The legends of the Norsemen are not like the legends of other peoples. There is not in them the comforting knowledge of one supremely powerful force of good that is far more potent than any antagonistic force of evil could ever be. The Gods make mistakes - and idiotic ones, sometimes. The Gods can die. And once all the folktales and epics are gathered, the end of the story is neither the eternal, joyous reign of the Caesars in Rome, nor a cataclysm that is only a part of the infinite cosmic cycle of creation and destruction, but an inevitable Götterdämmerung.In actual fact, we know much less about the Scandinavian pantheon than we do about the myths of other countries. Tales from Greek and Hindu mythology are so abundant it is almost embarrassing. Epic poems, hymns, religious texts and plays frequently provide six different and contradicting versions of the same legend, and that is despite the lacunae and lost tales.
Stories of Egyptian Gods are less plentiful, but even there the Book of the Dead and the Book of Gates and sundry inscriptions manage, with some help from the Rosetta Stone, to ensure that we have the main plot straight and any holes in our knowledge are not crippling.
Norse myth, on the other hand… It is the best preserved version of the older branch of Germanic mythology, and that isn’t saying much. It was handed down, like Hindu myth, orally. Unlike Hindu myth, very little skaldic poetry survived to be written down. The main extant sources, the Eddas and sundry other mediaeval texts, were written during and after the Christianization of Northern Europe, and little of significance remains from the days when the stories were believed as well as told. If the Norsemen had a Homer or a Vyaasa, his work has not withstood the ravages of the ages.
That, indeed, is a thread that runs inescapably and insidiously through the entire Norse pantheon. Immortality is unattainable, even for the Gods. With no external aid the Gods would be like Mortal men; they would be stronger and wiser and possessed of supernatural powers, but they would also age and die. Idunn’s apples gave them the gift of eternal youth, and an illusion of eternal life - life that would last until Raganrök.
That is what makes Norse myth - the Germanic tradition, in fact - so much unlike the other branches of mythology and eschatology that evolved from the Indo-European family.
When Olympus is besieged by the Giants, the Immortals know that the worst that can befall them is to be cast down into Tartarus. That is certainly an unpleasant thing to happen to anyone, but there is not the element of finality about it: being imprisoned is a situation that can be reversed. And when the Giants have been defeated and peace restored, you know that the Gods, at any rate, will live happily ever after.
The Norsemen did not have a happily ever after. They did not even have an ever after. Mortals, when they died, would go to Valhalla or to Hel. But what would happen to Valhalla once Odin had been eaten by Fenrir? And where did the Gods go when they died? Balder went to the realm of Hel, yes, but somehow the Völuspá does not leave one with the impression that Odin and Thor and Freyr are sitting in Nilfheim plotting dark revenge against Loki.
Ragnarök, moreover, does not form part, like the Mahapralaya of Hindu myth, of a cycle of creation and destruction that has been going on since the beginning of time and will continue forever. There is no supreme being controlling the Dusk of the Gods, who will ensure that there is a Dawn of the Gods to follow it. And the Dusk is inevitable: there is no way out, no prophecy of one person who has the power to save the world, no perilous quest that can avert the calamity.
Even the few elements of hope in the catastrophe, which draw it up just as it is about to take the final plunge into utter despair, are of doubtful authenticity.
It is unsurprising that the tales should have been woven thus. The creators of the Eddas and the royal bards made the stories famous, but they did not invent myths or write folktales. To those who did that, Ragnarök must have seemed inevitable.
The old women, who made up and modified and retold stories for their grandchildren, did not do so sitting on a rock in the middle of a grassy field under a smiling sun. It would have been winter, the air bitterly cold, and the sun an infrequent guest. Food would have been scarce, with precious little chance of getting more until the spring thaw. The frozen earth would have held no crop. The only sound would have been the wind howling in the trees and the wolves howling in the forests; as winter wore on and prey in the woods became scarce that howling would have come closer and closer to the towns until it sounded at the very doorsteps.
And the eerie pall that held the heavy air prisoner, the overwhelming knowledge of their own mortality, would have found its way into the stories they told. With the possibility of death as a perpetual companion, it would have been impossible to envision Gods who would live forever. And in that way, what probably began as a story to keep children entertained through the long winter nights became an inevitable downward spiral to Ragnarök.
Norse myth shares one thing with Greek tradition: the absence of a supreme God. Odin, like Zeus, is first among equals at best. He is wiser than the other Gods. He is their acknowledged leader. He can teach them valuable lessons and prod them in the right direction. But he is not an omnipotent deity surrounded by archangels, who can do absolutely anything he chooses. He is not the infinitely powerful being to whom all lesser Gods automatically turn for succour. He must even suffer defeat: for Zeus this only means being humiliated by Typhon or caught red-handed by a long-suffering Hera, but for Odin this means the end of the world.
In all this, it is tragic that nothing remains of the legends as they were before the arrival of Christianity. By the time the Eddas were written, Ansgar had had his effect on the Norsemen. Their traditions had changed, had become, according to some scholars, happier. It was Christian influence that let Balder escape the bloodbath of Ragnarök and ensured the survival of a handful of Mortals and baby Gods to repopulate the world.
Then again, that might have had more to do with the hopes of the Norsemen than with the spread of Christianity. If they could not believe that any individual, even a God, could be immortal, they could at least trust that life, in some form, would go on forever. Ragnarök did not harm Yggdrasil; if Valhalla ceased to be, the souls of generations of Viking warriors might still find a home in the same branches that offered shelter to Lif and Lifthrasir. And in time, when a new Odin was lord of all Asgard, they might return to a revivified Valhalla.
Also by Hafta
- A walk in the clouds - February 26th, 2007
- Off the beaten path in Toledo - February 26th, 2007
- Lazy French Holiday - January 22nd, 2007
- Mumbai Votes - January 15th, 2007
- Full House Mumbai - December 4th, 2006