an ancient carving of a horse that “never grassed over in spring, nor did the winter snow ever hide its shape” – which is reminiscent of the Uffington White Horse and other English chalk horses. Runemarks’ map shows that the Middle Worlds look like the British Isles, with World’s End in the general area of London. Why did you decide to use an English setting, rather than a Nordic one? Did the choice enable you tell a different type of story than if, for instance, the events took place in Iceland?

JH – I don’t think I made a conscious choice to set the books in a neo-British setting. To me it simply came naturally. I’m more familiar with my Yorkshire home than I am with, say, Iceland or Scandinavia, and there are already so many links here to Viking culture. There are Viking remains all around Yorkshire, from runic stones to burial mounds. I worked as a volunteer on the Coppergate dig in York when I was a teenager – the site that was to become Jorvik. Scratch the soil almost anywhere here, and you’ll find that our back gardens are all filled with Viking leavings.

Viking re-enactors at the Jorvik Viking Centre in York, England

Just outside my home village of Almondbury – which was to become Malbry in the Rune books – there are the foundations of an Iron Age fort on a hill. Castle Hill became Red Horse Hill without much alteration, and I’ve used some other local names, such as Farnley Tyas, mostly for my own amusement and that of my daughter, for whom I wrote the books in the first place. I wanted to try and recreate the way in which belief systems migrate and are recreated locally to suit the needs of each location in which they are adopted; in this case, my own region, which has harbored the remnants of Viking culture for centuries, even to adopting Danish words into our local dialect. For instance, the word laik (“to play”) was very common when I was a child, e.g., “A’ tha’ laikin’?” (“Are you coming out to play?”).

All this makes Malbry and the world of Inland very, very familiar to me. I think that, if I’d chosen a more obviously Icelandic – and therefore “foreign” – setting, the story would have been different; less intimate, less familiar. I wanted to tell a story that most of us here already half-knew, if only on a subconscious level – not introduce a new culture that people wouldn’t recognize.

KS – You give very nice logical explanations for the mysteries of Norse mythology. For instance, the ability to mystically bind a goblin or god by knowing its true name (“a named thing is a tamed thing”) is explained like this:

At the beginning of the First Age, it was given to every creature, tree, rock and plant a secret name that would bind that creature to the will of anyone who knew it.
Mother Frigg knew the true names, and used them to make all of creation weep for the return of her dead son. But Loki, who had many names, would not be bound to such a promise, and so Balder the Fair, god of springtime, was forced to remain in Underworld, Hel’s kingdom, until the end of all things.

Balder & Nanna on the road to Hel (1929)
by Norwegian artist Louis Moe

You recontextualize ideas from Norse myth (like the world weeping for Balder) and connect them to other Germanic concepts (like the Rumpelstiltskinian name-control) to provide an overarching logic to the material. From Snorri Sturluson to Viktor Rydberg to Kevin Crossley-Holland, writers have tried to fit the contradictory surviving remnants of Norse myth into a coherent whole. As an author who has so often created her own fictional worlds, what drew you to design a logical narrative from this ancient jumble of myth?

JH – Folklore rarely follows rules, especially not those of linear narrative. On the other hand, with folklore based on the oral tradition, the audience knows to suspend disbelief and to ignore inconsistencies. That doesn’t happen so much in books.

What I tried to do was sift through all kinds of aspects of folklore, myth and fairytale, bringing together what I could and adding variants of my own. Runemarks is basically a story about the power of stories – a power that has fuelled the world since long before the Vikings. The result is a kind of webwork in which myth, religious belief, fairytales, nursery rhymes and spells are all intimately interconnected.

Loki, Sigyn & the snake on the
10th-century Gosforth Cross

KS – In Runemarks’ character list, all the gods and goddesses are defined by their (antagonistic) relationships with Loki. He appears more in both novels than any of the Æsir or Vanir. John Lindow writes that “[e]veryone agrees that there was never any cult of Loki,” yet he is a favorite fictional character today. Marvel Comics has given Journey into Mystery over to his adventures, Joss Whedon calls him “the kind of character that turns the wheels” and M.D. Lachlan made him the only Norse god with a real speaking part in Wolfsangel. Why do you think Loki has become such a sympathetic figure in recent years?

JH – During the course of the last century, the concept of heroes and villains has become increasingly ambivalent. We have come to enjoy anti-heroes – those complicated, flawed characters who often exist on the fringes of normal society. We are no longer entirely satisfied by the archetypes of story, the whiter-than-white heroes and the villains with no redeeming features.

Thus Loki satisfies our need to identify on a more human level; his flaws are very believable, and – of all the Norse gods – he seems to me the most modern. His moral and sexual ambivalence, his inability (or refusal) to integrate into Asgard’s society, his outcast status, his subversive temperament, his changes of mood and his almost existentialist sense of humor make him very accessible to a modern audience.

Angry teenage Loki in Marvel Comics' Journey into Mystery
Art by Richard Elson

He portrays the insecurities of modern adolescence – the sense of not belonging; the need to make an impact, even a negative one, onto the world of adulthood (represented by Odin and the other gods). And, of course, he is very funny – lifting what would have been a very stolid and serious pantheon into something much livelier and more human.

Joanne Harris travels through the Nine Worlds

KS – Your novels hint at lands beyond the area your characters inhabit. Traders bring “glass and metalware from the Ridings; persimmons from the Southlands; fish from the Islands; spices from the Outlands; skins and furs from the frozen North.” You mention Wilderlanders, “all painted in blue woad,” and write that “[b]eyond the One Sea . . . there were men and women as brown as peat, with hair curled tight as bramble-crisp; and these people had never known Tribulation or the Good Book, but instead worshipped gods of their own – wild brown gods with animal heads.” Clearly, the action of the book only takes place in one small corner of the world you’ve created, with its reimaginings of real lands and peoples.

I’ve always wondered about the localization of Big Important Mystical Events. Gods with the power to shape existence and travel throughout the universe only seem to appear to very small groups of people in very specific locales. Yahweh never holidays in Alaska; Njord doesn’t seem to notice that there are some really nice beaches in California. How do you imagine the inhabitants of your world reacting to the fact that the disagreements of a bunch of Anglo-Saxon godly types bring all of existence to the edge of destruction? In the world of Runemarks, do other lands have gods as physically real as Odin and Loki? If so, are these other gods secretly observing the battles between the Northerners?

Tlaloc, Aztec god of thunder (& etc)

JH – I’ve often wondered that myself. It’s one of those non-linear folkloric suspensions of disbelief I was talking about earlier. In fact, I’ve been thinking about trying to write a Rune book in which world belief systems interact, just to see if my gods would survive, say, in South America, amongst all those bloodthirsty Aztec gods.

Of course, in the Runebooks, the concept of “world” is limited to the world we know. This has been true throughout history, and religions – which tend to adapt to local conditions – reflect this pattern too. That’s why Jesus is traditionally shown as very Anglo-Saxon-looking in Europe and America, and the Nativity is most often depicted under snow.

Little blond baby Jesus in the snow

I’ve touched on a tentative explanation of this, both in my Rune books and in some of my short stories, by suggesting that gods are notall-powerful, and that the word “god” – like the concept of “world” – is open to massive historical and regional interpretation. Loki – whose voice I often use to voice these subversive theories – says as much in Runemarks: “In my time I’ve seen theatre gods, gladiator gods, even storyteller gods – Maddy, you people see gods everywhere. Gives you an excuse for not thinking for yourselves.” And again: “God is just a word . . . Reverse it and you get dog. It’s just as appropriate.”

I’ve also touched on the idea that gods might appear in different aspects to suit the time and place. Therefore the god of thunder, for instance, might have multiple personae – appearing as Thor in one place, or Tlaloc in another, or Jupiter – to suit the current perception of what a thunder god should be. Even the figure of Jesus, I would argue, has borrowed a number of aspects from previous religions, from Osiris to Mithras – all of them aspects of the same archetypical figure sacrificed at Easter and later reborn into godhood.

My Little Pony wielding the flaming sword of Surt
Awesome painting of Rainbow Dash by ColinMLP

KS – Given the large role of giants in both Norse myth and British folklore, I was surprised they didn’t appear in your books. When Surt shows up, he’s “a black bird shadow with a corona of fire,” not the Edda’s sword-wielding giant. Your imagery reminded me of some lines from the Kalevala, the epic poem from Finland:

The sky’s bird struck fire
made a flame flare up.
The north wind burnt the clearing
the north-east quite consumed it:
it burnt all the trees to ash
reduced them to dust.

Skadi is listed as “of the Ice People” in your character list, not specifically as a giant. Why did you choose to leave the big fellas out of the story?

JH – The word most often translated as “giant” in Old Icelandic is open to a number of other interpretations, including “demon.” That started me thinking about the relationships between gods and giants/demons, and how little we hear about the actual physical size of these “giants.”

Thor, Loki & Thjalfi emerge from the glove of the giant Skrymir

In some stories they are indeed of giant size. The giant Skrymir, for instance, is large enough to house four people inside his glove, but Loki, supposedly half-giant, is of normal size – perhaps even a little shorter than average. Many others – Skadi, Gerd – are of similar size to the gods, able to intermarry without difficulty.

I came to the conclusion, then, that the word “giant,” like the word “god,” might be metaphorical – closer to the concept of “hero” or “superhuman.” We do, after all, refer to “literary giants” and “gods and goddesses of the screen.” Because of that, I wanted to use a word that didn’t necessarily convey monstrous size in every case, reserving the word “giant” for the actual “big fellas.”

KS – When in Aspect (her mystical appearance), Maddy’s hair is “loose instead of being sensibly braided, and in the place of her usual clothes she now wore a belted chain mail tunic of what she judged to be immodest length.” This reads like a description of 19^th-century artistic depictions of Valkyries. For novels that center around some very powerful female characters (and butt-kicking teenage girls), the Valkyries are notable by their absence. Why did you choose not to use these mystic warrior-women in your books?

Norwegian painter Peter Nicolai Arbo's 1869
Valkyrie shows a bit of leg for the lads

JH – I was never entirely taken by the image of the Valkyries. They always seemed to me tainted by those 19^th-century depictions – more the manifestations of some teenager’s wet-dream than actual symbols of female empowerment. They exist en masse, with no characterization or real means of telling them apart – like the chorus of We Will Rock You, rewritten by Wagner after a particularly dissolute Oktoberfest. I didn’t know what to do with them or how they would contribute to my story. And so I chose to leave them out altogether, concentrating instead on re-inventing the (somewhat male-dominated) Norse pantheon to include some kickass female characters.

KS – At the beginning of Runemarks, Maddy is fourteen years old – the age you were when you first began imagining new tales of the Norse gods and the age your daughter was when you finished the novel. You’ve described Maddy as “a mixture of myself at fourteen and of my daughter as she is now. In fact, we’re pretty similar personalities.” How do you think things have changed for strong-minded young women from your generation to hers? Is there a difference in the way today’s real-life Pippi Longstockings interact with peers and adults?

Pippi Longstocking, matinee idol

JH – I think, if anything, that things have changed for the worse for imaginative teenagers since then. When I was fourteen, there was far less pressure to conform, and our role models were actresses, sportswomen, musicians and writers instead of TV “celebrities.” There was much less pressure on teenage girls to focus on clothes and makeup; most of us lived in t-shirts and jeans, and although we were interested in boys (of course we were – who isn’t?), we were far more interested in fictional heroes and stars of the screen. Contrast that with my daughter being bullied at school at the age of twelve because didn’t shave her legs or because she didn’t like the same music as her peers.

In the Seventies, we felt that feminism was on the rise. We felt that women were coming of age; we were optimistic. Now, I think that feminism has lost its way. So many girls nowadays seem to think that laddishness is “empowering,” rather than just childish. So many of them seem to think that marrying a footballer, or becoming a reality TV star, or getting a boob job and becoming a pole dancer, or just winning the Lottery counts as “living the dream.” I remember when dreams were better than this.

KS – I once took an art history course with a girl who would make completely original observations on the material, yet always begin her statements with “I think I read somewhere in the textbook that . . .” There was a boy in the class who would repeat passages from the book almost verbatim, but always present the concepts as his own ideas. The idea of a creative young woman feeling that she has to hide her gifts appears near the beginning of Runemarks: “For Maddy’s deepest secret . . . was that she enjoyed working magic, however shameful that might be. More than that, she thought she might be good at it too and, like anyone with a talent, longed to make use of it and show it off to other people.” Did you intend a connection between Maddy’s relationship to her magical knowledge and talents and the continuing external and internal struggles of today’s “wise women” – whether students, professionals or creative artists?

Maddy on the cover of "The Secret Words,"
the Italian edition of Runemarks

JH – Yes. Maddy’s magic is something of a metaphor for the imagination of women generally. For too long, women have been judged primarily on their looks rather than their abilities, and, even now – in a world in which we can hardly move for political correctness – men and women are still viewed slightly differently in the world of music, literature and the creative arts. There is a patronizing smirk from the world of literature when a woman writes a romantic novel; but when a man does the same thing, he is being sensitive and insightful, making a valuable statement on the nature of relationships. In Runemarks, the same thing happens; a boy who reads is intelligent and will go a long way; a girl who reads is “clever,” which is useless in a girl – even potentially dangerous.

Speaking of adolescent male fantasy . . .
A sexed-up version of Maddy on the cover
of the Russian edition of Runermarks

KS – Fenris, Skoll and Haiti all appear as nasty teenage boys that dress and talk like dumb metalheads. Two of them have a swastika tattoo, “not a runemark, exactly, but a sign of allegiance to Chaos in one of its darkest, most sinister forms.” The teenage boys in the novels (including Adam Scattergood) are all delightfully disgusting, which got me wondering about the target audience for these books. I remember reading Tiger Eyes by Judy Blume as a teen and thinking, “Whoot! I don’t think boys are meant to be reading this!”

Runemarksand Runelight seem aimed at smart tomboys – Maggie is “too tall; too boyish; too clever; too pert; unwilling to play the seduction games played by other girls of her age.” This is totally understandable (and welcome), given the adolescent male fantasy of so much genre fiction (I’m looking at you, DC Comics editors and Game of Thrones producers). Aside from your daughter, were you writing with a specific audience in mind? What sort of response have you gotten from young women? From young men?

JH – I rarely think about my target audience. In this case I did – but my audience was an audience of one [my daughter], and I wasn’t thinking further than that. Later I began to receive fan mail, and realized that my audience is too diverse to be easily categorized.

Runemarks& Runelight author Joanne Harris
Photograph by Jennifer Robertson

I get a lot of letters from young people, of course, although some of my most persistent fans are women in their fifties. Boys write to me, as well as girls, and I’m glad to see that my publishers haven’t tried to direct the readership by suggesting that this is a “girl book” rather than a “boy book.” I don’t like the book apartheid that has sprung up over the past few decades or the ridiculous marketing of books with glittery pink covers – sometimes with a little free necklace or bracelet, as if a book needed to come with some kind of jewelry to appeal to girls – designed to indoctrinate little girls into conforming early.

My young readers, male or female, are Loki fans to a man (or woman). I think that, in many ways, Loki is the true hero of the books – even more so than Maddy. I’ve already spoken a little about Loki’s appeal, but I sense that my young readers see him as a reflection of themselves; they understand his feelings of alienation, so common in adolescence, and they enjoy his sense of humor and his irreverence towards authority. They like Maddy, too; but most of the time, it is Loki who has their heart.

Maddy practices rune fingerings as red-bearded Thor looms behind
Art by Les Kanturek

KS – Early on, Maddy works rune magic by drawing runes on the ground with a stick. The rune-shapes are not magical in themselves; they need to be activated with a spark: “Thatwas the only true magic involved. Anyone familiar with the runes – which were only letters, after all, taken from an ancient language – could learn to write them. The trick, Maddy knew, was to set them to work.” This usage of runes echoes the practice attested in Norse mythology, like Odin carving and staining the runes in Hávamál. The more striking rune-magic in the novels, though, is the casting with finger-shapes. You have a great demonstration of runic fingerings on your website. What were the influences on your development of the fingering system?

JH – I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Jan Fries and his book, Helrunar. It was my main starting-point for developing the runes, interpreting their meanings and developing the “fingering” system that Maddy uses. The original source material of the Norse legends never explains all the methods in which runes are used, although study of Old Icelandic tells me that there are many, many different uses.

You can find a lot of weird stuff on the internet

In Runemarks, I needed something simple and graphic enough to be easily visualized. Jan Fries puts heavy emphasis on “rune stances” – almost like yogic postures – to recreate the rune-shapes, but although a physical expression of the rune-shape seemed like a good idea to me, I found whole-body rune-shapes impractical. And so I decided on finger-shapes, a shorthand form of the rune stance, partly because as a child I remember my great-grandmother making the sign against the evil eye with her fingers – the same sign I’ve used for the rune Yr in Runemarks– and explaining that it was for protection against bad spirits.

KS – I’m curious about your use of the Bjarkan rune. The source poems all agree that the rune simply means “birch” or “birch twig,” and their verses are clearly about the tree or shrub. In the world of your novels, however, the fingering of this particular rune is peered through to gain “truesight” – to see the hidden trails of magic that light up the world when seen through the rune-shape, to see the “true colors” of the beings that surround you. It’s one of the most distinctive runes in your books, and many characters use it to gain insight. Why did you choose this particular rune to invest with this ability?

Mystic moonlight, bright birch

JH – I’m going with the connection between Beorc/Bjarkan and the Old High German word bar (Old Icelandic berr) meaning naked, open, bare – as well as the fact that birch trees are so immediately visible among the trees in the forest. It’s a tenuous link, I know, but it’s a possible interpretation.

KS – Each section of the novels has a bind-rune frontispiece. Did you design these yourself? Do they have specific meanings related to the events they precede?

JH - I designed them with my editor, who has become a very enthusiastic participant. They can be deconstructed to make a kind of shorthand accompaniment to the chapter. Some of my young readers are also very enthusiastic in decoding these bind-runes and send me their various interpretations of what they mean, which makes me very happy.

Frank Herbert and his awesome Viking beard

KS – The bind-runes preceding each section of the novels are accompanied by quotes from Lokabrenna, Invocations, Prophecy of the Seer, Proverbs, Apocalypse, Book of Mimir, Fabrications– imaginary lost poems of the Eddas and sections of the Order’s Good Book. The quoting of works from within the world of the novel reminded me of Frank Herbert’s use of imaginary quotations (like passages from “The Collected Sayings of Muad’Dib” in Dune). I didn’t see Herbert in your lists of influences, but he seems a simpatico persona, given his creation of worlds built on complicated internal logic and investigation of the meanings of religion to those involved in their mystical heart (his Paul Atreides, your Maddy Smith). Herbert left Catholicism for Buddhism, and questions of religious belief play a major role in his works. Does Maddy’s journey reflect your own spiritual experiences in any way?

JH – I don’t subscribe to any organized religion. I never have, although all belief systems interest me and I’ve spent most of my life studying aspects of belief. I didn’t want the Good Book to be the Christian Bible – although a number of people have assumed that it was – which is partly why I included the quotes. But patriarchal ideologies in general have overlapping areas of belief. My intention was not to portray one existing religion, but to draw on the concept of the evolution of religions in general and how they shape society.

Norse Ragnarök meets Christian Apocalypse
on England's 10th century Gosforth Cross

KS – The books freely mix Norse myth and Christian myth in a very interesting fashion. Ragnarökkian imagery intersects with Christian Apocalyptic visions, and the power of rune magic overlaps the power of the Word. The two traditions even join together physically in the final scenes as Maggie – daughter of Thor and follower of the Order – names her unborn son Adam, of all things. This both highlights differences between the two religious traditions and underscores how much Christianity took from the Old Way as it developed in the North. Your knowledge of the source texts of Norse myth rings through throughout your work, but I’m curious about your background in regards to Christian tradition. Were you raised in a believing family?

JH – No, but I was raised in a family with a strong Catholic background. I never intended the Order to be seen as Christianity, although it has some things in common with the early Christian church – most of all its ability to naturalize and assimilate native beliefs. The Elder Eddaitself shows how this works, retelling the myths from a different point-of-view [that is] biased towards Christianity.

However, I do believe that this is the nature of religion. No belief system stands alone. All are part of a long process of evolution and re-invention, and however much believers may reject this idea, all are ultimately related to one another.

Joanne Harris & the Doors of Perception
Photograph by Jennifer Robertson

KS – There are elements of contemporary pagan practice that appear in Runemarks and Runelight– including the use of runestones for divination (as opposed to the wooden strips of Tacitus) and the importance placed on reversed runes. While runologists agree that historical rune usage made no distinctions regarding the direction a runic text was written in – or even the orientation of any given rune in relation to its neighbors – some pagans today have worked up a complex system of rune-orientation based more on tarot divination and the I Ching than on what little is known of northern pre-Christian divinatory practice. You have written, “I don’t belong to any gang, political, religious or otherwise. And I’m allergic to words that end in –ist.” Understood. I’m just curious about your relationship to historical and modern paganism as a creative artist. Are your ideas about rune magic inspired more by ancient or modern conceptions? Are you more interested in how the runes were used in pre-conversion Europe or how they’re used in the modern world?

"Fava Bean Elder Futhar Rune Set"
Seriously. "Futhar" runes made from fava beans.
Sold as "perfect for those practicing Italian witchcraft."
What.

JH – I don’t think we can truly know how the runes were originally used. We can try to guess – and there are clues to be found, both in ancient texts and in the original languages – but my view is that belief in magic, like belief in religion, is a very personal thing. Blind adherence to rules set out a thousand or two thousand years ago is as pointless as trying to pretend that scientific advancement has not changed our perception of the Divine. My attitude is this: if it works for you, then that’s the way to do it for you. It may not work for anyone else, but that isn’t your problem. To paraphrase Siddharta, everyone follows his own path. If you’re following anyone else – even me – you’re going the wrong way.

My interest in runes spans both the ancient and modern beliefs. I included rune-casting in the “modern pagan” sense because, regardless of its usage (or not) in earlier times, it has been assimilated into modern practice to fit changing times and attitudes. This I think is perfectly acceptable; we should not feel constrained to think backward in terms of spirituality, but to build on whatever wisdom we have inherited.

Earthquakes are actually caused by the
Amazing Lava Man. Everybody knows that.

KS – At one point in Runemarks, Maddy thinks through the various explanations of earthquakes she’s been given. One ties them to the writhing of the World Serpent at the root of the World Tree; one connects them to a semi-Christian idea of the struggles of wicked souls in the underworld as they wait for the End of Days. Odin provides a third explanation, telling Maddy about “rivers of fire under the earth and avalanches of hot mud and mountains boiling over like kettles; but this seemed to Maddy to be the least likely explanation of all, and she was inclined to believe that he had exaggerated the tale, as he did so many things.” This can be read as fairly accurate representation of the struggle between religious belief and scientific understanding here in the United States, unfortunately! Religion offers simple answers and eternal truths; science asks for complex thought and constant questioning. How would you describe the relationship between religion and science in the United Kingdom today?

JH – I guess we have the same conflicts as in the US. We in the UK tend to inherit the US’s social problems somewhere along the line, including some of the more extreme manifestations of religious mania. We have not yet gone so far as to teach creationism in our schools, but it’s only a matter of time. Already a number of Catholic schools have refused to allow their female pupils to take a vaccine that protects them against cervical cancer on the grounds that it would “encourage immorality.” The heart sinks at such stupidity. But . . .

Doctor Faustus making a deal with the Devil

I don’t believe the role of religion should be to offer “simple answers.” Like Goethe’s Faust– as opposed to Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus– I think that the human condition is to strive, and that as soon as we stop striving (to explore, to understand, to create, to live in harmony with each other), then we have lost our way. In ancient times, our perception of the divine was limited by our limited knowledge of the world around us. At that time, it was perfectly acceptable to believe in such things as a flat earth or a physical Hell, to see perfectly natural phenomena as part of a supernatural universe.

The God of the Old Testament (and elsewhere) is a very primitive depiction of the divine – as represented by some very primitive people living in a primitive time, who see him as a kind of vengeful warlord with a mentality as barbaric as their own. The God of the New Testament is very different. Two thousand years later, even aspects of the New Testament (the Immaculate Conception, etc.) are being disputed by the church, and many parts of the Old Testament (e.g., stoning your son for drunkenness, not wearing mixed fibers, human sacrifice, etc.) have been dismissed by most as no longer valid in a modern context.

What I’m saying is that, as our knowledge of the universe has expanded, so should our appreciation of the divine. I don’t see science and religion as mutually exclusive. The world is changing constantly. So must our assumptions.

How much can we trust the Völuspá prophetess?
Faroe Islands postage stamp by Anker Eli Petersen

KS – Your novels contain several clever examples of folk etymology. Æsir is linked to Seer-Folk, which is reminiscent of Snorri Sturluson’s idea that the Æsir came from Asia. This is an interesting take on oral transmission and transmutation. You’ve written that “no-one had written [the Norse myths] down at the time, and the fullest accounts came from Christian chroniclers centuries later, and were at best, incomplete, and at worst, badly distorted.” In Runemarks, Loki says that “there’s rather a lot the Oracle didn’t foretell, and old tales have a habit of getting twisted.” The tagline for Runelight is “Never trust an Oracle,” and there’s a suggestion that Völuspá simply contains the untrustworthy words of a prophetess, not a statement of fact or religious dogma. I really like your idea that the myths may not tell the whole truth, which ties in with the debate (among both scholars and heathens) about the trustworthiness of the surviving mythology as an actual record of pre-Christian belief. Many of your characters were worshiped as living gods in the ancient North (and in modern pagan revivals), and we know that at least some actual religious belief is recorded in the myths. How do you personally see the relationship of religion, myth and literature? How does it affect you as an author to know that some readers literally worship the characters your write about?

Some selected Norse gods on the Runemarks cover

JH – I don’t see the gods of Runemarks as my characters or my property, and I hope I’ve left enough leeway in my fiction for my Ásatrú readers to understand that I am not in any way trying to make fun of the gods they worship. What I’m trying to do in my way is to demonstrate how stories evolve and how heroes – be they religious figures, historical figures or both – cast long shadows in their wake. These shadows become part of the oral and written tradition and, as centuries pass, are embellished, rewritten and re-interpreted by successive generations. Thus a hero can become a god or a god dwindle into legend. I hope I haven’t offended anyone who truly believes; that was never my intention.

KS – Your portrayal of the Order – the new religion that basically takes over after Ragnarök – is pretty grim. You write that the Order’s “temples were built on the ruins of springs and barrows and standing stones that once were sacred to an older faith” and that its members kill animals born with runemarks, take babies born with runemarks away from their parents, empty pagan barrows and reconsecrate them, and hang and burn pagans as people “who were in fact the servants of the enemy, and therefore had no souls to save.” You have written that you don’t hate Christians or “the Catholic Church, organized religion or any other kind of religious group. What I do hate is intolerance, repression, moral superiority, the concepts of original sin, holy war and eternal damnation, plus the various acts that certain individuals are willing to perpetrate in the name of their religion, certain that God is on their side.” Without ever mentioning Christianity in your novels, it’s pretty clear that the Order is a mythologized version of the Church, since so many of your examples parallel the actual (and often violent) history of northern conversion. There are a vast number of ways to turn Norse mythology into modern fiction (cf. J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, M.D. Lachlan’s Wolfsangel, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s Thor, etc.), but you chose to focus on the (literarily transformed) clash between paganism and Christianity. Why did you choose this particular aspect?

Today, there's a lot of talk about a war on religion and a war on women.
Way back in 1612, the ladies of Pendle really had it rough.

JH – Because it is the closest thing to what really happened to our indigenous beliefs. In Pendle, not far from where I live, there are still gibbets where witches were hanged. In Europe, the early Christian church was responsible for centuries of gruesome persecution – as well as the destruction of many precious ancient texts – in the attempt to stamp out all previous beliefs. There’s a reason they’re called the Dark Ages. And to think that certain people are trying to take us back there . . .

However, I still dispute that the Order is a mythologized version of Christianity. For a start, no mention of Christ, or any Christ-figure is ever made. In parenthesis, can I say that I do believe in the historical figure of Jesus, though not in his divinity? To me, he is a marvelous example of a truly wise man whose excellent advice – to be good to each other – has been shanghaied throughout history by people who have twisted his words to fit their twisted agenda. Christianity is not the only patriarchal religion in the world, and – as far as I’m concerned – they are all equally to blame for the spread of intolerance, hypocrisy, religious hatred and holy war.

Rant over. Moving on . . .

Stuck in the middle with you . . .

KS – In Runelight, Maggie (at least at the beginning) is a dedicated believer in the Order. She wears “a white headscarf of the type World’s Enders called the bergha,” which seems clearly connected to the burqa worn by traditional Muslim women. She has been trained to be unimaginative, to be obedient – and she responds emotionally to language “of sacrifice, and power, and mysteries.” You also mention “wealthy Outlanders with their strings of wives, veiled from head to foot in black, dark eyes modestly lowered.” Given your statements about religious intolerance and repression, was this meant to point out commonalities in the treatment of women in Christian and Muslim societies?

JH – Absolutely. And remember, traditional Muslim dress is not so different to the way in which women in Europe traditionally dressed,or the way modern nuns still veil their heads and shoulders. Remember too that – during the first part of the Middle Ages – a woman wearing men’s clothing was punishable by death; the charge was, officially, heresy. It’s one of the reasons they burnt Joan of Arc, who also casts a long shadow. Throughout history, there have been religious taboos over male and female clothing; the Koran and the Sunnah are filled with rules about what men and women can and can’t wear. I have simply transferred some of this to my story.

Red Horse Hill on the Runelight cover

KS – Like the Norse gods portrayed in the Eddas, the gods in your version are flawed and fallible; they are definitely not omniscient or omnipotent. Your Odin describes Order and Chaos as “the twin forces that even gods cannot hope to understand,” and he spills “the last few drops [of wine] onto the earth as an offering to any old gods that might be around.” Your Loki, when in a real bind, prays to any gods that may be listening. How would you describe the nature of the Norse gods – especially as opposed to gods of monotheistic traditions? Has your conception of their nature changed over the many years you’ve thought about this material?

JH – Of course, and my fiction in no way pretends to cast any light on their nature. Rather, what I’m trying to do is ask questions about the changing nature of belief, the way our perception of the Divine changes to suit our changing society, and to ask the question why we need those gods in the first place.

KS – Your characterization of Sleipnir is fascinating. He’s the carving on Red Horse Hill come to life, and you explain his eight legs by saying that he “has a foot in each World except in Pan-daemonium.” You describe him like this:

It looked like some madman’s dream of a horse. The body’s proportions were almost right; but the legs – all eight of them, no less – were grotesquely long and thin, like the legs on a midsummer crane fly, digging so far into the ground that they might have been the roots of trees and reaching so far above her that Maddy had to tilt her head back to see the creature standing over her, its colours like St. Sepulchre’s Fire, obliterating half the sky.

Valkyrie & Sleipnir on the Tjängvide image stone

This seems a spot-on description of the Valkyrie welcoming Sleipnir on the Tjängvide stone, down to the red color. Elsewhere in Runelight, Sleipnir appears as “a regular horse – a strawberry roan with a long black mane.” Throughout the books, you make a distinction between the physical appearance of the gods (and associated characters) and their true Aspects – how they manifest in more purely spiritual forms. This ties in with a discussion in modern heathenry that asks whether the gods are physical beings or disembodied Powers, whether they are actual or metaphorical. Would you explain your concept of Aspect? Aside from its use as it a plot device, how do you think this idea relates to modes of religious belief, both ancient and contemporary?

JH – I think it relates to both. In Runemarks, the gods have mostly lost their divinity as new beliefs took over. Of course, this is the way the Edda depicts the gods – as warlords pretendingthey were gods in a world where Christianity was gaining popularity. But in Runelight, the gods rebuild Asgard and re-acquire their godlike Aspects. This could be seen as a metaphor, if you like, of the way paganism has grown over the last few decades.

The idea of Aspect gives room to believe in either the physical or the metaphorical, as we choose. It suggests that – although our perceptions of the Divine may differ radically from one another – we all see some version of the truth and take from it whatever we can.

1882 Carl Emil Doepler illustration of Odin enthroned with
spear (Gungnir), ravens (Hugin & Munin) & wolves (Geri & Freki)

KS – Both novels are full of very subtle yet very deep use of Norse mythology. Concepts from Norse myth are put into action, such as Odin using rune magic to free himself from chains – which is one of the powers he brags about in Hávamál. There is a real attention paid to mythic detail, such as Odin only drinking “a little wine” when sitting down to a meal, echoing Grímnismál’s “on wine alone the weapon-magnificent Odin always lives.” You’ve studied Medieval Languages and Old Norse, but you’ve written that you “don’t do very much research, and if can get away without doing any, I will. I use reference books and the internet when I need specific details on something, but most of the time I write about topics where I already have some knowledge, or where I have access to someone who can give me first-hand information.” How has your formal study of language affected your writing on these mythological subjects? How does your intellectual study of the subject interact with creative inspiration in your writing process?

JH – I’ve always been interested in mythology and religion. You might see it as a lifetime’s study, which is what I mean when I say I don’t do much research. I’ve been reading about the Norse myths since I was seven years old, and I guess it was inevitable that a lot of what I’d read would find its way into the story on some level.

However, while I was writing Runemarks, I started to teach myself Old Icelandic, which I found unexpectedly rewarding, both in terms of reading texts in the original – and arguing about translation! – and in terms of the insight that learning a language gives you about the priorities and preoccupations of a culture. Some of this also found its way into the books; I’m not sure how much. I allow the ideas that interest me to enter the story through intellectual osmosis rather than any kind of formal planning.

Wotan (Odin) & Loge (Loki) in a 1910 Arthur Rackham
painting illustrating Wagner's Ring of the Nibelungen

KS – Your version of Loki is reminiscent of Richard Wagner’s Loge. In Der Ring des Nibelungen, the German composer conflates Loki with the Edda’s Logi, who is wildfire personified. You give “Wildfire” as one of Loki’s many names (as well as the meaning of his runemark) and associate the Trickster with fire throughout both novels. Your description of him as “a slim red-haired person” – coupled with his link to flame – reminded me of one of Arthur Rackham’s classic illustrations for the Ring. Was the version created by Wagner and Rackham a source for your character, or does he come from some other creative place entirely?

JH – No, this is always how I’ve envisaged Loki. As a child, I wrote a great deal about him and did a great number of drawings. Looking back at some of them now, it’s clear that my early pictures and descriptions of Loki are very similar to the way I describe him in Runemarks. I only discovered Rackham later, when I developed a passion for the Pre-Raphaelites and their artistic descendants. For a long time, my only visual point of reference for Loki and the Norse gods was a book by H.A. Guerber called The Myths of the Norsemen, which contains a number of illustrations. Like a child watching a bad movie based on a favorite story, I felt that the gods were not portrayed at all as I imagined them.

Thor & his talking hammer in Legends of Valhalla: Thor
The horror! The horror!

KS – In Runemarks, Loki gives Sugar a common pebble marked with runes that “make a sigil that was unmistakably Loki’s” – a plot device similar to one M.D. Lachlan’s Loki uses in Wolfsangel. In Runelight, Thor’s hammer appears as a sort of wisecracking midget, a bit like the talking hammer in Iceland’s Legends of Valhalla animated film. Your works predate both of these others, and I’m not saying there’s any cross-pollination here; similar source material often leads to independent arrival at similar ends. I’m just curious about your relationship to contemporary fantasy, whether in literature or film. Do you keep up with the latest releases? Do you follow modern fantasy or steer clear of it?

Thor's actually pretty awesome in the Dungeons & Dragons
Deities & Demigods manual. Check out his hit points!

JH – I’m not familiar any of the works you mention, but there are so many Norse-related stories out there that it’s not surprising if there’s cross-pollination. So many of these stories and characters are archetypal – it’s what makes them so familiar. I don’t avoid modern fantasy at all – or if I do it’s because of the pressures of time rather than indifference. On the other hand, there is an awful lot of it, and nowadays I find it hard to know what to choose. I loved George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones books – I was into the series long before it became fashionable – but there’s a lot of indifferent material out there, and I’m tired of reading fantasy books that read like a game of D&D.

Thor's hammer Mjölnir on the Runelight cover

KS – The Marvel Comics version of Thor has been around for over fifty years, and the series has built up a deep mythology of its own. It pervades popular culture, and it’s sometimes hard for the iconic imagery and characterization of Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and other contributors not to seep into our own imaginings. I see a similar impetus in Lee and Kirby moving Thor’s adventures to contemporary New York and your own desire “to explore the humour of the legends and to make them accessible to a different readership.” Have you ever been a reader of the comic? Did the successes and failures of the series affect the design of your own mythological world in any way?

JH – I’m not familiar with the Marvel comics – I wasn’t allowed comics as a child – though I have seen and enjoyed the movie Thor. As for the design of the world, it wasn’t really a conscious thing. My version of Inland and its inhabitants has evolved over a very long time – and, I suspect, will continue to do so for as long as I write these stories.

Loki figure by Wendy Froud

KS – These two books have already manifested themselves in various media. Random House filmed a moody “book trailer” for Runemarks, and you’ve held a contest for fan-made Runelight videos. I first discovered your books by stumbling across the Runemarks audiobook. Our mutual friend Becca Maravolo has created a line of Runemarks-inspired jewelry, and Yoda designer Wendy Froud has created a Loki figurine modeled on your version of the Trickster. Leaving aside purely financial considerations, how would you most like to see Maddy’s adventures translated – audio drama, graphic novel, TV series, feature film, puppet show or prog rock concept album? Would you rather see the book remain a book, or do you look forward to collaborating with artists in other media to create a new version of your work?

Joanne Harris wanders on ancient paths
Photograph by Jennifer Robertson

JH – I’d love to see what people make of my books, regardless of the medium. I’ve seen a great deal of fan art and fan fiction, much of it very imaginative. It just goes to show what affection there is for these characters. Of course I would like to see a film, as long as I could choose the director. I’d love to work with Guillermo del Toro, for instance, and if anyone ever felt like developing Asgard! The Musical, I’d be their friend for life.

KS – Many, many months (and sixteen single-spaced pages of notes) after I first asked you for an interview, that’s finally the end of my questions! There’s definitely a depth of concept in your work, and I feel we’ve only scratched the surface here. Thank you for your patience and willingness to dig into these matters.

JH – Well, thank youfor your very interesting questions. I don’t think I’ve spoken as much to anyone on the subject of my personal beliefs, or spent quite so long on a single interview. But I really enjoyed it. I hope you find it useful.

ASK A NORSE MYTHOLOGIST #2

Last year, I began a new feature at The Norse Mythology Blog called "Ask a Norse Mythologist." Everyone is welcome to submit questions about Norse mythology and Norse religion through the online form. I've received messages asking about Loki from all over the USA, Canada, Turkey and the United Kingdom. I’m very glad that people of such different ages and backgrounds are curious to learn more about the Norse myths. I hope that my Loki answers will be helpful to others, or at least lead them to do further reading and research on their own.

Richard Windsor (Beloit, Wisconsin, USA) asks:

“Is Loki the god of mischief or the god of fire?”

Wotan (Odin) and a flaming Loge (Loki) in a
recent production of Wagner's Das Rheingold
by the Metropolitan Opera in New York

Neither, really. Loki is not referred to by either of these titles in the source texts of Norse mythology. Rudolf Simek calls him “a god without a function,” and all the major scholars of Norse mythology and religion agree that Loki was never actually worshiped in ancient times.

The idea that he was a “god of mischief” seems to be connected with modern scholarship that attempts to connect him to Tricksters in other cultures (African, Native American, etc). The portrayal of Loki in Marvel Comics has strengthened this connection in the popular imagination. The “god of fire” idea is a famous mistake that is due to the similarity between the names Loki and Logi, the latter being a personification of fire in the well-known story of Thor’s visit to the giant Útgarða-Loki. The connection to fire was popularized by the composer Richard Wagner in his Ring operas, in which he portrayed Loki as a sort of fire-sprite named Loge.

Cameron Schick (Erie, Pennsylvania, USA) asks:

“Why does Loki want to end the gods?”

An 18th-century illustration of Loki & his fishing net

When you get right down to it, nobody knows. There is no motivation provided in the Eddas, the 13th-century Icelandic books that are the source of much of what we know about Norse mythology. The idea that literary characters have an inner psychological life is a modern concept that can’t actually be found in medieval literature. The Eddas provide no interior monologues in which the characters reflect on why they act they way they do.

That being said, it’s very difficult for modern people like you and me to keep from wondering about this issue. From a contemporary perspective, you can view Loki through the lens of the nature versus nurture debate. His behavior can be explained from either end of the spectrum; just remember that we’re projecting a modern way of thinking onto ancient stories. The results say more about how we think than about how the people who created these stories may have thought.

If you believe that people are born with an intrinsic predisposition to good or evil, you can read the tales of Loki from that perspective. At the beginning of mythic time, Loki is a giant. The giants are the destructive opponents of the gods, so you could say that Loki is a natural born killer. Loki fathers the most monstrous enemies of the gods: the Midgard serpent, the wolf Fenrir and the death-goddess Hel. He brings the killers of Odin and Thor into being. In the mythological present, Loki lives with the gods and is the traveling companion of Odin and Thor who continually gets them both into and out of trouble. In the future of the mythic timeline, Loki will bring about the death of the god Balder and lead the forces of darkness to destroy the world at the final battle of Ragnarök. So, you can interpret this as Loki starting out evil, striving to do good (as best he can) and finally reverting to his evil ways. According to this reading, he can’t escape his nature.

Loki's monstrous children in an illustration by Willy Pogany
from Padraic Colum's Children of Odin (1920)

On the other hand, if you believe that it is an individual’s environment and experience that determine character, you can also read the stories about Loki in that light. Some of my students have great sympathy for Loki’s monstrous children. While they are still young, the gods throw the serpent into the depths of the ocean, cruelly bind the wolf and banish Hel to the world of the dead – before any of them have actually done anything to harm the gods. To modern sensibilities, it seems like this mistreatment could have driven Loki to seek revenge. In the world of the myths, however, the gods are acting to protect themselves from a prophecy that declares these three will bring about the Doom of the Gods.

You can also ask if the actions of the gods actually turn Loki’s children to evil and therefore make the prophecy come true. Do the gods bring their doom upon themselves? Again, it all depends how you read the myths, but you should always be aware that we are overlaying modern concepts onto ancient tales. In order to put your mind into an ancient worldview (as much as that is actually possible), you have to realize that physical deformity was taken as a sign of evil. This led to horrible mistreatment (in real life) of people who were born with physical challenges. Even in modern times, we are often guilty of judging the character of individuals by their physical appearance. It makes no sense to suggest that long-ago gods would love and cherish children born to a giant in the form of a serpent, a wolf and a half-corpse woman. Although the monsters may seem sympathetic to modern sensibilities, that sympathy would have been completely alien to the culture that invented these stories. Myths reflect the values of the cultures that create them.

Miguel La Porte (Texas, USA) writes:

“I wanted to know if there was any documented story that tells us why Loki was so against the gods, who in reality were his very family.”

That’s a very interesting question. Please check out what I wrote above to Cameron, regarding motivation. I would like to make clear that the gods are not really Loki’s family – at least not his birth family.

In Snorri Sturluson’s Edda, it says that Loki is “numbered among the Æsir [the gods].” The language is important; Loki may hang out with the gods in several myths, but he is not one of them. He is the son of a giant, and – in the world of the myths – kinship is reckoned through your line of fathers. As a giant, Loki actually belongs to the family of the gods’ greatest enemies. In the end, he sides with his birth family against his adopted family.

Thor & Loki being adoptive brothers is an idea from comics, not myth

I’d also like to point out that Loki is not the adopted son of Odin; that’s an idea from Marvel Comics, not Norse mythology. We’re not talking about an adopted son attacking the man who raised and nurtured him. The myths tell us that Loki is the blood-brother of Odin. They swore allegiance, which implies that they are at least somewhat on equal terms and that they may have started as enemies on either side of the god/giant divide. Loki’s attack on the gods violates the oath of brotherhood that he took with Odin – as does his causing the murder of Balder, who actually is one of Odin’s sons. Oath-breaking and murder were (and are) very serious crimes. In Norse culture, Loki would have been seen as an outlaw; he was someone who committed crimes that meant he could no longer be part of society.

Tom Hovland (Canada) writes:

“What I want to know is if Loki is just a character who was added to the stories later on, or he was just a minor player, or he was just poorly documented.”

Loki plays a major part in the Norse myths that have survived. These myths mainly come from two collections – the Prose Edda and the Poetic Edda, both written down in 13th-century Iceland. The oldest written source for Loki is the 9th-century Norwegian poem Haustlöng (“Autumn-long”), which includes Loki’s adventure with the giant Thjazi. There is no mention of Loki in earlier sources from continental Europe or the British Isles.

Scholars have been arguing about Loki’s age and origin for very long time. Since his stories come from a time when heathens and Christians interacted, some have argued that he is a late invention (based on Christian demonology) that was inserted into the mythology – or that Christian ideas about devils were incorporated into his character. Others have suggested that the original conception of Loki was a heathen one of a bound giant or of a master thief. As Hilda Ellis Davidson writes, “Other theories which try to establish Loki as an early god in the Germanic world have not been very successful.”

When I was a kid, this is exactly how I drew the Hulk's teeth when
he was angry. Since he's always angry, I had a lot of practice.

Some people have seen an image of Loki on an ancient furnace stone found on a Danish beach. Interpreting the carving this way is based on a basic misunderstanding of Loki’s nature that considers him a god of fire. Read my answer to Richard (above) for an explanation of this linguistic mistake. We’re left with a circular argument that (wrongly) posits Loki as a god of fire, then defines a random face on a furnace stone as Loki because he’s a god of fire. See how the logic fails? The other argument for this being Loki is that the image supposedly shows stitches on the face’s lips, as in the myth in which an angry dwarf sews Loki’s mouth shut. I think it’s pretty clear from the close-up photo that the vertical lines are simply meant to represent the face's lower teeth. Archeologists have a distressing tendency to associate with a god any representational figure that they can’t immediately explain.

A bound Loki or a bound Satan?

There is a carving from England that has also been interpreted as representing Loki in the form of a bound giant, waiting for Ragnarök. However, the image is actually found on a fragment of a Christian cross from the late 10th century; England’s conversion to Christianity began way back in the 6th century. Given the late date of the carving, its location and its Christian setting, it can arguably portray a devil or demon from Christian lore. The problem with interpreting this as Loki is that we’re reading backwards from Icelandic mythology and projecting it on an English artifact. Without the Icelandic myth of Loki’s binding, there would be no reason to identify this Christian image as Loki. It’s a flawed argument, like the one for the furnace stone.

Loki, Sigyn & the snake
on the Gosforth Cross

A different 10th-century cross from England has a figure that may be more convincingly argued as representing Loki. The Gosforth Cross includes an image of a bound figure lying on his back, with a woman holding a bowl above him and what may be a snake hovering above his head. This lines up well with the myth describing Loki being bound by the gods, with his wife Sigyn holding a bowl above his face to catch the venom dripping from the snake hanging above. Although we’re again dealing with a Christian crucifix, elsewhere on the object are images that seem to portray the Norse gods Balder, Heimdall and Vidar. Altogether, the cross has been interpreted as using imagery from Norse mythology to help converted heathens grasp the teachings of their new Christian faith. Again, the late date and the Christian setting of the crucifix mean that it doesn’t tell us anything about Loki that we don’t know from the Icelandic sources. As with the other English cross, we only interpret this figure as Loki because of what we know from the Icelandic manuscripts.

One interesting source that may shed some light on all this is History of the Danes, composed in the 13th century by the Danish writer Saxo Grammaticus. In this massive work, the Norse gods appear in very different forms from those we're used to (which come from Icelandic literature), and the stories themselves are very different. Saxo tells us of a human hero named Thorkil who finds a bound giant when he travels to “a land that knew neither stars nor the light of day but was shrouded in everlasting night.” The story has been connected by scholars to the Edda tale of Thor’s visit to the giant Útgarða-Loki. In Snorri’s version, Loki travels with Thor, and we interpret the name of the giant as “Loki of the Outer Regions.” In other words, this deceitful fellow is to the giants as Loki is to the gods; he's their Loki.

The giant in Saxo is also called Útgarða-Loki, but he's a very different figure. Here’s the part of the story describing how Thorkil finds the giant:

After this, with others in front acting as torch-bearers, [Thorkil] squeezed his body in the narrow jaws of the cave and gazed on every side at rows of iron seats festooned with slithering serpents. Next a quiet stretch of water flowing gently over a sandy bed met his eyes. When he had crossed it, he reached a place where the floor sloped downwards rather more steeply. From here the visitors could see a murky, repulsive chamber, inside which they descried Útgarða-Loki, his hands and feet laden with a huge weight of fetters. His rank-smelling hairs were as long and tough as spears of cornel-wood. Thorkil kept one of these as a more visible proof of his labours by heaving at it with his friends till it was plucked from the chin of the unresisting figure; immediately such a powerful stench rolled over the bystanders that they had to smother their nostrils in their cloaks and could scarcely breathe. They had hardly gained the open air when the snakes flew at them from every direction and spat on them.

You’ll have to read the book to find out what happens next!

Louis Huard's illustration of Loki bound

In this version of the myth, Útgarða-Loki seems to be Loki himself. The scholar E.O.G. Turville-Petre writes that this giant “appears to be Loki, expelled from Asgard [land of the gods] into Utgard [land of the giants], in the form which he took after he had caused the murder of Baldr. He was bound with fetters, and thus he will remain until the Ragnarök.” Note that this giant is bound underground and guarded by poison-spitting snakes, which agrees with the punishment of Loki that we’re familiar with. It also lines up with the image of the bound giant on the cross discussed above, if we decide to interpret that image as a bound giant. As I wrote earlier, some scholars have argued that this idea of Loki as a bound giant is the older version of the character. I hope you now see how difficult it is to move between physical artifacts and literary sources and argue the meaning of one based on the other.

In the end, the answer to your question is really that the only definitive things we know about Loki come from late literary sources, either from the time of northern Christian conversion or long after that conversion was completed. There is a lot of scholarship on this issue, and I've merely addressed some of the basic issues here.

ASK A NORSE MYTHOLOGIST #2 (continued)
Click here for Questioning Loki, Part One

Is Loki really a special squeezable unicorn?

Emily Taylor Kent (Bristol, United Kingdom) asks:

“Do you think Loki is ‘evil’ or just mischievous, cheeky and misunderstood? Do you think he deserved his punishment?”

I think that it depends on whether you decide to read the mythology as a whole or decide to throw out the uncomfortable bits. Personally, I think we have to take everything we know about Loki as a totality and make our judgement accordingly. Let’s look at the evidence.

Loki's children turn out evil. Since Darwin won out over Lamarck, we haven’t subscribed to the idea that acquired characteristics can be transmitted to our offspring. Given that there’s no mention of Loki raising his monstrous kids in his household and passing on his values to them, let’s not blame him for the nasty things they do. On the other hand, you should read what I wrote to Cameron (in Part One) about our modern sympathy for monsters – a sympathy that would have been completely alien to the worldview from which the Norse myths originate.

Loki's children actually do seem a bit rough, though, don't they?

SCORE: Evil 0, Cheeky 0

Loki has a bunch of adventures in which he gets the gods out of sticky widgets. Admittedly, he usually gets the gods into these awkward situations in the first place. He really does seem more naughty than evil in these stories, so let’s give him a point on the mischievous side.

SCORE: Evil 0, Cheeky 1

Now we run into problems. Loki brings about the murder of Balder, the fellow that Snorri Sturluson calls “the wisest of the Æsir [the Norse gods] and most beautifully spoken and most merciful.” You could even call him Christlike. What did Balder ever do to hurt anyone? Nothing. He’s the great innocent of Asgard. With no motivation given in the myths (other than, perhaps, base jealousy), Loki causes Balder’s death. He simply kills the nicest of all the gods. You really can’t read this action as anything other than evil.

SCORE: Evil 1, Cheeky 1

Loki isn't the greatest guy to have over to the house for a party.

In the poem Lokasenna (“Loki’s Quarrel”), Loki murders a servant named Fimafeng simply because he’s mad that folks were praising the excellence of the waitstaff. He's jealous of waiters, now? Fimafeng is the second innocent killed by Loki. Yikes! Loki then goes on to say nasty, nasty things about each one of the gods and goddesses – until Thor shows up and shuts him up. Although some of the things he says may actually be true, airing people’s private business in public in the nastiest possible way isn’t much better than outright slander, is it?

SCORE: Evil 2, Cheeky 1

Here’s the big ’un. At the end of mythic time, Loki attacks the gods in the ship Naglfar, which is made from the fingernails and toenails of dead people. Eww, right? Here’s how the scene is described in the poem Völuspá (“Prophecy of the Seeress”):

A ship journeys from the east, Muspell’s sons [the giants] are coming
over the waves, and Loki steers.
There are the monstrous brood with all the raveners,
The brother of Byleist [Loki] is in company with them.

Loki actually drives the gang of giants to come kill the gods in the final battle of Ragnarök. During the ensuing carnage, almost all of the gods are killed, every human being (except two) are killed, and the world is destroyed. Mass murder on a worldwide scale and destruction of the earth itself – could it get any worse? By the end of mythic time, Loki makes Hitler, Stalin and Mao look like amateurs.

FINAL SCORE: Evil 3, Cheeky 1

What happened to you, Loki? You used to be cool.

In the end, Loki really is an evil so-and-so. He may have some good times with Odin and Thor in the middle-period stories, but that can’t really balance out the truly evil things he does. I know that a lot of people today want to see Loki as a gothy emo cutie, but that’s really going directly against the source mythology.

Regarding Loki’s punishment, the Poetic Edda tells us that Loki is captured after his second murder. He is “bound with the guts of his son Nari,” but the poem doesn’t tell us how those guts were got. While the Poetic Edda simply says that Loki’s other son “changed into a wolf,” Snorri Sturluson writes in his Prose Edda that this wolf-boy ripped his brother apart (but does not say that the gods forced him to do so). Given the fact than, in Norse mythology and saga, “changing into a wolf” can mean (1) going into a berserker rage or (2) being branded an outlaw and kicked out of the community, I'm not so sure that we can take the original quote to mean a literal change into an animal. Snorri is notorious for taking poetic images literally, then spinning them out into long-winded explanations.

As for the implication (i.e., not a direct statement) in the Poetic Edda that the gods kill one of Loki's sons, this is actually not an alien concept to the moral worldview of ancient times. There are many instances in many sources concerning the murder of an enemy's children. This awful act appears in not just in Norse myth and saga, but in the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Koran, Jewish scripture, Greek myth & etc. Although this idea is rightly abhorrent to us today, we should be careful about projecting modern morality onto ancient texts. Seeing Loki as a victim of outrageous cruelty by the gods is a simple misunderstanding of historical cultural realities.

Sigyn's favorite song: "Stand by Your Man"

This complicated business aside, Loki’s subsequent punishment is described by Snorri like this:

Skadi [the giant maiden in my Norse Mythology Blog logo] took a poisonous snake and fastened it over Loki’s face; poison dripped down from it. Sigyn, Loki’s wife, sat there and held a basin under the poison. But when the basin was full, she carried the poison out; and meanwhile the poison fell on Loki. Then he writhed so violently that all the earth shook from it; these are now called earthquakes.

You have to decide whether this is a just punishment for a purely malicious pair of murders, both against completely innocent victims with no real motivation. Binding for (nearly) eternity and snake poison (sometimes) in the face are both pretty nasty things, but the punishment for murder in real life has been pretty nasty, too. I think you need to weigh all the above evidence and information for yourself and make your own judgement – while always keeping in mind the danger of reading today's morality and psychology into yesterday's mythology.

Michael Bullard (Hamilton, Ontario, Canada) writes:

Recently my nephew and I were watching an animated version of Marvel's Thor on television that featured the frost giants as the villains. Somewhere in the story, it's mentioned that Loki is actually a jotun [an Old Norse term usually translated as “giant”] like the frost giants and not one of the gods. My nephew picked up on this and asked how Loki could look the same as Thor and the gods, but actually be born a jotun – which were giant icy monsters in the film. It may seem like a silly question, but it was one I remember asking myself as a child when reading Norse stories. Not just about Loki, but about the giants themselves. I guess what I'm asking is:

Just how giant were the giants? Could they change size? Could the gods change size? Does it even matter? How did so many gods and giants intermarry and have children if the giants were, well, giant?

What happened to you, Thor? You used to be cool.

Anyone who follows this blog knows that I’ve read a lot of Marvel Comics (and was a bit heartbroken by Kenneth Branagh’s Thor movie). I really do love the comic books, and I’m always happy when they lead young people (like your nephew) to the original Norse myths. I’ll address your questions in order.

Giants could definitely change their physical form or, at least, how we see them. The story of Thor’s visit to the hall of Útgarða-Loki shows this; the giant of the tale has the ability to change his outward appearance, and he is a master of illusion.

The gods can certainly change size. In the story of Thor’s fishing trip, the god of thunder swells to gigantic proportions. The angrier he gets, the larger he gets (like the Hulk), until his feet go through the floor of the boat and rest on the bottom of the ocean as he throws his hammer from on high. That’s pretty big!

As for whether this matters, I’m not sure that it does. I stress to my college students that we shouldn’t try to apply too much of the logic of modern realist literature to ancient tales of gods and giants. Here’s what the Roman writer Tacitus had to say about the Germanic tribes in 98 CE:

They conceive it unworthy the grandeur of celestial beings to confine their deities within walls, or to represent them under a human similitude: woods and groves are their temples; and they affix names of divinity to that secret power, which they behold with the eye of adoration alone.

Note the absence of physically-manifested gods (of any size) hanging about
in Emil Doepler's 1905 illustration of a sacred grove described by Tacitus

This was written over 1,000 years before the Eddas, but it’s interesting to note that the ancient tribes (at least in this reported instance) did not think of their gods in discrete physical terms as walking and talking characters. Gods and giants are mystical beings with fluid characteristics. To get too hung up on physical details is like asking what color God’s beard was before it turned white, or who cuts his hair.

Your question about intermarriage between gods and giants gets right to the heart of the matter. Both Odin and Thor had giantesses for mothers. Njord (god) marries Skadi (giantess) and Frey (god) marries Gerd (giantess). In no instance is there any suggestion that the giantesses are physically larger than the gods. Loki, who is definitely a giant, seems to be smaller than Thor; he even hangs on to Thor’s belt for safety while crossing a raging river.

Books are awesome (even ones without pictures)

In the end, we should avoid thinking of the giants in terms set by later folklore and popular culture, but try to read the Norse sources with Rudolf Simek’s words in mind:

The concept of giants probably originated in the observation of various natural phenomena, in particular wintery phenomena (hence: frost giants) which overwhelmed human understanding and lay outside the close area of experience of men. Thus giants are natural spirits and among the original inhabitants of the world.

Think about winter storms. You can have a tiny little snowfall that barely coats the ground or a huge raging blizzard that shuts down schools and causes multiple car accidents. In other words, you can have a tiny giant or a huge giant. Make sense?

Jovana Garcia (Florida, USA) asks:

Loki & the kids share a quiet moment

“I want to know if there has been any mention of Loki having mortal or demigod children and, if there was, did they inherit any powers from him or other gods?”

This is a much easier question to answer! Loki’s three monstrous children (the giant snake, the giant wolf, the half-corpse Hel) were all born of a giantess. Loki seems to have also had two sons with his wife Sigyn, who is a goddess. So, no – Loki doesn’t have half-human children like, for instance, Zeus does.

Irem Ayar (Turkey) writes:

I'm a high schooler who is very interested in Norse mythology but, unfortunately, there aren't so many books about it in my country. So I've read some tales on the net (seems like they're from the book The Jotunbok: Working with the Giants of the Northern Tradition) and loved them very much, but I'm not sure if they're real myths or some talented writers who are inspired by the real myths just wrote them, because I've never heard of these tales before.

For an example, is there really a myth about the birth of Loki?

I’m very glad to hear from you, and I’m saddened by the lack of access you have to good information. I would steer clear of books like the one you mention, which really have more to do with modern neopaganism than with any actual Norse mythology or historical Norse religion. No, there is no myth about the birth of Loki. That’s the danger of some of these new books – the authors tend to make up information to fill in the gaps in the mythology, but they don’t make it clear what is original and what is modern. J.R.R. Tolkien was also very interested in exploring what could have existed in these blank spots in the Norse myths, but he would never have dared to suggest that his works of fantasy were anything other than modern creations.

The Norse Mythology Blog recommendsThe Children of Odin

If you want to explore the major tales of Norse mythology, I strongly recommend Padraic Colum’s Children of Odin. It’s the first book I ever read on the subject, and it’s very easy to read (with great black & white illustrations by Willy Pogany). It presents the main stories in an order that makes sense, and it provides a great introduction to the most famous myths. You can read it for free online by clicking here. After you’ve read it, just send me a message through the “Ask a Norse Mythologist” tab, and I can recommend another book. Please keep in touch!

That's it for this edition of “Ask a Norse Mythologist.” Keep on reading and asking questions – both activities are good for the soul.

For several years, I've been wondering about heathens in the US military. When I say heathens, I mean those who follow the contemporary iteration of Norse religion that is sometimes known as Ásatrú. For instance, I’ve had questions about the accuracy of data regarding adherents of various minority faiths within the military. I’ve come across small bits of information about the Department of Veterans Affairs forbidding the appearance on grave markers of Thor’s hammer (probably the most popular religious symbol for historical and modern heathens), but I discovered nothing definitive. I wasn’t able to find detailed answers to my questions – until I met Josh and Cat Heath.

Josh & Cat's heathen wedding in Denmark (2009)

Born in Laconia, New Hampshire and raised in nearby Holderness, Josh was on active duty in the US Army from 2006 to 2011. He served as a Quartermaster and Chemical Equipment Repairer / General Mechanic and was deployed during Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2008-2009. He’s currently serving his last few months with the US Army Reserve while studying Political Science and French as a full-time student at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York, where he is also working to develop the school’s Veterans Liaison Office.

Cat was born in Chorley, Lancashire, England; the US is her seventh country of residence. She earned a BA with Honors in Modern Languages (French, Spanish and Portuguese) at the University of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne and met Josh while he was stationed in South Korea, where she was teaching kindergarten. The couple moved to Germany and had a civil wedding before Josh was deployed to Iraq. After his return a year later, the couple had a heathen wedding ceremony in Denmark. Cat currently works “as a corporate slave” but is also planning an escape via her translation business.

Together, Josh and Cat have been deeply involved in American heathenry and have played important roles in the struggle for its recognition as a religion in the US military. In 2010, they founded the Open Halls Project, an organization “set up to connect military heathens with civilian and military heathens throughout the world.”

KS – What is reconstructionist heathenry?

JH – It’s a process of breaking down all the information we have about historic heathen worldview and then trying to make that worldview work in the modern day. In some ways, it’s easier to say what it isn’t. Reconstructing heathenry is not reenactment. Reconstructing heathenry is not doing the same things that our ancestors did. Reconstruction in heathenry is about understanding why the ancient heathen peoples did what they did and applying that thought process to the building of religious ceremonies and customs (also known as sidu), today. There isn’t really such a thing as reconstructionist heathenry; different heathens have done differing levels of reconstruction. The movement to do more reconstruction has gotten stronger in the last ten years or so, and this movement has erroneously been called reconstructionist heathenry, when really it’s just heathenry with a focus on understanding and implementing a traditional worldview.

Swedish artist Carl Larsson's (highly imaginative) vision of ancient blót

For example, we don’t know exactly how a blót [Old Norse “sacrifice”] was done in heathen times. We have a lot of archaeological information and we have a load of textual information about what became outlawed during Christian times, and we can extrapolate a lot of great information from all the research that has been done. The key, at least how I understand it, is that blót (and really any sacrificial ceremony in heathenry) is about creating a cyclic gifting relationship between the gods and ourselves. These same relationships can be built with the landvættir [Old Norse “land spirits”] and our ancestors, and I think it’s been a key part of recent advances in heathenry to focus on the fact that those relationships are, in a lot of ways, more important than the one with the gods. Our ancestors care about us, because we are more closely connected to them – the same with the landvaettir. They live with us; that relationship is like having a good connection with your neighbors. I like having a good relationship with the mayor, too, but if I don’t get along with the dude next door, that would impact my life a lot more.

Others might have a different view of Ásatrú or heathenry and how reconstruction fits into that. I know for a fact that some of my close friends don’t always agree with me, but I think that’s important. We don’t agree, but we can discuss all of the concepts together and really get into quality debates and help each other work out some thoughts and concepts.

CH – Reconstructionist heathenry is very misunderstood, and – as someone that’s often associated with it – I tend to find myself having certain “accusations” leveled at me. Most of the time, these center around how we’re all apparently “soulless” and just slavishly following what them there dusty old books say, that we apparently don’t have any of that UPG [Unverified Personal Gnosis, or mystical experience] stuff, and that we’re all mean and intolerant.

Self-portrait of Cat Heath

I did used to get quite annoyed by these accusations, but now I see them more as being indicative of the misunderstandings that exist out there about reconstructionism. As my husband said, sometimes it’s better to try and explain reconstructionist heathenry by what it is not, and, for some reason, some of what it is perceived to be not is often offensive to others, too. My husband has talked a little about the process that reconstructionists engage in, and I believe that reconstructionism is something that all heathens engage in; it’s just that some engage in it to a greater degree than others. However, having said that, heathenry suffers just as much from the curse of labeling as any other group on earth does. The reasons why we humans label each other are mostly just for identification purposes, but sometimes we label as a way of devaluing a group so that we don’t have to listen to anything they have to say. This is what I believe has happened in both the “anti-recon” and “recon” camps that seem to have sprung up. Trying to figure out what came first here is probably one of those “chicken and the egg” type scenarios – i.e., did the labeling create and reinforce group identities, or did already extant group identities lead to the labeling?

Either way, groups that are more reconstructionist in nature do have some differences. We tend to be more locally and community based (as opposed to playing on the national stage) and tend to focus on building up traditions over the years that can be handed down to our children. In terms of internet interactions, we also tend to stick to discussing subjects that can be backed up by sources, which admittedly can lead to the impression that we’re somehow “anti-UPG,” but we’re really not. Some of my most treasured UPG conversations have been with “recons” at the end of a night of revelry and with a drink in hand. We just tend to keep it to ourselves or among trusted friends and, in the age of Facebook, Tumblr and whatever else that encourages us to share every single detail of our lives for public consumption, is there really anything wrong in keeping some things – moreover things we consider sacred– more private?

KS – How is reconstructionist heathenry different from other iterations of Norse religion in the last half-century?

JH – Reconstruction is a technique, it isn’t really a type of religious practice. From that perspective, it’s just another way of getting at information to help forge a modern Norse religion. Having said that, I think the biggest difference is we are trying to get away from the universal ideas that most modern heathens started with. Heathenry in Iceland is different from heathenry in the UK, is different from heathenry in the Northeast of the US, and is likely different from heathenry in Australia. There isn’t anything wrong with that! That’s a good thing. The regional differences of practice are important. Regional religious expression was different throughout the [historical] heathen world. However, we are all working from the same base information set, so even if what we do is different, why we do it should generally be the same. It’s the worldview that is important, not the structure of blót or worship event.

Even thunder gods need help with the ladies, sometimes.

This is the biggest issue I’ve had with books written by heathens. They often write out “this is how you do a ritual blót,” instead of writing “this is the worldview surrounding why you do blót.” Then, instead of explaining why we think our ancestors are directly important to us, some folks simply say a particular ancestry is important. No, it doesn’t matter where your ancestors came from. If you lived in a heathen tribe in the old days, and you grew up there, you knew their way of life. You were a heathen. Period. Honoring our ancestors is thanking them for the actions that they took that have led us to where we are today. Old Spice has a tagline on their products: if your grandfather didn’t wear it, you wouldn’t be alive today. Cheeky and a bit odd, but totally true in this context.

CH – The biggest difference I can think of here is that non-Norse-focused groups (like Germanic or Anglo-Saxon heathens) tend to be more of a reconstructionist nature. Well, other than those “Seax Wicca” people, but we don’t talk about those. They’re like Fight Club; we just don’t talk about them. Other than that, though, I agree with my husband – it’s just a method that happens to have led to the creation of some really cool groups and interesting customs.

KS – How did you two come to the form of heathenry you practice today?

The Hammer and the Cross
by Harry Harrison & John Holm

JH – It was the year 1994 or 1995. I had just read a great book called The Hammer and the Cross by Harry Harrison (may he never be forgotten). I seriously liked it, and I wondered why there weren’t people still worshipping the Norse gods. I kinda left it at that, as well as a 5th grade “research” paper on the Vikings and their religion and travels. That summer, I worked as a volunteer at the local library and came across a term in a book that I couldn’t pronounce, but I was totally sure it was my new religion. That word was Ásatrúarfélagið [“Æsir Faith Fellowship”], and – really truly at the time – I had no idea what it meant or said, except the definition was belief in the Norse gods in Iceland. Simple as that, I was hooked and, with internet acces, I learned about another easier to pronounce word: Ásatrú. I read the websites at the time, learned about the Nine Noble Virtues [a list of moral guidelines created by English heathens in the 1970s] and called it a day. From then till 2004, I met only two other heathens, and I was not impressed by them. So, I wasn’t really much of a heathen. I said I was Ásatrú, but I didn’t really make offerings regularly, and I didn’t even really know all that much.

Sleeping in your car changes your life. I sat down and made a ten-year plan while I was living in San Diego in my car. Part of that ten-year plan was to really make Ásatrú/heathenry a part of my life. Not just to believe in it, but to truly live it. I popped back on the internet and began doing some searching again, and I came across several very bad websites – all of them racist garbage. At that point, I almost gave up looking for heathens that were worthwhile, again.

The battle-cry of Asatru Lore: "Cite your source!"

Then I stumbled across [the online forum] Asatru Lore. This site was a major impact on my heathenry. This is where I first learned about recon. This is the site that drove me to really start reading the different versions of the Eddas. This is where I discovered Hilda Ellis Davidson and a multitude of wonderful resources regarding heathen worldviews. This is also where I discovered the Nine Noble Virtues were a pile of crap written down in a vain attempt to collate all of the different cultural norms from the Lore (the collected writing and archaeological evidence we have from the heathen age). Practically every assumption I had regarding heathen religious belief was called into question. The concept of Valhalla was thrown out and replaced with a non-dualist concept of afterlife in the grave mound. Rituals were done for a reason: to create a gifting relationship with the gods based on the concepts of luck and action. I learned a lot there.

I also learned that a lot of heathens were a**holes. Ha! Asatru Lore has a reputation for having a culture that smacks down people that don’t know anything, hands their hats back and says, “Shut up until you have an idea what you're talking about.” This was not always an easy environment, but I learned a lot in the years I’ve been a member of the site. I look back at my first post and cringe at some of what I suggested. From there I joined the Army, met my wife – who had been a heathen nearly as long as I had, at that point – met other good heathens and became a part of the Northeast heathen community, even while I was living in South Korea and then Germany. It’s been a long, crazy trip. That’s for sure.

This picture totally proves that Jesus loves dinosaurs.

CH – My first “draw” to the Norse gods was when I was eleven and encountered a book of myths during “silent reading” at school. “Silent reading” was basically a half-hour period in which we had to get a book and read silently, and I loved it – well, as long as I had a good book! For some reason, though, this book was different, because I’d read lots of books by that point and had never prayed to the “characters” when I got home from school before! Right here, I’d like to say that I’d continued on the path of heathenry, that I had grown good and true and different from my Christian whelp classmates, but that’s not what happened. Especially not when other kids were getting confirmed and getting to drink free wine underage. So, that’s what I did. I got confirmed and lasted as a Christian for less than a year. I remember asking the vicar a lot of uncomfortable questions about Jesus and dinosaurs and not actually liking the wine much, after going out of my way to get confirmed so I could have it. So, I just decided to go back to doing what I was doing before.

Unfortunately, I grew up in a place that might be classified as “the sphincter of the universe,” and the only books that were remotely on the subject in the local library in the mid-1990s were all Wicca-type books. I read a lot of books that talked about things like “magic yonis” and pretty much decided to ignore them and continue just doing what I was doing. When I was younger, I used to spend lots of time on the moors, hanging around the old burial mound or the remains of the chambered cairn and the Viking barns. Over the years, I built up a series of places and my own traditions of things that I did there. Growing up on that land, I was more than aware of the folktales, too, and it was almost instinct to make offerings to the “spirits” at certain places.

As 1997 dawned, so did a brave new world: the internet had finally reached the town in which I was attending junior college, and that’s when I abused the college printer, printing out sagas and Eddas for free. Not only that, but I found all manner of websites that caused me to have “Oh, shit! That’s like me!” kind of moments (as well as some really neat ones about shrunken heads). That’s when I decided I was a heathen. In all honesty, I thought it sounded stupid saying the word Ásatrú. It sounded too much like ass for someone from a town like the one I came from, so heathen has always been my preferred term. I travelled around a few countries, had a few adventures, got a degree, found a group of other heathens, partied with lots of pagans, moved to Korea, met my husband and ended up on the US heathen radar (for better or for worse). The rest of the story after that is just boring though – something about moving to Germany, getting married, moving to the States and winding up around the good people we are now.

Krampus says, "Don't cry, little children!
Researching historical religion is fun!"

As for how I became a reconstructionist, I’ll tell you the secret. There’s a magical being called Recon Krampus that actually scoops up unsuspecting heathens in a big net, puts you in a big room where you are held Clockwork Orange style, and forces you to listen to sources and academic arguments. It’s really quite traumatic, and I’d appreciate it if you just left this one alone now, Karl.

No, for real, I just always liked reading and getting to the bottom of mysteries.

In Part Two of The Norse Mythology Blog interview with Josh & Cat Heath, the couple will discuss their international work with heathen soldiers. Stay tuned!

Self-portrait of Josh & Cat Heath

Click here for Heathens in the Military, Part One

KS – What is the Open Halls Project?

JH – The Open Halls Project was a concept that Cat and I came up with, in an attempt to help US military service members. I’d joined the Army with the expectation that I’d never really meet a lot of other heathens. Funny enough, that turned out to be the exact opposite of the truth. I met more heathens once I’d left home and joined the military than I had before that. Even back home, I was getting messages, and – on leave at one point – I got to meet a whole ton of folks that I didn’t have a chance to before that. It was crazy.

The Open Halls Project is a way for heathens to get in touch with other heathens when they move from one duty station to another. That’s its core purpose. The other purposes are running care-package drives for service members that are deployed, advocating for more religious understanding and rights with the Chaplains Corps and making sure that heathen service members are taken care of, in any way we can help them with. We have a website, a Facebook page and a mailing list. Beyond that, it’s Cat and I doing our best with our crazy schedules to make things happen for folks. Sometimes that's easier than others.

CH – I think my husband pretty much covered it.

The doors of the hall are open to all

KS – Why did you decide to start the project?

JH – Cat and I were introduced in South Korea by a person we both sort of knew from the internet. She introduced us, and we also got to meet her. We were three heathens in a country with… three heathens. Our friend was a member of the Troth [a large American heathen organization], a very long-standing member at the time. Over the years of knowing her, she suggested a few times we look into it as an option to join. Honestly, I’ve never been one for joining any groups. I just never saw it as a good idea.

We got talked into joining the Troth because they wanted to have military stewards – folks that do outreach to particular groups. Since we were both keen on the idea of outreach, we decided it was a good idea. We wanted pretty much one thing out of the Troth. At that time, no religious preference was on the books [in the military] for heathens to choose. So, we joined, with the hope that by joining we could build up a program to help military heathens, get Ásatrú and Heathen added as religious preferences and see where that went.

Josh & Cat (on table) attempting to move the process along

To say we were kinda disappointed is a bit of an understatement. The Troth moves a bit slower than Ents do during a ten-year-long Westerosi winter. It took almost ten months to get the paperwork we needed from the folks in charge of the Troth to make the request to add a religious preference. I have to say that we don’t really agree with the Troth when it comes to how they do what they do, but to each their own. I wish many of my friends in the Troth well, but I’m glad we aren’t members anymore – even though I don’t really have hard feelings towards any of them. We are working with the Troth regarding a few projects here and there, and there is a big project coming up that they might be working with us on. Cross your fingers.

CH – Without getting into it too much, another main reason why we set up the Open Halls Project is that from an early stage in our interactions with the Troth and AFA [Asatru Folk Assembly, another large American heathen organization], we realized that some of the inter-org politics and style of working really didn’t fit the ethos that we’d decided to operate by when we came up with the OHP. Our aim was to create something that was grassroots, inclusive and that would be ruled by the principle of “just getting shit done.” For all the good intentions in an org, there is still baggage, history and by-laws to contend with, and we simply didn’t want to be constrained by any of those things.

Being grassroots, we don’t sound as impressive as a 501(c)(3)-status org, but we are certainly freer in how we operate and who we work with. On occasion, we’ve considered looking into becoming a 501(c)(3) org, because – as a grassroots movement – we’re very careful not to take any donations directly, instead facilitating the process between the donor and the service member. However, were we to become a 501(c)(3), we’d end up losing our mobility as a project. Sooner or later, we’d probably also become entrenched in politics, and that would be a pity.

Josh Heath in his work clothes

KS – How many members of the military have registered with Open Halls, and from which service branches?

JH – We have approximately 300 people registered in our official database, 120 in our Facebook group, plus who-knows-how-many website visitors, because we don’t have a tracker. 110 people in the database are active military or veterans. A majority of those are in the Army. We have a decent amount of folks in the Navy and the Air Force – and a very small amount of Marines and no Coast Guard, to my knowledge. These are official registrations, though; the amount of heathens I think would be much higher. Folks might not think these are large amounts of us.

KS – Have you been able to gather any hard data on the total number of practicing heathens serving in the US military?

The stone wall set up by the US Army Chaplains Corps
(Illustration by J.R.R. Tolkien)

JH – My hypothesis is that there are at least 300 practicing heathens, Ásatrú, or Norse Wiccans on active duty in the total military. Though this number might be slightly inflated, it's based on my estimates of folks that are on a multitude of groups on Facebook and around the internet that I’m either directly affiliated with or that I’m aware of. Hard data is very hard to get when the US Army Chaplains Corp has stonewalled you in regards to getting more information about the request you put in almost two years ago.

CH – In other words, it’s not easy to get information on a group that officially doesn’t exist yet, especially when attempts to gain recognition for the existence of that group seem to be going ignored or messed up (seemingly willfully) by the chaplaincy.

KS – How does the number of heathens compare to members of other minority faiths in the military?

JH – I’m doing some research and will put this into perspective. There are 1,456,862 people in the active US Army. As of 2009, 367 have chosen Wicca as their religious preference. From personal experience, I bet thirty to forty of these folks are really heathens of some sort showing solidarity because they didn’t have their own option. 280 Hindus, 40 Salvation Army, 85 Orthodox churches, 41 Quakers (I thought they were pacifists, but anyway…), 2 Magick and Spiritualists – and 46,890 Unknown.

We did get the US Army to add a heathen religious preference: the Troth. It isn’t what we wanted, and our second request to have Ásatrú and Heathen added has been largely stonewalled. Until we added the Troth [as an option], I was one of those folks that was Unknown. The point is this: there are a ton of random religious preferences, and we would not be the smallest of them by a long shot – if we were really counted the way we should be.

Historically, Christian leaders have had a complicated
relationship with interfaith outreach. In 742, the man
who became Saint Boniface reached out to heathens
by chopping down Thor's holy oak with an axe.

CH – To be honest though, the addition of the Troth as a religious preference really didn’t shock me. When Josh was deployed, I decided to go to the chaplaincy to ask if any others with similar beliefs had made themselves known to the chaplains there. The first thing I was told was that the post we were on was one of the most fundamentalist [Christian] posts that that particular chaplain had ever been on and that he’d never come across anyone else professing Ásatrú. He discouraged me from posting flyers because of the reactions from the community and then proceeded to tell me about a man he knew with tattoos that originally didn’t want to come to church but now really enjoys it. He also asked me multiple questions about how I was coping with my husband being away and recommended some Byron Katie and church stuff, even though I’d told him that I was working two teaching jobs on the German economy and was doing fine.

In the end, I left my number behind and asked him to please direct anyone that came asking about heathenism to me, but I got the distinct feeling that Post-it was just going to end up in the trash by the end of the day. Through a lot of that meeting, it was almost as though he couldn’t believe that I could really cope without Jesus, and that – in spite of my work and smart casual attire – I was just deluded that I was. I think this interaction and the way that that chaplain tried to work on me was pretty representative of how many in the chaplaincy function when confronted with another belief system. If nothing else, it soured our view of the chaplains on-post.

I know it sounds like I’ve just allowed one bad experience with the chaplains to affect my view of the whole chaplaincy. However, I’ve heard far more bad about them from other heathens than good, including one tale of how a suicidal soldier went for help and was told by the chaplain that he couldn’t help him unless he converted to Christianity. Which is a pity, because it’s definitely not in the remit of the chaplaincy to propagate one religious belief over another. They’re supposed to support and facilitate the expression of religious beliefs for all in the military community, regardless of what those beliefs are.

I want YOU to properly fill out religious preference forms

KS – Multiple soldiers have told me that, when they were asked their religion for official military records at induction and answered Heathen, their answer was changed to Other or No Religious Preference. Have you had experience with this or been contacted by others who have?

JH – Yes. I’ve heard of the second one happening, but the first is more common. The US military, until recently, did not have an official religious preference for heathens. The Troth is still the only one that they actually have. Honestly, the option of Other provides a lot of leeway for the military. The system of having specific religious preferences is important and is mandated by regulation. In a lot of ways, it seems like a useless system designed to cause problems. However, what it does is require the Chaplains Corps to have some level of understanding of each faith and to legally provide for the religious requirements of those faiths that are within their system.

Josh's companion for his world travels

It’s tiresome and often difficult to get additions to said list. However, in a lot of ways, it protects real religions from folks that would put random things they don’t truly believe in place. Any person is allowed to have whatever they want in the religion space on their dog tags. I had Ásatrú put on mine before I deployed, and before the Troth was added. This meant that anyone finding my dog tags would have at least something to research. Having a religion added to one’s other paperwork is helpful for requesting holidays, specific requests for religious exemptions (having a period of time off to give offerings, for example) and allowances for books and religious items that might not be authorized normally in places like basic training. I had my copy of the Poetic Edda with me during basic, and having a religious preference would mean that any heathen would, de facto, be allowed to have such a thing and could bring a lawsuit if they were restricted from having it.

The option of Other was designed to show that a person had a religious preference, not that they didn’t have any. Other as an option means that those members of smaller faiths can show that they have a religious preference and that they deserve to have some allowances made for their religious needs. None or No Religious Preference is different, but still valuable for those atheists and others that choose it. I don’t really know how frequently it’s a problem that heathens have their religious preference changed to None. Normally, it’s to Other, and there are regulations that recruiters have to follow that say they must choose Other, if there is nothing that fits a recruit’s religious preference.

Part Three of The Norse Mythology Blog interview with Josh & Cat Heath will focus on the quest for a heathen military chaplain and for allowing Thor's hammer as a religious symbol on veteran grave markers.

Click here for Heathens in the Military, Part One and here for Part Two

Self-portrait of Cat & Josh Heath

KS – It really seems like the military’s refusal to accept heathenry as a “real religion” would make it impossible to estimate the number of heathens in the Armed Forces. Journalists, politicians and scholars rely on figures provided by the military – but they’re being given falsified data. How have you been involved in trying to change this situation?

JH – I’m unsure if it’s a refusal to recognize heathenry as a real religion. It’s also not totally falsified data, because they do have data that presents how many choose Other as an option. It’s ignorance about our faith, for sure, but many chaplains are supportive of the religious pluralism mandated by regulation and law. Some are not, and Cat and I have both had our dealings with chaplains that weren’t. Education is key in changing their behavior and attitudes, in general, regarding our religious rights. Beyond adding options to the religious preference list, we’ve also both pushed to try and educate chaplains, chaplain assistants and others about our faith.

CH – Either way, this is an area that is going to become all the more difficult to work on as Josh makes his final transition out of the military. We have some good people that we can work with that are still “on the inside,” so to speak, so it’s not insurmountable – but I don’t know. I would have loved to have seen Josh’s last day in the military being one in which he was officially “heathen” in the records.

US Army Chaplains Corps Regimental Insignia
Latin Text: "For God and Country"
According to the Pentagon, "The pages of the open
Bible represent the primacy of God's Word."

KS – How does this situation relate to the lack of a single heathen chaplain in the US military?

JH – That’s a whole other bottle of fish. Seriously. There are about 3,000 chaplains, I think, just in the Army – though that might be the entire US military. Even in the Army, that’s 3,000 spiritual advisors for over half a million people. If it’s for the whole military, that’s 3,000 for about 1.5 million – based on 2009 numbers, at least. For the 2,000 Buddhists, they have one chaplain, and he only recently became a chaplain. There are seven Jewish chaplains for nearly 2,000 Jewish soldiers. The Wiccans – who have a much larger number than we do – haven’t been able to endorse a chaplain yet. Getting the first chaplain of any faith in the military is hard. You have to be the “perfect candidate,” and you really have to work your butt off with both your endorsing organization and the military Chaplains Corps you want to be a part of to make it happen. I’ve seen a lot of folks try and fail to make it.

KS – Have you been working towards the inclusion of a heathen chaplain in the military system?

JH – Without wanting to let any cats out of any bags, we are working with an individual that might make it to being the first heathen chaplain. I absolutely cannot say any more on the issue as of now. We will see how things work out. I’m hopeful right now.

CH – So, yes, please cross your fingers for us that this works out!

Stephen McNallen in New York Times portrait

KS – Although the Department of Veterans Affairs allows a very wide range of religious symbols on military grave markers (including symbols of minority faiths like Wicca, Sufism and Seicho-no-ie), they don’t allow heathens to have Thor’s hammer on their gravestone. For those who may not know, will you explain who Stephen McNallen is and how he was involved with the effort to have Thor’s hammer accepted as a religious symbol by the VA?

JH – Stephen McNallen is the head of an organization called the Asatru Folk Assembly. He is a former Special Operations soldier himself and was a major force in the early modern Ásatrú movement here in the US. McNallen is also a bit of a controversial figure in the heathen community today, especially because of his concept of metagenetics – the belief that the desire to become a heathen is somehow attached to one’s ancestors through a blood connection. Personally, biology, history, science and the things we know about how heathens really viewed the world make me think this is a bunch of drivel. There are a lot of folks that agree with me, and there are some that agree with Mr. McNallen. I mention this simply to say that, because he is the leader of one group of heathens does not make him the leader – or even the spokesman – of us all. Heck, no one can claim to be the leader of us all and we rather like it that way.

That being said, he did begin the process that helped to drive the VA to change their regulation. He made a speech on the Mall in DC about adding it and began the Quest for the Hammer to have a hammer added to the list. Thor’s hammer is a common heathen religious symbol both from antiquity and from the modern day. It would probably be the most requested symbol for any heathen to have on their headstone.

National Geographic photo of gravestones at Arlington National Cemetery

KS – How did you get involved in this effort? What was your interaction with military administration like?

JH – Near the end of our tenure with the Troth, the Quest for the Hammer begun by the Asatru Folk Assembly became a big thing. We were already working on a load of heathen military ideas, because we were working towards becoming the military stewards for the Troth. We got involved because we were told about the speech that McNallen made, and we wanted to really make a positive change. We had added a religious preference to the Army’s official list, and we really thought we could use a lot of the contacts we had made around the heathen world to make a difference. We reached out to both organizations and told them we really wanted to help, and we wanted to facilitate some cooperation between the two, so that we both could get something really good done for heathens – regardless of political issues that had happened between them in the past. We really thought that we could all work together for the common good.

KS – Did McNallen and his group support your work?

JH – Yes and no. We worked extensively with their military outreach person when this all began. We called our Facebook group “AFA’s Quest for The Hammer,” and we made sure to add their folks as administrators to that group and to keep them involved as much as possible. We got a lot of push back against working with us as time went on. McNallen and his group seem to have their own agenda that we didn’t fit into particularly well. We think it’s pretty sad, too, because we really had no political desire to do this, and getting embroiled in heathen politics was not something we thought needed to happen.

The Department of Veterans Affairs in Washington DC

Our Facebook group amassed over 600 members in a matter of days. We helped to start a letter-writing campaign to the VA to get a hammer added to the list of symbols for headstones. We had friends in the AFA’s military outreach program that we were talking to about all of this stuff that we could get done together. Then the AFA came back and said they didn’t want to work with the Troth at all. We replied, “Ok, we’ll continue to work with both groups and you don’t have to work with them.” They didn’t want to work with anyone affiliated with the Troth, either.

As for directly working with the military administration, we didn’t do a lot of that for this project. Instead we acted as rabble-rousers, getting all kinds of people on board and writing to the VA and to their congresspeople. In the end, we might have ended up being more involved if the VA hadn’t changed their rules. We were on track to really getting into the administration's face if we had to, but they changed the rules just in time to avoid us!

CH – The whole thing was really a shame, and there were quite a few of us around at that time – in both orgs – working on this that found the whole thing frustrating. Most of those people were military or ex-military, and it was expressed more than once that people were just letting petty rubbish get in the way of working on what we saw as being the bigger picture. There was also, sadly, lots of talk that went along the lines of, “We can only back this person as a potential distinctive faith group leader [a term used by the Army Chaplains Corp] if they’re a member of our org, and if they’ve been one for long enough.”

There's a long tradition of striking while
the iron is hot in Germanic myth & legend

As members of the military community – and more than aware of the constant cycles of PCS [“permanent change of station,” or moving posts] and deployment – we know that, if we are to get a heathen distinctive faith group up and running, it’s probably going to be a case of having to “strike while the iron is hot.” This was, and still is, all the more frustrating for us because orgs don’t seem to have any issues with getting comprehensive prison outreach programs up and running, but, when it comes to those that take oaths to fight on our behalf, there’s not much out there.

KS – What’s the current status of the policy regarding Thor’s hammers on grave markers?

JH – Around May of 2009, we got a message from our contacts letting us know that the VA was going to come out with a change that would make the Quest rather moot. The VA changed their rules on how the system for headstones works. The VA now has a rule that any symbol added to the list can only be done for a military member posthumously. Once a service member passes away, the next of kin can process paperwork to request exactly what image they would like on their headstone. This image will then be added to the official list of options.

Because of this, we highly suggest that all heathens – hell, all military members – add a specific image they want on their headstone to their wills. A legal document will be the best way to prove that a deceased serviceman or woman really wanted a particular image on their headstone. Sadly, someone will have to die before we can have the symbol added to the list. The Irminsul website – which was incidentally my first Ásatrú website, ever – has a good suggestion to go along with the Open Halls Projects suggestion of adding a picture and information to ones will.

This change came about because of all the concerted effort on a multitude of fronts to make it happen. I am damn sure our efforts had a major part in the change.

Fallen soldiers return to the United States from Afghanistan

CH – Sadly, I’ve heard of at least one heathen service member who died and whose wishes weren’t honored by his family. I cannot confirm this personally. The gentleman was a member of a group that I had contact with a while ago, and they had a memorial for him, but – officially – he was given a Christian burial. We really can’t emphasize the need for military heathens to get their wishes in their wills enough. Do it today. Don’t wait for deployment warnos [warnings] or for your unit to tell you; get your butts down to Legal and get this squared away, ASAP. Have those conversations with those you want to represent your interests should you not come home, and – if you have concerns about how your loved ones might act on your behalf – look into (if it’s possible) legally empowering someone you trust to do so in their stead. Do it.

This is huge. If you are the person that doesn’t come home, and your will proves that you wanted the hammer on your gravemarker – not meaning to sound like a Star Trek Klingon – but your death could bring about a real game changer for military heathens and how the military views heathenry. Now, we’re not saying here that we want anyone to die – quite the opposite. On another note, we have several military heathens in our database that we haven’t heard from in quite a while and who haven’t replied to our emails that we’re worried about. So, yes, get your wills sorted and reply to our emails. Let us know you’re okay!

KS – Thank you both for taking the time to answer my questions. I’ve been wondering about heathens in the military for quite a while, and it’s great to finally get some straight answers.

CH – No problem. Thanks for interviewing us.

JH – Thanks for the interview, Karl. Any follow-up questions or folks that are interested in the Open Halls Project – or any of the other awesome things we are working on – can email us at heathenopenhalls@gmail.com. Our website is openhalls.org, as well.

Author (and recording artist) J.R.R. Tolkien

In a 1953 letter to Father Robert Murray, a Catholic theologian, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote:

The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like 'religion', to cults or practices, in the imaginary world.

Although Tolkien had a deep personal commitment to Catholicism, he also had an abiding love for what he called “that noble northern spirit” – the historical, literary and philosophical heritage of pre-Christian northern Europe. He lamented that the coming of Christianity had obliterated any detailed record of the ancient mythology of his own country, as opposed to Iceland’s preservation of its literary heritage in the Eddas. His decades-long creation of the Middle-earth corpus was, in part, an effort to create a “mythology for England.” This mythology is not a Christian one; Tolkien referred to Gandalf as an “Odinic wanderer,” not a Christ figure (despite what today’s movie reviewers may tell you).

Iceland actually has beer
named for saga heroes.

In 1926, Tolkien founded the Kolbítar [“coalbiter”] Society, named for an Old Norse term referring to those who would tell tales while sitting close enough to the fire to bite the coals. The members of the club (including C.S. Lewis) would meet regularly to translate the Icelandic Eddas and sagas while drinking beer. Given that these texts are foundational sources of information for Norse mythology and religion – and that beer plays a major role in both the myth and ritual of the ancient North – I wouldn’t call this club “fundamentally Catholic” in outlook, unless we use the lower-case catholic to mean “broad in sympathies, tastes or interests.”

Tolkien’s deep love for the literary heritage of northern Europe can be felt throughout his works. I teach a semester-long course teasing out the many elements of Norse myth that permeate The Hobbit alone. In this article, I will focus on a close reading of a single bit of dialogue in The Lord of the Rings to show how powerfully the pre-Christian philosophy resonates in Tolkien’s fantasy.

In “The Passing of the Grey Company,” the second chapter of The Return of the King, Aragorn tells Éowyn that she may not ride with him to battle, but must remain behind as the men go off to war. Her response immediately shows her allegiance to heathen ideals.

‘You are a stern lord and resolute,’ she said; ‘and thus do men win renown.’ She paused. ‘Lord.’ she said, ‘if you must go, then let me ride in your following. For I am weary of skulking in the hills, and wish to face peril and battle.’

Odin's words still fascinate, as evidenced by
release of yet another Poetic Edda translation.

Éowyn’s words echo those of the god Odin in the Old Norse poem Hávamál (“Sayings of the High One”):

Cattle die, kinsmen die,
the self must also die;
but glory never dies,
for the man who is able to achieve it.

In Norse religion, it was brave actions of the individual in this life that mattered – not quiet piety and prayer aimed at a future afterlife. By forbidding that Éowyn participate in the great conflicts of her era, Aragorn acts with the patriarchal authority of a Biblical king as he denies a heathen woman the right to live a full and fulfilling life.

When Aragorn then tells Éowyn of her duty (a word long used to bind women to the home), she gives a fiercely proud reply:

‘Too often have I heard of duty,’ she cried. ‘But am I not of the House of Eorl, a shieldmaiden and not a dry-nurse? I have waited on faltering feet long enough. Since they falter no longer, it seems, may I not now spend my life as I will?’

Her words specifically associate her with the ancient Germanic peoples. In Old English, before it meant “earl,” eorl (which Tolkien here uses as a proper name) simply meant “warrior.” With much of the language associated with Éowyn’s people, Tolkien ties the Riders of Rohan to the old Anglo-Saxons. For example, Éowyn is the niece of Théoden, whose own name is a modernized spelling of the Old English þēoden (“ruler,” “lord”).

Anglo-Saxon runes on Thror's Map from The Hobbit

Éowyn’s name is formed from ancient elements. Dating from approximately the 9th century, the Anglo-Saxon Runic Poem is a collection of verses that each illuminate (not always clearly) the meaning of a specific rune. These are the same runes that Tolkien used in his texts and illustrations, such as the cover art and maps of The Hobbit. Like Tolkien’s work, the poem itself contains both heathen and Christian elements. Éowyn is formed from two runic names: eoh and wynn. In Anglo-Saxon, the former means “war-horse, charger” (not to be confused with a similarly-named rune meaning “yew-tree”) and the latter means “joy, rapture.” Éowyn’s name can be interpreted as “the one who rides joyfully into battle.” In this light, Aragorn is denying her very nature by forbidding her to ride to war.

Tolkien's Finn and Hengest

The horse-prefix of Éowyn’s name and her insistence on her lineage also connect her to Hengest and Horsa, the legendary brothers of Anglo-Saxon legend who led the Germanic tribes to conquer what later became England. As the names of Éowyn and her brother Éomer (interpretable as “the one famous for deeds on war-horse”) both contain “horse” elements, the names of this legendary pair both simply mean “horse.” Rudolf Simek connects the Anglo-Saxon figures to ancient “horse-shaped (Indo-)Germanic twin deities” and to “the horse heads on the gables of farmhouses in Holstein [Germany] which were known as Hengist and Hors even as late as around 1875 and can still be seen there today.” This correspondence of horse-siblings is no accidental congruence. Tolkien was intimately familiar with the story of Hengest and Horsa; his lectures on these ancient heroes are collected in the posthumously published Finn and Hengest.

"Cimbric Women Defending the Fortification of Wagons"
from Ward Lock's The Illustrated History of the World (c1880)

Éowyn referring to herself as a “shieldmaiden” connects her to historical heathen women who armed themselves and fought in battle. The Greek writer Plutarch describes the fierce women of the Cimbri, a tribe located in what is now Denmark. When Roman soldiers pursued the fleeing men of the tribe back to their wagons, both groups got a nasty surprise.

Here the women met them, holding swords and axes in their hands. With hideous shrieks of rage they tried to drive back the hunted and the hunters, the fugitive as deserters, the pursuers as foes. With bare hands the women tore away the shields of the Romans or grasped their swords, enduring mutilating wounds. Their fierce spirit unvanquished to the end.

Statue of Veleda (1844)
by Hippolyte Maindron

Like Éowyn, some historical women were great captains of their people in times of war. In the 1st century, Veleda was a leader of the Rhineland tribe of the Bructeri. She led in both the political and spiritual arenas, serving as an arbiter during negotiations between Rome and Cologne and acting as a prophetess for her tribe. The Roman writer Tacitus underscored the connection between her roles in military and religious life when he described her as

a maiden of the tribe of the Bructeri, who possessed extensive dominion; for by ancient usage the Germans attributed to many of their women prophetic powers and, as the superstition grew in strength, even actual divinity. The authority of Veleda was then at its height, because she had foretold the success of the Germans and the destruction of the legions.

The historical role of heathen women in military and religious spheres is reflected in mythological and literary sources. The shieldmaidens of Norse mythology and saga are striking figures (in both senses of the word). Carolyne Larrington’s description of the shieldmaidens of mythic poetry reads like a thumbnail portrait of Éowyn, stating that they are “human girls who, scorning domesticity and female tasks, take up the warrior life; as such they can overlap with valkyries.”

Éowyn ready for battle as a shieldmaiden
in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings

In the Icelandic Saga of the Volsungs, Brynhild is a mystic Valkyrie who serves Odin. Compare the words and appearance of Éowyn with Bryhild’s description of herself:

I am a shield-maiden. I wear a helmet and ride with the warrior kings. I must support them, and I am not averse to fighting.

Later in The Return of the King, Éowyn literally puts Brynhild’s words into action by wearing a helmet to disguise herself and riding into battle with the warrior-king Théoden. Throughout the novel, she makes abundantly clear that she is “not averse to fighting.”

As a mystic Valkyrie, Brynhild determines the outcome of human battles and possesses great wisdom and magical knowledge. The hero Sigurd asks her to teach him the ways of the world and says, “Never can there be found a wiser woman in the world than you. Give me more wise counsel.” Although written down after the conversion of Iceland to Christianity, the saga is based on older poetry and mythology (Odin is a recurring character) and has a thoroughly heathen worldview. Notably, it portrays Brynhild as a warlike wise woman – a role that women actually played in pre-Christian society.

A Valkyrie welcomes a warrior to Valhalla with a drinking horn
on a Swedish memorial stone from the Viking Age

When Brynhild teaches wisdom to Sigurd, she brings him a ritual drink. Likewise, one function of the Valkryies in the Eddas is that they welcome dead heroes to Valhalla with horns of mead. In The Lord of the Rings, Éowyn several times presents a symbolic drink to the heroes in a ritualized manner. In the scene immediately following her conversation with Aragorn, she brings a drink to the departing warriors.

She was clad as a Rider and girt with a sword. In her hand she bore a cup, and she set it to her lips and drank a little, wishing them good speed; and then she gave the cup to Aragorn.

Here and elsewhere in the novel, Tolkien’s description of Éowyn recalls the description of Brynhild in the Saga of the Volsungs as “in a mail coat, with her sword in her hand and a helmet on her head.” In this scene, Éowyn is dressed as a shieldmaiden while she replicates the ritual cup-bearing actions of the Valkyries, further tying herself to heathen tradition.

To be continued in Part Two.

Click here for Part One

Brunnhild / Brünhilde / Brynhild
on an 1897 postcard by Gaston Bussière

Although telling the same basic story as the Icelandic Saga of the Volsungs, the German Nibelungenlied portrays Brynhild (as Brünhilde) in a very different light. The German version presents the tale in an overtly Christian setting; pivotal scenes occur at church, and Odin is notably absent. As part of the downgrading and removal of heathen religious elements, the Valkyrie is recast as a purely human warrior-woman:

There was a queen throned across the sea, that had not her like, beyond fair and of mickle strength, and her love was for that knight only that could pass her at the spear. She hurled the stone and leapt after it to the mark. Any that desired the noble damsel’s love must first win boldly in these three games. If he failed in but one, he lost his head.

There is no sense in this version that she is supernatural. Instead, like Éowyn, she is a noble woman who has chosen to live the warrior’s life as a shieldmaiden – a choice that is seen, in this Christian worldview, as wholly negative. Both Brynhild and Brünhilde are tricked into marrying unworthy men by the deceit of the hero (Sigurd in Iceland, Siegfried in Germany). However, the Christianized German version adds a disturbing extra scene in which Siegfried violently rapes the shieldmaiden in her own bedroom to teach her the virtue of wifely obedience (on behalf of her new husband, who secretly watches).

Brünhilde the Shieldmaiden
The strife endured long atwixt them. Then Siegfried got hold of Brünhilde. Albeit she fought valiantly, her defence was grown weak. It seemed long to the king, that stood there, till Siegfried had won. She squeezed his hands till, by her strength, the blood spurted out from his nails. Then he brake the strong will that she had shown at the first. The king heard it all, but he spake no word. Siegfried pressed her down till she cried aloud, for his might hurt her greatly. She clutched at her side, where she found her girdle, and sought to tie his hands. But he gripped her till the joints of her body cracked. So the strife was ended.

You may choose to read this as a wrestling match rather than a rape, but the sexual element really is clear in the text. The “strife” occurs in bed, with the husband hiding behind the bed curtains, and begins with Siegfried tearing Brünhilde’s nightgown. Where the heathen version of the tale presents us with a hero who begs a wise Valkyrie to share her knowledge, the Christian version gives us a rapist who violently puts a headstrong shieldmaiden in her (domestic) place.

The Awesomest Painting in the History of the World
or, Éowyn versus the Witch-King of Angmar

The dispute between Aragorn and Éowyn, of course, pales next to the horror of the Nibelungenlied scene. However, the underlying theme is the same, even if Tolkien makes it implicit rather than explicit; the mighty hero wants the shieldmaiden to give up her willful heathenish ways and become a subservient Christian woman. In Tolkien’s version, however, the shieldmaiden not only has the better lines, but she goes on to [SPOILER ALERT!] vanquish the greatest warrior of the Dark Lord on the battlefield when she fearlessly faces and defeats the Lord of the Nazgûl – a figure so terrifying that the novel’s male characters literally fall to the ground in terror when he appears.

SCORE: Heathen Feminist 1, Christian Patriarch 0

Éowyn in the 1980 Return of the King cartoon

A possible objection to this reading of Éowyn as heroic heathen shieldmaiden may be made by pointing to the negative attributes of Valkyries in Germanic literature. These mystical figures can be bloody and terrifying, violent and untrustworthy. Leslie A. Donovan addresses this issue in her excellent essay, “The valkyrie reflex in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings”:

By eliminating from his primary women figures the concept common in valkyrie typology of the female inciter and her accompanying vengeance for kin or personal insult, Tolkien constructs them as reflective of moral good, heroic ideals, noble behavior, and responsible leadership by means of a female identity concordant with contemporary perceptions of women as significant forces within society and the world.

She goes on to say that “Tolkien’s modern benevolent valkyries… are preservers of tradition, defenders of their culture, bearers of the future, and forces for moral good.” In Éowyn, Tolkien has created a model version of heathen womanly power that embodies the highest ideals of the Old Way. Every ancient religion has positive and negative characterizations of women in its received texts. Surprisingly for a Catholic author, Tolkien chooses to gather together the positive aspects of heathen womanhood into a powerful and sympathetic character.

Éowyn stands alone - art by Michael Kaluta

Éowyn also expresses a pre-Christian worldview when she asks, “may I not now spend my life as I will?” At least in terms of marriage, the Icelandic sagas show that women had a surprising independence before the conversion to the new religion. Perhaps most interesting is the fact that a woman could declare herself divorced and immediately force her husband to leave while taking possession of her own property. Laws covered division of common possessions, child custody and child support. In the sagas, physical abuse is the most common reason given by women who declare themselves divorced; these women would not be pushed around by anyone.

Compare this strikingly modern arrangement with, for instance, the Catholic Church’s continuing and complicated policy on divorce and annulment. In post-conversion Iceland, Catholic bishops held the power to decide whether a divorce would be granted; patriarchal authority pushed aside female self-determination. Éowyn’s indignant desire to determine the course of her own life aligns her against the new patriarchy and with the powerful and independent women of Tolkien’s beloved Icelandic sagas.

As the conversation continues, Aragorn again insists that Éowyn remain with the non-combatants.

‘A time may come soon,’ said he, ‘when none will return. Then there will be need of valour without renown, for none shall remember the deeds that are done in the last defence of your homes. Yet the deeds will not be less valiant because they are unpraised.’

"She is fearless and high-hearted. All love her."

This again denies Éowyn the right to pursue one of the fundamental tenets of the heathen religion: the pursuit of glory on earth and reputation among men (and women). Her response is fierce.

‘All your words are but to say: you are a woman, and your part is in the house. But when the men have died in battle and honour, you have leave to be burned in the house, for the men will need it no more. But I am of the House of Eorl and not a serving-woman. I can ride and wield blade, and I do not fear either pain or death.’

What disqualifies Éowyn from making her mark on her era and being immortalized in song? Only her gender. This ties in with the post-conversion change in women’s rights within marriage. Éowyn wants to be an equal partner, like the heathen women who could divorce abusive husbands with a word. Instead, she is being forced into a traditional Christian position of subservience. Paul the Apostle makes a clear link between wifely submission and Christian theology, underscoring the patriarchal nature of the new religion’s mythology and religious practice:

Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body. Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so [let] the wives [be] to their own husbands in every thing.

Aragorn preaches to the congregation

If The Lord of the Rings is “a fundamentally religious and Catholic work,” is Aragorn – the king of The Return of the King– a fundamentally religious and Catholic hero? It does seem that he is arguing a Christian position for the role of women in society, and Éowyn is presenting a dissenting view that is based in heathen thought.

As the conversation draws to a close, Aragorn – perhaps taken aback that this young woman has no fear of battle and death – asks her what she does fear. Her answer is the great feminist line of the Tolkien mythos.

‘A cage,’ she said. ‘To stay behind bars, until use and old age accept them, and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire.’

For all the (mostly fair) criticism of Tolkien’s weak writing of female characters, this is a line worthy of Charlotte Perkins Gilman or Virginia Woolf. It powerfully expresses the soul-crushing frustration of being denied the right to live a full and independent life because of one’s gender. This is a shockingly modern sentiment in a work by a male Catholic medievalist in his sixties, published only two years after the English translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex.

Tolkien having a pipe and a laugh

Éowyn’s words also encapsulate the wanderlust and restlessness of the pre-Christian North, from the Indo-Europeans arrival through the migrations of the Germanic tribes to the world-spanning travels of the Vikings – a raw energy that Tolkien loved and admired, even though he lived in a Christian era and took the New Way’s teachings to heart. Éowyn likewise speaks with the fierce and determined voice of “that noble northern spirit” when she later tells Merry, “Where will wants not, a way opens.”

Although Tolkien’s work focuses on Great Men doing Great Deeds and on patriarchy and kingship, in this short scene he presents us with a young woman giving voice to the energy at the heart of the heathen era. It says something about Tolkien as a human being that he was able to write so eloquently from the perspective of a woman espousing heathen ideals, if only for this one moment. He really was a man of (lower-case) catholic interests.

Josh Rood carries the torch for Old Norse religion

We all need to join together and support Josh Rood. One of the deepest people I know, he's the editor of Óðrœrir Journal ("dedicated to developing, fostering and distributing scholastic literature solely regarding the reconstruction of the various pre-Christian religious traditions & cultures of Northern Europe") and vocalist of the metal band Fenrismaw. As a mythologist-musician myself, I give him much respect.

Josh has been accepted to the Masters Program in Old Nordic Religion at the University of Iceland under Professor Terry Gunnell. This is huge! Josh has made public vows of what he intends to bring back from his studies in Iceland

I plan to push very hard for the University of Iceland and for a US school to develop a undergraduate Norse Religion program for US students to be able to go and learn about the old heathen religion with financial aid. Nobody should have to do this alone. I can promise also, that everything I learn will go to benefit my local community, and the people that supported me and helped me achieve this. The books, the publications, they'll be dedicated to you. I am already tremendously grateful to all the support I have received. I have the best community in the world, and I want to pay it back however I can.

There's just one problem, and it's a doozy.

Student loans and scholarships [in Iceland] are out of the question, which means I need to finance my education there myself. The total sum required by the Icelandic Directorate of Immigration in order to study in Iceland for one year is $12,000. A hefty chunk of change, I know. The upside is that this sum is actually the total amount they anticipate a student from the US will spend on all things (tuition, board, living expenses) for a year. I can't even live for under that without school, here in NY. The problem is that I need the money up front, and I need it before I go in August.

Josh Rood, Kubb Champion

Josh is someone we should all be supporting. Even if you can only give a few dollars, please help him out. The future benefits to the study of Norse mythology and religion in America will be well worth it. To read more and donate, please visit the donation website: Rood's Old Norse MA Program. Josh will be documenting his progress on his new blog, The Saga of Rood and the Old Norse MA.

P.S. Despite my full support for Josh's studies, I will still krush him in the Kubb Tournament at the East Coast Thing. For Asgaaarrrddd!!!

Original article by Kári Pálsson appeared in Vor Siður 22, no. 1 (2013)
Translated by Kári Pálsson & Dr. Karl E. H. Seigfried for The Norse Mythology Blog
Read the original article (in Icelandic) here
Original text © Ásatrúarfélagið

Vor Siður – newsletter of the Ásatrúarfélagið (“Æsir Faith Fellowship”)

As a young boy, I visited Goðdalur (“dale of the gods”) in Bjarnarfjörður in northwest Iceland several times. The valley is extremely remote and not known to many people, since the one road leading to the dale is fairly poor and usually impassible in the winter except with large vehicles. There are two cottages in the valley owned by friends of my family.

When I was teenager, I started wondering about the history of this place and was particularly interested in its name. The valley is not mentioned in any sagas or historical records, but it was said by people through the centuries that this place had a hof (heathen temple) and many kinds of vættir (wights) and other spirits or gods. Legends say that Bishop Guðmundur tried to exorcise the spirits of the dale in the 13th century, but he failed.

In the foreground are the ruins of the old farm in Goðdalur
Photograph by Kári Pálsson

The valley was inhabited until December 1948, when a 130-meter wide avalanche destroyed the town and killed six people. A farmer named Jóhann Kristmundsson and his young daughter survived. The girl died soon after; Jóhann lived couple of years longer, but never recovered. Today, the dale still holds ruins of the old farm.

Ingibjörg Sigvaldadóttir, a housewife born in 1912 in Svanshóll, remembered that her father Sigvaldi Guðmundsson had told the farmer then living in Goðdalur that he shouldn’t have removed the remains of the old hof that stood in the valley. The farmer later denied having done so and claimed he only covered it with soil and built over it.

In the 1952 yearbook of Ferðafélag Íslands (Icelandic Touring Association), Jón Hjaltason wrote, “Goðdalur has been a place of tragic events and accidents. It is clear that this place is filled with the wrath of the gods, and that only land-wights want to live there.”

Heiðinn Siður á Íslandi by Ólafur Briem

It is interesting how many places around Goðdalur have heathen names. In his 1945 book Heiðinn Siður á Íslandi (Heathen Practice in Iceland), Ólafur Briem names four waterfalls that have the name Goðafoss (“waterfall of the gods”). There are actually five – including two in Bjarnardalur and one in Goðdalur – but Ólafur forgets to mentions one of them. There are also several place-names in Goðdalur that relate to hörgur (heathen stone altars).

Remains from different eras have been found throughout the valley, and the dale is a popular location for archeologists. Once, when I was playing in valley’s little stream as a boy, I found a small square iron plate that looked like ashtray with a picture of bearded man done in an interesting style. I’m not sure how old this iron tray was; I gave it to an adult and learned nothing more. It was likely from before the time of the avalanche.

In 1960, as excavations were being done to build a small summer house on the spot, an ancient blót (sacrifice) stone was found. Scientists examined black marks on the inside of the stone and found that they were residue of ancient animal blood. The stone was lost, but it resurfaced in 2002 and is now stored in Galdrasafnið á Ströndum (Museum of Icelandic Sorcery & Witchcraft).

Blót stone found in Goðdalur, Iceland

It is clear that blóts were held in this location in ancient times. Scholars think that heathens gathered here and held blóts in secret, even two centuries after the conversion to Christianity had outlawed public sacrifices. The discovery of the stone gives clear evidence for stories that this area had a hörg or hof.

Eyrbyggja Saga tells of a hof raised by Þórólfur Mostraskegg:

There he let build a temple, and a mighty house it was. There was a door in the side-wall and nearer to one end thereof. Within the door stood the pillars of the high-seat, and nails were therein; they were called the gods’ nails. Therewithin was there a great frith-place [peace-place, sanctuary]. But off the inmost house was there another house, of that fashion whereof now is the choir of a church, and there stood a stall in the midst of the floor in the fashion of an altar, and thereon lay a ring without a join that weighed twenty ounces, and on that must men swear all oaths; and that ring must the chief have on his arm at all man-motes [moots, meetings].

On the stall should also stand the blood-bowl, and therein the blood-rod was, like unto a sprinkler, and therewith should be sprinkled from the bowl that blood which is called hlaut, which was that kind of blood which flowed when those beasts were smitten who were sacrificed to the gods. But round about the stall were the gods arrayed in the holy place.

The blót stone from the valley was likely used as a hlaut-bowl like the one described in the saga.

Photograph of Goðdalur by Kári Pálsson

It is said that an ancient goði (heathen priest) was buried near the site of the hof in Goðdalur and that around him was a some sort of hex place on which animals were never allowed and which was never mowed. It is also said that the hofgoði (temple priest) threw his gods’ statues in Goðafoss after the conversion to Christianity, although this tale has been probably confused with that of Þorgeir Ljósvetningargoði. Of course, people suspect that this story is pretty one-sided.

Thanks to Kári & the Ásatrúarfélagið for sharing this piece. Þakka þér kærlega fyrir!

Crop circle in shape of bass clef – proof of ancient alien bassists?

I recently appeared on episode of the Ancient Aliens television show about “The Viking Gods” on H2, the second History Channel station. As they do for all episodes of this popular series, the producers interviewed scholars of a particular historical period and asked them to explain the culture, mythology and technology of the time. I was asked about Norse mythology, as were Scott A. Mellor (UW-Madison Department of Scandinavian Studies), Timothy R. Tangherlini (UCLA Scandinavian Section), Kirsten Wolf (also UW-Madison) and Jonathan Young (Joseph Campbell Archives).

Personally, I agreed to participate because I wanted to make sure that basic information about Norse mythology and religion was presented in a fair and accurate manner. I told the producers up-front that I have absolutely no interest in “ancient astronaut theory.” My answers were edited down to a few very brief soundbites, which is totally fair and understandable. However, many people have asked me what my full answers were to the producers' questions. I can’t provide transcripts of what I actually said, since I haven’t seen the full footage myself. Instead, I am posting the personal notes I typed up while preparing for the interview. Enjoy.

WORSHIP OF THE NORSE GODS

Rock carving from Bohuslän, Sweden
c1800 BCE

The Norse gods were worshiped over a very wide range of space and time. Rock carvings and artifacts in Scandinavia dating back to over 1,000 years BCE show what we could call “reverse echoes” of the Norse gods. The conception of the gods hadn’t yet evolved into the characters we’re familiar with as Thor and Odin and the rest, but you can see common symbolic elements such as the sacred chariot, sun wheel and axe or hammer.

Conversion to Christianity began in England around 600. Sweden, the last heathen holdout, converted around 1150. As the various Germanic tribes migrated over time, the gods moved with them. We have evidence from literature, archeology and place-name analysis that shows local variants of Norse religion throughout the continental German lands, Scandinavia, the northern islands and the British Isles.

THE WORLD TREE

The World Tree is a poetic concept in Norse mythology that serves as a symbol to connect the Nine Worlds of gods, men, elves, dwarves, giants and the dead. It’s related to the Germanic concept of the Warden Tree, a tree that guards your homestead. A farm would have a Warden Tree to protect the household, a temple would have a tree that protects the community. By extension, Odin’s hall (Valhalla) has its own Warden tree, and the world itself has a tree – this symbolic World Tree that connects the different realms of the various inhabitants of the world.

SOURCES OF NORSE MYTHOLOGY

A manuscript of Snorri Sturluson's Edda
Iceland, 18th century

There’s a wide range of sources for what we now call Norse mythology. There are Latin writings by Julius Caesar and Tacitus that describe the religion of the Germanic tribes that came into contact with the Roman Empire. There are texts by Christian writers during the Conversion Era that discuss heathen beliefs. There are sagas and histories written by Icelanders and Danes that record tales of the gods.

Next to these sources, the two books that provide the most coherent version of Norse myth are what we now call the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda. They were written down by Christian writers in Iceland in the mid-1200s – over two centuries after Iceland’s conversion. Both texts contain a lot of Christian elements mixed in. Snorri Sturluson, the compiler of the Prose Edda, is particularly keen to let readers know that he thought the pre-Christian religion was nonsense. These books are accessible to modern readers because, in typical medieval fashion, they seek to impose a clear structure on what was really a variable and contradictory set of religious beliefs over a wide range in space and time

SNORRI STURLUSON

Snorri Sturluson was an Icelandic author who compiled a book called the Edda, which is sometimes translated to mean “Poetics.” This book was not written to record religious belief or describe religious ritual. It’s really a poetry manual.

With the coming of Latin learning and continental-style prose writing after Iceland’s conversion to Christianity, the older art of traditional poetry was dying out. Icelandic poetry was largely based on metaphorical allusions called kennings, which referred to characters and events of Norse myth. In order to understand the poetry, the audience had to know the mythology very well. Two centuries after conversion, this knowledge was fading – and so traditional poetry was becoming difficult to understand. Snorri wanted to record the myths in a systematic, orderly way so that his contemporaries could read and write in the older poetic style.

THE NINE WORLDS

A map of Asgard & the Nine Worlds
as conceived by Marvel Comics

The concept of the Nine Worlds is a poetic way of imagining the different realms of gods, men, elves, dwarves, giants and the dead. These realms are thought of as discrete areas, mythical versions of the discrete homesteads and communities of the northern world. Gods, giants, dwarves and men in the myths and sagas travel on foot and by horse between these areas, which are clearly not distant planets in outer space – that’s an idea we get from the Marvel Comics version (which appeared nearly a decade before Erich von Däniken published his “ancient alien theory” and seems, along with other 1960s pop culture, to have greatly influenced it).

ASGARD

Asgard means “enclosure of the Æsir” and is named for one of the two tribes of Norse gods. It’s the home of the major Norse gods and goddesses, including Thor, Odin and Freya. Each of the characters has their own hall within the wall of Asgard, and there are poetic ideas connecting Asgard to the afterlife.

Odin’s Valhalla (“Hall of the Slain”) is where he collects dead human heroes to fight the final battle with the giants at the end of time. The goddess Freya takes half the dead who die in battle into her hall, but we don’t know why. Thor gathers the dead from the peasant or farming class, the part of society he is especially connected to as the god who brings rain for crops and defends the common person from the giants, symbols of the terrifying forces of nature.

MIDGARD

Midgard means “middle enclosure.” This is where humans live, and the term is the root source for Tolkien’s “Middle-earth.” Midgard is surrounded by frightening places such as the home of the giants and the home of the dead. This is understandable, given the structures of communities in the ancient North, where life was often hard and vicious. Thor was thought of as the protector of humanity, defending his followers from the overwhelming forces of nature, which are given metaphorical form as terrifying giants.

THE NORSE GODS

When we think of Norse mythology as a coherent system, we’re really accepting a very late version of the myths that was systematized and written down in Iceland, centuries after the conversion to Christianity. In the Christian era, Snorri Sturluson tried to organize a complicated heritage of poetry and oral tradition into a clear storyline. He clearly misinterprets some of his material and seems to freely invent some passages.

According to this post-conversion synthesis, there are two main tribes of gods. The Æsir include gods more associated with war like Odin and Thor; the Vanir are gods tied more to fertility, like the twins Frey and Freya. These two groups mix freely together, and evidence of actual religious belief tends to blend and blur their supposed roles as gods of war and gods of fertility.

ODIN

A bronze figure thought to represent Odin
Sweden, 7th century
The missing arm appears to be later damage

The consistent characteristic of Odin in Germanic myth is his power to inspire. His name is connected to a root meaning both “fury” and “poetry.” This really sums up his role – he inspires the warrior to a battle-frenzy and he inspires the poet to a creative-frenzy. This idea is reflected in his power to metaphorically bind and unbind men’s minds. He could bind the minds of his enemies, which is a poetic way of saying that he could paralyze them with fear – like Mike Tyson did with his boxing opponents. He could also unbind men’s minds, which is poetic way of saying he could inspire creativity by freeing poets from what we now call “writer’s block,” for example.

ODIN'S HIGH SEAT

Odin’s high seat, which is named with a term that roughly means “watchtower,” is a place where he could sit and look out over the world. On one hand, it’s related to the high seat of the Germanic hall, where the leader of the family would sit during gatherings; Odin is (at least in the late Icelandic version) the leader of the main family of gods. On the other hand, it’s related to the high seat of the prophetess; she would be physically raised up so that, symbolically, she was raised above the world and could see farther ahead in space and time.

ODIN'S RAVENS

Odin has two ravens named Hugin and Munin who fly through the world each day and report back to him what they see. Their names mean “thought” and “memory,” showing them to be symbolic representations of Odin sending out his thoughts in animal form while in a shaman-like trance.

VALHALLA

Odin’s hall is called Valhalla, which means “hall of the slain” and may be connected to ancient religious beliefs that the dead lived on inside of burial mounds. This is reflected in poetic descriptions of a host of human warriors that have been killed in battle and selected by Odin and his Valkyries to live on in Valhalla, fighting and dying and being constantly reborn – feasting on an endless supply of mead and pork until the final battle with the giants at Ragnarök. We know about the hall from Icelandic poetry that describes it as full of weapons and shields, populated with fierce warriors who joyfully fight each other and are served endless food and drink by Valkyrie waitresses – clearly an image of paradise for young warriors.

ODIN AND GODS OF OTHER CULTURES

Mercury as god of commerce & industry
French coin, 1924

Odin is really a unique character, but the Romans connected Odin to their own Mercury, most likely because of the Roman god’s connection to trade, wisdom and traveling far and wide. Odin was seen by his followers as a god of cargoes, as a seeker after and sharer of wisdom, and as a lone wanderer who traveled the world in a quest for knowledge.

THE VALKYRIES

The term Valkyrie means “chooser of the slain.” They are mythologized versions of female ritual leaders in the Germanic world mentioned by Roman, Arab and Anglo-Saxon writers. These original women led ritual human sacrifice, literally “choosing the slain” – selecting who would be sacrificed and then carrying out the killing themselves. They would, of course, have been imposing and terrifying figures, and over time they evolved into this conception of mystical warrior-women who decide who is to die on the battlefield – taking the greatest heroes to Odin in Valhalla, where they are gathered to fight in the final battle with the enemies of the gods at the end of time.

To be continued in Part Two.

This is the second part of the personal notes I prepared for my appearance on the Ancient Aliens episode about “The Viking Gods” on H2, the second History Channel station. Click here for Part One.

THOR

Thor as ruler with Frigg (left) & Odin (right) in an illustration from
History of the Nordic Peoples by Olaus Magnus (1555)

Thor is a complicated character who can be seen as both a war god and a fertility god, as both subject to and superior to Odin – depending where and when your source comes from. Despite what modern artistic interpretations show us, he’s never physically described in any detail in the ancient poems, and it’s not even clear if he’s human-sized or giant-sized. All of this underscores that he is a spiritual and symbolic figure. The idea of Thor as a blustery, red-bearded, human-sized character really comes from the Icelandic sagas in the 1200s and 1300s, long after the conversion of Iceland to Christianity in the year 1000. In these late sources, he seems to be shrunken down to underscore the victory of the new Christian faith.

In the mythological sources, he’s often in conflict with Odin – a conflict that is sometimes interpreted as reflecting a rivalry between the followers of each god. Odin is characterized as wise and wily, often using deceit and magic to get what he wants. Thor is blunt and honest, facing foes head-on and distrusting magic as dishonorable.

THOR'S IMPORTANCE

In Iceland, the courtly poets make Odin the superior god – understandable, given that he’s the god of both nobles and poets. Thor, the god of the free farmers and peasants, seems to have had a superior role in pre-conversion Sweden. In some regions in the North, Frey was more important. Thor was particularly associated with farmers and peasants, which shows that a conception of him as only a battling war-god is missing out on his fertility aspects as the god who brings rain to the fields. According to the Icelandic version, his mother is the Earth itself, and the variations on his wife in different sources also seem related to earthly fertility.

Thor’s popularity is connected to his characterization as an idealized self-image of the independent farmer – he’s rough, hard-working, honest and takes children on adventures. He fights off giants (symbols of terrifying natural forces) as farmers would struggle against rough conditions to protect their farms and families. In the conversion era, Thor (with his bluntness and love of common folk) was seen as the direct opposition to Christ as missionaries sought to convert the northern peoples.

THOR'S HAMMER

Thor's hammer pendant from Sweden c1000 CE

Thor’s hammer is usually interpreted as a symbolic representation of lightning. It’s connected to conceptions of the mystic thunderweapon that show up in cultures around the world as early peoples sought to understand how something from the sky could smash trees and destroy homes. Like so many of these poetic images of a physical object that falls from the sky, Thor’s hammer is literally a “thunder-bolt,” a physical object that crashes to Earth with the flash of lightning.

Although we’re most familiar with the Icelandic image of Thor’s weapon as a metal hammer, other sources describe it as a rock or wooden club. The image of the thunderweapon evolved as human technology evolved, eventually giving us something described very much like the hammer of a smith, but one given the very convenient properties of always returning to the thrower’s hand and being able to shrink down small enough to fit inside Thor’s shirt. This last quality may be connected to the small hammer pendants worn by heathens during conversion times, in opposition to the crucifixes worn by Christian converts.

In the Icelandic myths, Thor’s hammer is the primary weapon of the gods against the enemy giants. Thor is constantly smashing giants at home and abroad with his hammer, and is very upset when it gets misplaced. Unfortunately for those of us who grew up with Marvel Comics, it’s never given a physical description other than mentions that it’s a bit short in the handle.

THE GIANTS

In Norse mythology, the giants are natural forces that are given a poetic or metaphorical form. The popular image of giants as huge, humanlike creatures really comes from later folklore. In Norse myths, they’re not necessarily big – and Thor himself sometimes swells up to gigantic size. Male giants are sometimes wise old rulers, sometimes frightening trolls. Female giants are sometimes beautiful maidens that mate with the gods, sometimes hideous troll-women.

Some conflicts between giants and gods seem like disagreements between rival families, and the two sides are actually closely related through marriage and parentage. In other cases, the conflict seems to be a symbolic one, between the gods representing order and creation and the giants representing chaos and destruction.

FREY

Frey (Froh) as depicted in a costume design
by Carl Emil Döpler for the premiere of
Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen

Frey is the main fertility god of Norse mythology. He seems to have been represented artistically as having an immense phallus, a clear symbol of his fertility role. He’s referred to as “the friend of the folk,” the god who is close to humanity and brings them aid – again, a fairly straightforward reflection of his role as fertility god. What records we do have of his worship tend to focus on his gifts of peace and plenty.

FREY'S SHIP

Frey had a ship called Skíðblaðnir, which means “assembled from pieces of thin wood.” Icelandic sources tell us that it was so cleverly constructed that it could be folded up like a cloth and put in your pocket, which connects it to model boats that were used for fertility rituals and then folded up and put away when not needed. Like so much of the mythological material, it seems that Christian writers in the 13th century and popular writers in the 20th century have misunderstood poetic imagery – which is sometimes based on forgotten religious ritual – and taken it as literal description of mystic objects.

LOKI

Loki is not a god, but merely counted among the gods. He’s a giant who – for reasons never explained – becomes the sworn blood-brother of Odin. He’s the one character in Norse myth who seems to evolve over the course of mythic time, which is part of the evidence that he was a late literary creation and not part of actual pre-Christian religion.

He starts out as a mischievous character who gets the gods into trouble and then gets them out of it, usually through clever trickery and deceit. Early in the mythic timeline, he’s the travelling-companion of both Odin and Thor, but he goes on to kill the god Balder and will personally lead the army of giants and non-heroic dead against the gods in the final battle at the end of time. He has been interpreted as a sort of shadow-Odin, because many of his characteristics seem like parodies of those of Odin himself – more evidence that he’s really just a literary creation.

THE SONS OF IVALDI

Loki, the golden hair & the dwarf
in an illustration from Maria Klugh's
Tales from the Far North (1909)

The sons of Ivaldi are dwarves who, along with another pair of rival dwarves, are tricked by Loki into making a set of treasures for the Norse gods. They appear briefly in the mythology in the role of smiths, a role taken by dwarves throughout Germanic mythology, legend and folktale.

TREASURES OF THE GODS

The dwarves were tricked into making a set of treasures for the gods, all of which are symbols for values held by the noble classes of ancient Germanic culture. Among other objects, they fashion Odin’s spear, which represents religion throughout Norse myth and saga. They create Thor’s hammer, which represents the power to protect one’s family and followers. They make Frey’s boar, which is a Nordic symbol of fertility. They forge Odin’s ring that itself creates other rings, a clear symbol of wealth. They also make golden hair that attaches itself to the head of Thor’s wife and grows; her name basically means “wife,” which underscores that this golden, ever-growing hair is a poetic symbol of the bounty of fertility.

TRAVELS OF THE NORSE

Norsemen traveled west to Canada, east as Iran, north to Greenland, and south to Africa. Despite the popular image of the Norse as violent Vikings, they were also great traders and adventurers.

THE NORSE IN AMERICA

Stone altar to the goddess Nehalennia
from Domburg in the Netherlands

The Icelandic sagas of the 1200s describe Norse voyages to North America in great detail. Archeological proof of their visits to this continent was finally discovered in Newfoundland in the 1960s. Research teams found clear physical evidence, including ship’s nails and remnants of buildings that matched structures in Iceland and Greenland.

GODS AND SEA VOYAGES

Thor, in his role as thunder god, seems to have been invoked for protection against stormy seas, as was a goddess named Nehalennia – there’s some evidence that she was a deadly sea-goddess who was asked by merchants to be merciful, but she may also be have been a benign goddess of fertility and plenty. There was also another sea-goddess named Rán, whose name is related to “robbery,” and who symbolizes the dark and terrifying ocean that drags down men and ships.

Reykjavík's Neighborhood of the Gods is an area in Iceland's capital city featuring streets named after figures from Norse mythology. In 1906, Óðinsgata (Odin's Street) was the first street in this part of the city to be named for one of the Norse gods. Many others followed, creating what became known as the Heathen Neighborhood; Sjafnargata (Sjöfn's Street) completed the set in 1929. In the mid-1920s, the district was known for poorly-built houses and the poverty of its inhabitants, leading some to refer to it as the Blasphemy – meaning that the deteriorated condition of the neighborhood was an affront to the gods whose names it bore. With the usual tides of population change that sweep through urban areas, the neighborhood is now considered a fashionable place to live.

This map shows the Neighborhood of the Gods, from Týsgata (Týr's Street) at the top to Mímisvegur (Mimir's Way) at the bottom.

Óðinsgata (Odin's Street)

The first street in the Neighborhood of the Gods is named for Odin, the Allfather of the Norse pantheon. Like so many figures in Norse mythology, Odin is a complex and enigmatic figure. He is the god who stirs anger in human hearts and delights in war, but he is also the god who inspires creativity in men's minds and (according to Ynglinga Saga) speaks everything in rhyme.

Baldursgata (Balder's Street)

In 1912, six years after Óðinsgata was dedicated, Baldursgata (Balder's Street) became the second street in the district named for one of the Norse gods. Balder, the bright and beautiful, is better known for his death and afterlife than for any actions he accomplished while alive. Troubled by dreams, magically protected, killed by mistletoe and trapped in Hel's domain, Balder will return after Ragnarök.

Nönnugata (Nanna's Street)

According to Snorri Sturluson, Nanna was the wife of Balder. She died of a broken heart at his funeral and was placed on the burning pyre alongside her husband. Nönnugata (Nanna's Street) was named for her in 1919. Does the graffiti on the street sign simply show teenage nonsense, or does it seek to portray Nanna lamenting the death of her beloved Balder?

Intersection of Balder's Street and Nanna's Street

Fittingly enough, the streets named for Balder and Nanna intersect one another. The love shared between the god and goddess was stronger than death, and the two of them journeyed together to the dark realms of Hel, the sinister ruler of the afterlife. Today, Balder and Nanna remain connected in the streets of Reykjavík's Neighborhood of the Gods. Who says Norse mythology isn't romantic?

Haðarstígur (Höðr's Lane)

Haðarstígur (Höðr's Lane) was named in 1925 for the blind god who, according to Snorri, killed Balder by shooting him with a mistletoe missile. Höðr's hand was guided by the scheming Loki, who was jealous of the attention the gods were paying to the seemingly invulnerable Balder. The street was likely designed for garbage pickup, sadly underscoring Höðr's status as an outsider, left out of the god's joyous games.

Válastígur (Váli's Lane)

Válastígur (Váli's Lane) is named for the young god sired by Odin specifically to avenge the death of Balder, his beloved son. According to the Poetic Edda, Váli kills Höðr "when one night old." Válastígur lies directly behind Baldursgata, suggesting Váli's role as Balder's avenger - or perhaps referring to the Eddic assertion that Váli and Balder will both survive Ragnarök to rule over a new era of peace.

Lokastígur (Loki's Lane)

Completing the cast of Balder's drama is Loki, "originator of deceits and the disgrace of all gods and men." In 1920, Reykjavík's mayor supposedly named Lokastígur (Loki's Lane) to get even with a greedy landowner who sought to increase profits by dividing his property. The lane hides behind Þórsgata (Thor's Street), as Loki hides behind (or from) the god of thunder in the myths. Note the graffiti monster lurking around the corner as shadows descend on Loki's Lane.

To a Viking, San Ramon sure would seem like a different world.

Back in 2011, I answered a series of questions about Norse mythology and religion from a very intelligent high school student. In 2012, I answered another set of interesting questions from a middle school student. Now, I've been contacted by another very curious middle school student who is researching Norse myth.

Lori Luo is a sixth grader in Ms. Jennifer Keenan’s class at Windemere Ranch Middle School in San Ramon, California. She is working on an “I-Search” project on Norse mythology and contacted me to help her with her research. I’m glad to help! Her questions and my answers are below.

LL – Which god seemed to be the most favored by the ancient Vikings?

KS – There are several different answers to this question. If you had a ship that could travel through both time and space and you visited different lands at different points before and during the Viking Age, you would find that different gods were favored in different places at different times. Okay, I’ve used the word different six times (now seven times!) in this paragraph, which is a bit confusing. Let me explain.

The three figures in this 12th-century Swedish tapestry are usually
interpreted by scholars to be the Norse gods Odin, Thor & Frey.

If you visited Sweden in the 11th century and went to the city of Uppsala, you would find a large temple with a statue of Thor in the center spot. Off to the side, you would see statues of Odin and Frey. For this particular population in this particular area at this particular time, Thor was considered the mightiest of the gods. The people would tell you that Thor “presides over the air, which governs the thunder and lightning, the winds and rains, fair weather and crops.” You can see how this would be important for a community based on farming.

If you went back a little farther and visited a wealthy warrior in Iceland in the 10th century and he invited you to stay for dinner, you might hear a poet sing songs about Odin. Because Odin inspired both the fighting spirit of the warrior and the creative spirit of the poet, he was considered the most important god in halls of this time and place. Since the Icelandic courtly poems have survived (because they were later written down), we have a lot of information about Odin.

There were many gods and goddesses, and they were worshiped by many different groups of people over a very large area and a very long period of time. Your social status, your geographical area, your family history, and your time period were all factors in which particular god or goddess you might have thought was most important.

LL – How did the gods treat each other, humans and other beings?

KS – The Norse gods are a lot like you and me. Sometimes they are happy and kind. Sometimes they are angry and selfish. We’re not perfect, and neither are they.

I think this is one of the reasons why the Norse gods are so interesting. They are not all-powerful, all-knowing spirits that exist outside of time and space. On the contrary, they are fallible physical characters that sometimes make mistakes. They walk through the world and interact with all the groups that live in various areas: giants, dwarves, trolls, elves and people.

At least in the version of Norse mythology that was written down in Iceland, the gods are a big family. They live together in Asgard, which is like the city of the gods with many homes and estates. Like any family, they argue with each other and get into disagreements. Also, like any family, they pull together and support each other when someone is hurting or needs help.

Thor on the cover of a Danish comic book:
Þjálfi is on the left, Röskva is on the right
(and Loki is hiding behind Thor, of course)

Thor is probably the god you would be most likely to meet. In one famous story, he basically adopts a young boy and girl named Þjálfi and Röskva.

By the way – if you don’t recognize the letter Þ, it’s called a thorn and is pronounced “th.” It’s really an ancient rune that survived into modern Icelandic. Runes were letters used by the ancient people of Northern Europe before they learned our modern Latin alphabet, which arrived in the North with the conversion to Christianity. In the myths, runes sometimes have magical properties. Odin had to go through a scary ritual in order to bring them back from the Other World so they could be used by gods and humans.

These two young kids then join Thor on his adventures. They travel with him to far-off Giantland and take part in some of the most famous myths. Thor is like your favorite uncle. He loves kids, he has great stories to tell and he might even sneak you some tasty snacks when your mother isn’t looking. He has a bit of a temper, but he is quick to forgive and always tries to do the right thing.

LL – What are all the major gods in the pantheon’s names and doings?

KS – All the major gods? All their doings? That’s a pretty big question, Lori! I’ll introduce you to three of my favorites. You’ll have to read some books on Norse mythology to learn about the rest! If you don’t already have it, I suggest you pick up Ingri and Edgar Parin d’Aulaire's Book of Norse Myths, which has kid-friendly versions of all the main stories and is a really good introduction to all the gods and goddesses.

Thor raises his hammer to summon the storm
in a classic illustration by Arthur Rackham

Each of the Norse gods is a complicated and interesting character. You’ll often see Thor referred to as “the god of thunder,” but that doesn’t really make sense. Why would you need a god of thunder? Thunder is just a loud noise. A god of storms, on the other hand, totally makes sense. Storms bring rain for the farmer and bring wind for the sailor. They cool down the summer heat and blow away the winter snow. Remember what I quoted earlier about Thor being in charge of “thunder and lightning, the winds and rains, fair weather and crops”? From this perspective, you can see why Thor was an important god for both farmers and sailors. The thunder is just his way of announcing himself.

Thor’s hammer was a mythic way to understand lightning in a time long before we had a scientific understanding of electricity. People saw a flash of light and saw trees burst apart and houses catch fire. In ancient times, it was completely logical to conclude that Thor had thrown his burning hammer down from the clouds, and what we call lightning was really the path his weapon burned as it flew through the sky. Ancient people believed that Thor used his mystic hammer to protect us from the terrifying giants who wanted to freeze us and wipe us off the planet. Thor is the guardian of both humans and gods, and he is the great enemy of dangerous giants and trolls.

This is my favorite picture of Odin.

Odin is also a very complicated guy. On one hand, he can be seen as the god of language, poetry and runes. On the other hand, he is also the god of magic, war and death. Unlike your big, bearded Uncle Thor, Odin isn’t quite so friendly and trustworthy. He can be downright devious when he sets his mind on something, and he will do whatever it takes to accomplish his goals.

One side of Odin is really deep and beautiful. He is determined to learn all that he can about the world, even if what he learns doesn’t make him any happier. He is willing to sacrifice one of his eyes for just one sip from the Well of Wisdom. He is willing to hang himself from the World Tree for nine days and nights without any food or drink in order to gain knowledge of the runes. He travels all over the world (actually, the Nine Worlds) to ask questions about the origin of the universe, about the way things are now, and about the way the world will end. He risks his life by questioning powerful giants, and he even raises prophetesses from the dead to ask what the future will bring.

I think that this determination to learn everything he can – and to make personal sacrifices to gain wisdom – is very inspiring. We should all work hard to learn everything we can about the world. If you want to be a scientist, learn as much as you can about the parts of science that most interest you. If you want to be a musician, dive deep into music and learn all you can about the subject. In this regard, Odin is a great role model.

However, the other side of Odin can be pretty frightening. On his travels, he learns all about Ragnarök, which means “doom of the powers.” The powers are the gods, so Ragnarök is a term for the end of the world, when the giants and the evil dead rise up and destroy gods, humans, elves, dwarves and the world itself. Before you get too worried, you should know that the giants themselves are destroyed, and that a new world of peace and light will rise up from the ruins of the old world. The knowledge of this great calamity in the future drives Odin to do some dark things.

The Ride of the Valkyries

Odin stirs up war and fighting all over the world. Why would he do such a horrible thing? Because he knows that this great battle with the giants is coming, and he wants to build an army to fight on the side of the gods. By causing war throughout the world, he can discover who the greatest warriors are. He sends out his army of mystic warrior women, the Valkyries, who ride flying horses over the battlefields of humans and pick out the greatest heroes. Their name explains what they do: Valkyrie means “chooser of the slain.” They decide who will die in battle, then they scoop up the dead heroes and take them to Valhalla, Odin’s hall in Asgard. Valhalla means “hall of the slain.” Are you sensing a theme here?

In Valhalla, the dead warriors spend all day fighting and killing each other. At dinner time, they all come back to life, hug each other and go into the hall to eat. They feast on a pig who – like them – comes back to life every day. Yes, it’s true. The warriors of Odin have a literally endless supply of bacon. Since they’re already dead, they don’t have to worry about the fat causing heart disease! Why do they keep on fighting and killing each other? Because they’re in training for the final battle. Odin wants them to be ready to fight the giants when Ragnarök finally arrives.

Wait! Didn’t I just say that all the gods and humans and everybody else will die at Ragnarök? Yes. Yes, I did. This is one of the interesting things about Norse mythology that really reflects the values of the culture that created it. Even though Odin knows that he will lose the final battle, he does everything he can to work for victory. He doesn’t get depressed, give up and go cry in the corner. He works to do all the good he can and to keep hope alive. So even the dark, warlike side of Odin’s character has a powerful message behind it: no matter what happens in your life, no matter what obstacles are in your way, always have hope. Always fight to be the best you can possibly be. Never give up, but fight to make your dreams become reality – no matter what stands in your way.

Freya drives her cats while her brother Frey rides his boar.
If I had a choice, my chariot would be pulled by magic dachshunds.

Freya is my other favorite. If Odin is the Allfather of the gods (and that’s what he is often called in the myths), you can think of Freya as the Allmother. She’s just as powerful and just as complicated as Odin. Like him, she also has a light side and a dark side.

Freya is considered “the most glorious” of the goddesses. She represents all that is bright and beautiful. You can recognize her by the shining necklace she wears and by her chariot that is drawn by cats. She has a pretty awesome cloak of falcon feathers that gives her the power to fly through the skies like a bird. She enjoys songs about love and she is always ready to help people with love problems. Hopefully, you don’t have any love problems yet, but Freya will be there to help you out when you’re older!

Just as the gods reflect human imperfection, so do the goddesses. Maybe the reason Freya cares so much about love is because she herself has a broken heart. Her husband is missing, wandering somewhere out in the world. Freya cries in loneliness, but she is so magical and beautiful that her tears fall to earth as drops of gold.

Like Odin, Freya also has a frightening side. She is the one who teaches a mysterious magic known as seiðr to the gods. A 13th-century Icelandic author named Snorri Sturluson wrote that the seiðr Freya taught Odin gave him some not-so-nice powers:

By means of [seiðr] he could know beforehand the predestined fate of men, or their not yet completed lot; and also bring on the death, ill-luck, or bad health of people, and take the strength or wit from one person and give it to another.

So, the flipside of Freya’s golden beauty is a little bit witchy. One ancient poem says that she Made magic wherever she could, with magic she played with minds, She was always the favorite of wicked women.

Like Odin, Freya collects dead warriors who fall in battle. Another very old poem describing the halls of the various gods and goddesses tells us that

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

Fólkvang means “field of the people.” What does that mean? Think of it is a riddle. What is the field where you bury people? The answer is a graveyard. That’s a pretty grim name for a hall owned by such a beautiful goddess! It definitely shows that there is more to Freya than a pretty face. To make this all even more mysterious, we never find out in the Norse myths what Freya does with all her warriors. Is she preparing for Ragnarök? Does she just need help babysitting her kittens?

To be continued in Part Two.

Click here for Part One.

LL – What part of Norse mythology do you find the most fascinating?

KS – My answer to this is really the same as my answer to your previous question: Odin, Thor and Freya. Let me explain.

Odin takes a deep drink from the Well of Wisdom.

I love Odin’s quest for knowledge. I think he can inspire us to be the best that we can be in our own lives. Odin sacrifices an eye and hangs himself on the World Tree to gain wisdom; he travels throughout the Nine Worlds and risks his life for knowledge. I’m not saying that you and I should do these extreme things. These are myths – they are stories that present deep ideas in fantastical ways that can fire up your imagination. What you and I can learn from Odin’s quest is that we should dedicate ourselves to learning and then sharing the results of that learning – by answering questions from very smart sixth graders, for example!

I think that Thor is inspiring because he is so honest and so willing to stand up against the forces of darkness. He always speaks out against what he thinks is wrong, and he is brave enough to stand up against overwhelming and terrifying monsters (like the snake so big that it surrounds the earth). In the myths, he doesn’t just defend the gods; he also protects the scared little humans who would otherwise be overwhelmed by the destructive giants. I’m not saying you and I need to start running around and hitting monsters in the head with a big hammer. I think we can, however, learn how act bravely – even at the times when we are the most scared inside. We can learn to stand up against the monsters of our own time: prejudice, bigotry and bullying of all kinds. We can learn to speak up and defend those who maybe can’t defend themselves.

Freya hangs out high up in the clouds above.

I think that Freya is inspiring because she shows that women are just as strong and powerful as men are – sometimes more so! Thor needs his goats and his chariot to ride above the clouds, while Freya simply leaps into the air and flies through the skies like a falcon. Odin is a great wizard (and the role model for Gandalf from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings), but he needed Freya to teach him how to perform seiðr. Even Loki, who is usually so clever, has to beg Freya for her falcon cloak when he needs to fly to Giantland on a mission for Thor. If I ever have a daughter, I want to name her Freya and help her to be as fierce and independent as the goddess of golden tears. My wife doesn’t agree with the name. Maybe you could have a little talk with her?

LL – How does Norse mythology affect modern times?

KS – Norse mythology is around us every day. Have you ever heard someone talk about a bolt of lightning? The full name is thunderbolt. The English word thunder comes from the Old English word þunor, which was not only the word for thunder, but also what the Anglo-Saxons called Thor. Bolt is an Old English word meaning a short, heavy arrow. So, when we talk about a thunderbolt crashing to the ground, we’re keeping alive the memory of Thor throwing his mighty thunderweapon down from the sky. That’s pretty cool. If you study this material in more depth when you’re older, you’ll discover that there is a lot in modern English that can be traced back to ancient roots like this; many of the words we use every day are grounded in ancient myth and religion.

I think we can all agree that the Marvel Comics Thor
is totally cool, even if he's not really true to the myths.

The Norse myths are around us in more obvious ways, too. Ever since Stan Lee and Jack Kirby brought Thor into the world of Marvel Comics back in 1962, he’s been part of American pop culture. As long as I’ve been alive (and I’m like an old greybearded Viking wizard), there have been Thor comics, TV shows, toys, dolls, stickers, plushies, advertisements, pillowcases, posters – and now even multimillion-dollar Hollywood movies. There are also authors, artists and musicians all over the world who use the Norse gods and heroes in their creative works; they are continuing a storytelling tradition with these characters that goes back well over a thousand years. That means that Thor definitely has Superman beat when it comes to the length of his back-story!

LL – Around where and when did Norse mythology originate?

KS – The Norse myths that most of us familiar with really come from two Icelandic books that were written down in the 13th century – the Poetic Edda and the Edda. If you read popular versions of the Norse myths (popular meaning books for a non-scholarly audience, not popular meaning the mean girls in your gym class), almost all the stories that modern writers will tell you have been taken from these two books from Iceland. That’s actually pretty strange, and I’ll tell you why.

Icelander Snorri Sturluson wrote the Edda,
one of our main sources of Norse mythology.

Iceland converted to Christianity in the year 1000. This means that the Norse myths were written down by Christian writers over 200 years after the worship of the Norse gods was officially ended in the country. I think it’s pretty obvious that the myths must have been around before the year 1000, back when the worship of Thor and Odin and Freya was the common religion. Scholars today believe that the myths were passed down as oral tradition for a very long time before they were finally recorded. The Christians who wrote them down changed bits here and there, but the stories they transcribed preserve some elements that go back many centuries earlier.

Way back around the year 0 (that’s right – zero), Roman authors wrote descriptions of the Germanic tribes that they were encountering on the continent. Although these Latin sources tend to interpret the gods of the northern tribes through the lens of their own religion, it’s pretty clear that the northerners were worshiping gods very similar to those that we’re familiar with from the much later Icelandic sources. Scholars have picked apart what the Romans recorded and decoded which “Roman” god in Germanic lands was really a version of Odin, Thor and so on.

Even earlier than that, we can find what I like to call “reverse echoes” of the Norse gods. Almost back to 2000 BCE, we can find rock carvings in Sweden that show very early versions of Norse religious figures and symbols. We can’t point at any specific image and say, “This is Thor” or “This is Freya,” but we can see that there is a continuum of concepts that stretches back many centuries. I think it’s very interesting that these carvings come from around the same time as the traditional date for the birth of Abraham, which means that Norse religion has roots just as old as that of Judaism.

LL – Where did Norse mythology spread to?

KS – Norse mythology spread everywhere. Mythology is a set of stories. You’re reading the stories now in California in the 21st century. That’s pretty far away from where these tales originated!

The Germanic tribes sure did move around a lot, and they took
their religion and mythology with them wherever they went.
This map shows the movement of the tribes from 378-439, and
it's just one small part of a much longer story. History is cool!

Norse religion, on the other hand, is a different thing. I tell my students that a more accurate term is Pan-Germanic religion(s). This means that there were many variations of the religion over a very long time period and a very wide physical distance. We can recognize (and have records of) versions of the Norse gods all over the British Isles, the Nordic countries and continental Europe. There are even myths of Odin that are recorded in Italy!

Like I said earlier, the version of the myths we are most familiar with come from Iceland in the 13th century, long after the island was converted to Christianity. The stories we know from the Icelandic sources are a very late version – a version that has been arranged into a neat, logical order by medieval writers. If we travel further back and farther abroad, the sources are much more fragmentary and confusing. Part of the fun of studying Norse mythology is trying to piece together all these little bits and figure out what people may have believed in various times and places.

LL – When and why did people stop believing in Norse mythology?

DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME.
Art by Andy Fairhurst

KS – Again, I think we need to make a distinction between mythology and religion. Mythology never dies. Right now, somewhere in the world, a little kid is discovering Thor for the first time and is thrilled at the idea of this big Viking guy who fights giants with a mystic hammer. I think it’s really awesome that these stories still appeal to young people so many centuries after they were first written down.

Religion’s role in history did not work out the same way. In different parts of the northern world, the Old Way was replaced by Christianity at different times. The conversion of England began in 597. The continental tribes were basically converted by 800. We’ve already talked about Iceland converting in the year 1000. Sweden wasn’t fully converted until around 1150. These official dates of conversion don’t mean that people completely stopped believing in the Norse gods, however.

There is evidence that belief in the gods and other mythological creatures (especially elves) continued in some places even into the 20th century. Jacob Grimm (as in Grimm’s Fairy Tales) recorded elements of the old belief system that were still practiced by rural European people in the 19th century. In Iceland today, more than half of the population says they still believe in elves – and five percent say they have met one of the Huldufólk (“hidden people”). Wow!

LL – Around what part of Norse mythology does your research center?

KS – Well, Lori, you’ve actually touched on most of it with your questions! I love learning about all aspects of history, mythology and religion. I think that these three things are really inseparable. In order to understand any one of them, you need to understand the other two. Every day, I read something related to one of these topics. I have books scattered all over the house with bookmarks in them, and my phone is full of digital books so I can read wherever I am.

You'll have to wait until you're older to read
this big book, but it's pretty exciting stuff.

I take every opportunity to read a little bit here and there. The other half of my career is as a professional musician, so I read a few pages on my phone when there’s a break in rehearsal or during a concert. When I was in Iceland a few years ago, I read all 782 pages of The Sagas of Icelanders. I started it on the airplane ride there, and I finished it before we landed back in Chicago. I simply read a little bit whenever we were waiting somewhere, or before bed, or when we were taking a break from exploring. The American author Henry David Thoreau once said, “Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.” I wholeheartedly agree!

I’d like to thank you for contacting me and asking me all these questions. It’s clear that you’ve thought a lot about this topic, and I hope that my answers will help you understand a bit more about the Norse myths. I wish you the best of luck in your future studies as you continue to explore this fascinating subject!

THE CONTEST

Midsummer bonfire in a painting by Norwegian artist Nikolai Astrup

The theme for the first-ever Norse Mythology Blog art contest is midsummer. During the summer solstice on June 21, those of us living in the northern hemisphere will experience the longest day and shortest night of the year. This may seem pretty early in the season, but it’s really the middle. From this point onwards, the days will start getting shorter as we slowly slide back towards winter.

Throughout Northern Europe, there are local traditions that celebrate midsummer. Some of these practices preserve very old rituals. Your goal with your original piece of visual art is to capture the spirit of both midsummer and Norse mythology. Will you draw elves feasting in the forest under the summer sun? Thor lighting the Midsummer bonfire with lightning? Freya taking her cats to the beach for a picnic? It’s up to you!

I strongly suggest doing some reading and research on midsummer celebrations in Northern Europe before you start working on your artwork. If you need some ideas about Norse mythology, browse the Norse Mythology Blog Archive. Most importantly – be creative!

THE JUDGES

As soon as I thought of finding judges to help me with this contest, I thought of Judge Dredd – so I asked two of my favorite artists from long-running Dredd comic books in England. I have been a huge fan of the work of both of these brilliant illustrators for many, many years. The three of us will judge the entries together.

2000 AD's Wulf Sternhammer by Boo Cook

Boo Cook is a British artist whose work has long been featured in the UK comics 2000 AD and the Judge Dredd Megazine. More recently, he’s broken into the American comic book market with stunning work on Captain America, Elephantmen, Hulk, Wolverine and X-Factor. In addition to his great work with pencil and pen, Boo’s use of computer coloring techniques has set new standards in the field. Boo and I collaborated for a performance on the Chicago Calling Festival in 2008; I played improvised string bass onstage in Chicago while we projected visuals from Boo’s customized “pen-cam” as he drew live in England. He also did the awesome cover art for my Portrait of Jack Johnson and Of Alien Feelings albums. You can explore the wonderful diversity of his work at his official website.

Richard Elson art for Marvel's Thor #611

Richard Elson has been at the center of the British comics scene for twenty-five years. He was one of the first artists in 2000 AD and the Judge Dredd Megazine whose work really turned my head with its originality. In England, his art has appeared in The Beano, Sonic the Comic, Spectacular Spider-Man Adventures, Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles and Toxic Crusaders. He has now become one of the go-to artists in the United States for Marvel Comics; he has drawn Avengers, Hulk, Marvel Zombies, Morbius the Living Vampire, Spider-Man and Wolverine. Most exciting for me, personally, is the fact that he has been the artist for both Thor and Journey Into Mystery, the latter of which features the new adventures of Loki. I’m planning on interviewing Richard about his work on Marvel’s Norse myth comics – as soon as I can catch up on reading all the many issues he’s already done!

AGE CATEGORIES

There will be three winners in each of the following categories:

Kids: Age 12 & under
Teens: Age 13-19
Adults: Age 20 & up

THEME

Your artwork entry must:

1. Be on the theme of midsummer.
2. Contain at least one element from Norse mythology.

Note: For the purposes of this contest, Marvel Comics characters are NOT considered part of Norse mythology. Any art with imagery from the comic books or movies will not be accepted. Please do some reading and research on celebrations of midsummer and the summer solstice, then base your imagery on what you discover about these holidays and Norse myth!

DESCRIPTION OF PICTURE

You must write a short description of your artwork that explains how it portrays midsummer and what element(s) you have included from Norse mythology.

RULES

Midsummer bonfires in Austria's Kalkkögel Mountains

1. Art must be done with crayons, markers, paint, pen, pencil or digital materials.
2. Original art only (no photography or collage).
3. Art must be kid-friendly (no nudity, no violence).
4. No copyrighted characters. Let’s leave the Marvel Comics to professionals like Boo and Richard!

HOW TO ENTER

1. Click on the “Ask a Norse Mythologist” tab at The Norse Mythology Blog.
2. Follow the instructions under “ART CONTEST – Midsummer 2013.”

ENTRY DEADLINE

Midnight of June 14, 2013

WINNERS

Winners will be featured on all
websites of Norse Myth Online

Boo, Richard and I will be judging the entries based on creativity and relation to Norse mythology. Do some reading, do some thinking and make something original!

The three winners in each age group will be featured at The Norse Mythology Blog, The Norse Mythology Facebook Page, The Norse Mythology Google+ Page and The Norse Mythology Twitter Page. Your art and your description of it will be posted on all the many sites of Norse Mythology Online and will remain permanently in the Norse Mythology Blog Archive.

June 19: Kids winners announced
June 20: Teens winners announced
Jue 21: Adults winners announced

It’s time to sharpen your pencil and start drawing. Good luck!

INTERVIEW WITH JOANNE HARRIS (RUNEMARKS & RUNELIGHT), Part One

INTERVIEW WITH JOANNE HARRIS (RUNEMARKS & RUNELIGHT), Part Two

INTERVIEW WITH JOANNE HARRIS (RUNEMARKS & RUNELIGHT), Part Three

INTERVIEW WITH JOANNE HARRIS (RUNEMARKS & RUNELIGHT), Part Four

INTERVIEW WITH JOANNE HARRIS (RUNEMARKS & RUNELIGHT), Part Five

QUESTIONING LOKI, Part One

QUESTIONING LOKI, Part Two

HEATHENS IN THE MILITARY: AN INTERVIEW WITH JOSH & CAT HEATH, Part One

HEATHENS IN THE MILITARY: AN INTERVIEW WITH JOSH & CAT HEATH, Part Two

HEATHENS IN THE MILITARY: AN INTERVIEW WITH JOSH & CAT HEATH, Part Three

TOLKIEN'S HEATHEN FEMINIST, Part One

TOLKIEN'S HEATHEN FEMINIST, Part Two

VIKING, CAN YOU SPARE A DIME?

VALLEY OF THE GODS IN ICELAND

NOTES FOR "THE VIKING GODS," Part One

NOTES FOR "THE VIKING GODS," Part Two

NEIGHBORHOOD OF THE GODS, Part One

A 6TH GRADER ASKS ABOUT NORSE MYTHOLOGY AND NORSE RELIGION, Part One

A 6TH GRADER ASKS ABOUT NORSE MYTHOLOGY AND NORSE RELIGION, Part Two

ART CONTEST – Midsummer 2013