Seven Norse Myths We Wouldn’t Have Without Snorri: Part V

Norse myths have been very popular with fantasy and science fiction writers. Why? I think it’s because of Snorri’s special touch—the wry and sarcastic humor that infuse his tales.

In 2005, for example, Shadow Writer interviewed Neil Gaiman while he was touring for The Anansi Boys (read it here: http://www.shadow-writer.co.uk/neilinterview.htm). They asked Gaiman if he had a favorite myth. He answered, “I keep going back to the Norse ones because most myths are about people who are in some way cooler and more magical and more wonderful than us, and while the Norse gods probably sort of qualify, they’re all sort of small-minded evil, conniving bastards, except for Thor and he’s thick as two planks.”

Then Gaiman referred a tale Snorri wrote: “I still remember the sheer thrill of reading about Thor,” Gaiman said, “and going into this weird cave that they couldn’t make sense of with five branches—a short one and four longer ones—and coming out in the morning from this place on their way to fight the giants … and realizing they’d actually spent the night in this giant’s glove, and going, Okay, we’re off to fight these guys. Right.”

It’s the beginning of the story of the god Thor’s encounter with the giant Utgard-Loki. No other source tells this tale. I think Snorri made it up. I imagine him regaling his friends with it, as they sat around his feast hall at his grand estate of Reyholt in Iceland, sipping horns of mead or ale. Snorri was known for holding extravagant feasts, to which he invited other poets and storytellers. He might have read aloud from his work-in-progress, the Edda. Or he might have told the tale from memory, like an ancient skald.

Here’s how I relate the story in my biography of Snorri, Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths:

One day Thor the Thunder-god and Loki the Trickster sailed east across the sea to Giantland. With them was Thor’s servant, a human boy named Thjalfi, who carried Thor’s food bag. They trudged through a dark forest. That night they found no lodgings except one large, empty house. It had a wide front door, a vast central hall, and five side chambers. Thor and his companions made themselves comfortable in the hall. At midnight came a great earthquake. The ground shuddered. The house shook. They heard scary grumblings and groans. Loki and the boy fled into one of the little side chambers, and Thor guarded the doorway, brandishing his hammer against whatever monster was making that noise.

Nothing more happened that night. At dawn Thor saw a man lying asleep at the edge of the forest. Thor clasped on his magic belt and his strength grew. He lifted his hammer—but then the man awoke and stood up. He was so huge that “Thor for once was afraid to strike him.” Instead, he politely asked the giant’s name.

The giant gave a fake one. “I do not need to ask your name,” he said in return. “You are the mighty Thor. But what were you doing in my glove?”

(Here I imagine Snorri pausing, while laughter fills the room. Maybe he gets up and refills his ale horn.)

The giant, Snorri continues, suggested they travel together and offered to carry their food bag in his giant knapsack. After a long day keeping up with giant strides they camped for the night under an oak tree. The giant settled in for a nap. “You take the knapsack and get on with your supper.”

Thor could not untie the knot. He struggled. He fumed. And—giantlike?—he flew into a rage. He grasped his hammer in both hands and smashed the giant on the head.

The giant awoke. “Did a leaf fall on me?”

(Another pause for laughter.)

He went back to sleep.

Thor hit him a second time.

           

“Did an acorn fall on me?”

           

(Pause for laughter.)

He went back to sleep.

Thor took a running start, swung the hammer with all his might—

The giant sat up. “Are you awake, Thor? There must be some birds sitting in the tree. All sorts of rubbish has been falling on my head.”

(Pause for laughter.)

The giant showed Thor the road to the castle of Utgard then went on his way.

Thor and Loki and little Thjalfi walked all morning. They reached a castle so huge they “had to bend their heads back to touch their spines” to see the top. Thor tried to open the gate, but couldn’t budge it. They squeezed in through the bars. The door to the great hall stood open. They walked in.

King Utgard-Loki (no relation to the god Loki) greeted them. “Am I wrong in thinking that this little fellow is Thor? You must be bigger than you look.”

It was the rule of the giant’s castle that no one could stay who was not better than everyone else at some art or skill. Hearing this, Loki piped up. He could eat faster than anyone.

The king called for a man named Logi. A trencher of meat was set before the two of them. Each started at one end and ate so fast they met in the middle. Loki had eaten all the meat off the bones, but his opponent, Logi, had eaten meat, bones, and wooden trencher too. Loki lost.

The boy Thjalfi was next. He could run faster than anyone. The king had a course laid out and called up a boy named Hugi. Thjalfi lost.

Thor could drink more than anyone, he claimed. The king got out his drinking horn. It was not terribly big, though it was rather long. Thor took great gulps, guzzling until he ran out of breath, but the level of liquid hardly changed. He tried twice more. The third time, he saw a little difference.

He called for more contests.

“Well,” said the king, “you could try to pick up my cat.”

Thor seized it around the belly and heaved—but only one paw came off the ground. “Just let someone come out and fight me!” he raged, “Now I am angry!”

The king’s warriors thought it demeaning to fight such a little guy, so he called out his old nurse, Elli.

“There is not a great deal to be told about it,” Snorri writes. “The harder Thor strained in the wrestling, the firmer she stood. Then the old woman started to try some tricks, and then Thor began to lose his footing, and there was some very hard pulling, and it was not long before Thor fell on one knee.”

Utgard-Loki stopped the contest, but allowed them to stay the night anyway.

The next day the king treated Thor and his companions to a feast. When they were ready to go home, he accompanied them out of the castle and said he would now reveal the truth. He himself had been the giant they met along their way; he had prepared these illusions for them.

When Thor swung his hammer—the leaf, the acorn, the rubbish—Utgard-Loki had placed a mountain in the way: It now had three deep valleys. At the castle, they had competed against fire (the name Logi literally means “fire”), thought (Hugi), and old age (Elli). The end of the drinking horn had been sunk in the sea—Thor’s three great drafts had created the tides. The cat? That was the Midgard Serpent which circles the entire earth.

Outraged at being tricked, Thor raised his mighty hammer once more. But he blinked and Utgard-loki and his castle disappeared.

“Thick as two planks,” indeed.

Why do I think Snorri made up this story of Thor’s visit to Utgard-Loki? A poet does refer to Thor hiding in a giant’s glove—but it’s a different giant. Another mentions his struggle with the knot of a giant’s food-sack. A kenning for old age refers to Thor wrestling with Elli—but it appears in Egil’s Saga, which Snorri probably wrote, so he may be quoting himself. Otherwise, the journey and the contests are unknown.

I think the brilliant character of the giant Utgard-Loki, with his wry attitude toward that little fellow Thor who “must be bigger than he looks,” is a stand-in for Snorri himself. They share the same humorous tolerance of the gods. There is very little sense throughout the Edda that these were gods to be feared or worshipped, especially not the childish, naïve, blustering, weak-witted, and fallible Thor who is so easily deluded by Utgard-Loki’s wizardry of words. What god in his right mind would wrestle with a crone named “Old Age”? Or expect his servant-boy to outrun “Thought”?

It also fits with why Snorri wrote the Edda: to teach the 14-year-old king of Norway about Viking poetry. This story has a moral: See how foolish you would look, Snorri is saying to young King Hakon, if you didn’t understand that words can have more than one meaning, or that names can be taken literally? The story of Utgard-loki is, at heart, a story about why poetry matters.

This essay was adapted from my biography of Snorri Sturluson, Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths, published by Palgrave Macmillan. It originally appeared on the science fiction and fantasy lovers website Tor.com.

Join me again next Wednesday at nancymariebrown.blogspot.com for another writing adventure in Iceland or the medieval world.

Seven Norse Myths We Wouldn’t Have Without Snorri: Part II

 It was Neil Gaiman who convinced me. Reading American Gods, I was delighted to see the character Mr. Wednesday echoing Snorri Sturluson, the 13th-century Icelandic writer whose biography forms the core of my book Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths.

Mr. Wednesday, I knew, was the Norse god Odin (from the Old English spelling, Woden’s Day). In American Gods he is a tricky figure to pin down, attractive, untrustworthy, all-powerful, but also afraid—for the old gods have been nearly forgotten. And that, Gaiman implies, would be a disaster for all of us.

Which is exactly what Snorri Sturluson was trying to say in his Edda.

Seeing Snorri through Gaiman’s lens convinced me he was more than an antiquarian, more than an academic collector of old lore. Like Gaiman himself, Snorri was a wonderfully imaginative writer.

And both of them—all writers, in fact—are devotees of the god of Wednesday who, according to Snorri, is the god of poetry and storytelling.

We know very little about Odin, except for what Snorri wrote. We have poems containing cryptic hints. We have rune stones whose blunt images and few words tantalize. Only Snorri gives us stories, with beginnings and ends and explanations—but also with contradictions and puzzles.

Almost everything we know about Norse mythology comes from Snorri’s Edda and Heimskringla, two books he wrote between 1220 and 1240 to gain influence at the Norwegian court.

The Edda is a handbook on how to write Viking court poetry, much of which refers obscurely to Norse myths. The god Odin in Snorri’s Edda is the ruler of heaven and earth, the greatest and most glorious of the gods. Odin and his brothers fashioned the world from the body of the giant Ymir. But Snorri also describes Odin in very Christian terms as the All-father.

This Odin overlaps with, but is not entirely the same as, the King Odin in Snorri’s Heimskringla. Heimskringla means “The Round World” or “The Orb of the Earth” (from the first two words of the introduction). It is a collection of 16 sagas in which Snorri traces the history of Norway from its founding in the shadows of time by Odin the Wizard-King (a human king who later was mistakenly revered as a god, Snorri explains) to 1177 A.D., the year before Snorri’s birth.

It is this Odin the Wizard-King who inspired Mr. Wednesday—as well as Tolkien’s Gandalf, which is a subject for another time.

King Odin “could change himself and appear in any form he would,” Snorri writes, including bird, beast, fish, or dragon. He raised the dead and questioned them. He owned two talking ravens who flew far and wide, gathering news. He worked magic with runes, and spoke only in verse or song. With a word he “slaked fire, stilled the sea, or turned winds in what way he would.” He knew “such songs that the earth and hills and rocks and howes opened themselves for him,” and he entered and stole their treasures. “His foes feared him, but his friends took pride in him and trusted in his craft.”

Long after King Odin’s death, when he had become a god, Snorri says, the missionary King Olaf Tryggvason, who forced Norway to become Christian around the year 1000, held a feast to celebrate Easter. An unknown guest arrived, “an old man of wise words, who had a broad-brimmed hat and was one-eyed.” The old man told tales of many lands, and the king “found much fun in his talk.” Only the bishop recognized this dangerous guest. He convinced the king that it was time to retire, but Odin followed them into the royal chamber and sat on the king’s bed, continuing his wondrous stories. The bishop tried again. “It is time for sleep, your majesty.” The king dutifully closed his eyes. But a little later King Olaf awoke. He asked that the storyteller be called to him, but the one-eyed old man was nowhere to be found.

Nowhere but in Snorri’s books. And, perhaps, in his soul.

Odin One-eye was Snorri’s favorite of all the Norse gods and goddesses. Following tradition, he placed Odin in his Edda at the head of the Viking pantheon of 12 gods and 12 goddesses. Then he increased his power so that, like the Christian God the Father, Snorri’s Odin All-Father governed all things great and small.

Icelanders had, in fact, long favored Thor, the god of Thursday. They named their children after the mighty Thunder God: In a twelfth-century record of Iceland’s first settlers, a thousand people bear names beginning with Thor; none are named for Odin. Nor did the first Christian missionaries to Iceland find cults of Odin. Odin is rarely mentioned in the sagas. For a good sailing wind Icelanders called on Thor. But Snorri wasn’t fond of Thor—except for comic relief. Thor was the god of farmers and fishermen.

Odin was a god for aristocrats—not just the king of gods, but the god of kings.

He had a gold helmet and a fine coat of mail, a spear, and a gold ring that magically dripped eight matching rings every ninth night. No problem for him to be a generous lord, a gold-giver.

He had a grand feast hall named Valhalla, where dead heroes feasted on unlimited boiled pork and mead. Snorri is our only source for many of the details of what Valhalla looked like: its roof tiled with gold shields, the juggler tossing seven knives, the fire whose flames were swords—even the beautiful Valkyries, the warrior women who serve mead to the heroes. Old poems and sagas that Snorri does not quote describe the Valkyries as monsters. These Valkyries are troll women of gigantic size who ride wolves and pour troughs of blood over a battlefield. They row a boat through the sky, trailing a rain of blood. They are known by their “evil smell.” One rode at the head of an army carrying a cloth “which hung down in tatters and dripped blood.” She whipped the cloth about, “and when the ragged ends touched a man’s neck she jerked off his head.” Snorri didn’t care for that kind of Valkyrie.

Finally, Odin had the best horse, the eight-legged Sleipnir. Snorri is our only source for the memorable comic tale of how Odin’s wonderful horse came to be.

Here’s how I tell it in Song of the Vikings:

One day while Thor was off fighting trolls in the east, a giant entered the gods’ city of Asgard. He was a stonemason, he said, and offered to build the gods a wall so strong it would keep out any ogre or giant or troll. All he wanted in return was the sun and the moon and goddess Freya for his wife.

The gods talked it over, wondering how they could get the wall for free.

“If you build it in one winter, with no one’s help,” the gods said, thinking that impossible, “we have a deal.”

“Can I use my stallion?” the giant asked.

Loki replied, “I see no harm in that.” The other gods agreed. They swore mighty oaths.

The giant got to work. By night the stallion hauled enormous loads of stone, by day the giant laid them up. The wall rose, course upon course. With three days left of winter, it was nearly done.

“Whose idea was it to spoil the sky by giving away the sun and the moon—not to mention marrying Freyja into Giantland?” the gods shouted. They wanted out of their bargain. “It’s all Loki’s fault,” they agreed. “He’d better fix it.”

Loki transformed himself into a mare in heat. That evening, when the mason drove his stallion to the quarry, his horse was uncontrollable. It broke the traces and ran after the mare. The giant chased after them all night and, needless to say, he got no work done.

Nor could he finish the wall the next day with no stone. His always-edgy temper snapped. He flew into a giant rage.

The gods’ oaths were forgotten. Thor raised his terrible hammer and smashed the giant’s skull.

Eleven months later, Loki had a foal. It was grey and had eight legs. It grew up to be the best horse among gods and men.

In my next post, I’ll look at how Odin gave men poetry.

This essay was adapted from my biography of Snorri Sturluson, Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths, published by Palgrave Macmillan. It originally appeared on the science fiction and fantasy lovers website Tor.com."The Grey God" is by Michael L. Peters; see more of his art at http://mlpeters.com. 

Join me again next Wednesday at nancymariebrown.blogspot.com for another writing adventure, or meet me on tour:

            11/29: Sterling College, Craftsbury Common, VT @ 6:30

            11/30: Northshire Bookstore, Manchester Center, VT @ 7:00

            12/3: Scandinavia House, New York City @ 6:30

            12/6: Phoenix Books, Burlington, VT @ 7:00

The Most Influential Writer of the Middle Ages

Who influenced your favorite writers?

As Laura Miller reported in Salon recently, a group of mathematicians led by Daniel Rockmore of Dartmouth College analyzed the works of 537 authors who wrote in English from 1550 to the present. The mathematicans concluded that “today’s literary writers have little use for the classics,” in Miller’s wording. She continues, “They are, the study asserts, much more influenced by their peers than they are by the most revered authors of earlier centuries.”

The Dartmouth study focused on style--word usage--and I won’t disagree that no one these days writes quite like Shakespeare, Donne, or Milton. But look back farther than 1550 and you'll start to see more similarities. 

Take Snorri Sturluson. A few years ago, when I began writing my biography of Snorri, Song of the Vikings (due out in October), I read Neil Gaiman’s best-selling genre-bender American Gods (published in 2001). I was delighted to see how heavily Gaiman was influenced by Snorri Sturluson, in both style and content. 

American Gods won the Hugo and Nebula awards, was the first “One Book One Twitter” title in 2010, and is being made into an HBO television series. But put aside the fact that it’s a great story. What intrigued me is that American Gods essentially updates Snorri’s masterwork, the Edda, for both Gaiman and Snorri ask, What do we lose when the old gods are forgotten? 

Gaiman’s Mr. Wednesday is closely patterned on Snorri’s Odin One-Eye, the god of Wednesday. In this passage from American Gods, Mr. Wednesday reveals himself—by paraphrasing Snorri: “His right eye glittered and flashed, his left eye was dull. He wore a cloak with a deep monklike cowl, and his face stared out from the shadows. ‘I told you I would tell you my names. This is what they call me. I am Glad-of-War, Grim, Raider, and Third. I am One-Eyed. I am called Highest, and True-Guesser. I am Grimnir, and I am the Hooded One. I am All-Father, and I am Gondir Wand-Bearer. I have as many names as there are winds, as many titles as there are ways to die.’”

Mourned Snorri in his Edda, “But these things have now to be told to young poets.” They have forgotten the names of Odin. The old lore is dwindling and will soon vanish into neverwhere: “But these stories are not to be consigned to oblivion,” he insisted. 

And because of the books he wrote, they were not.

More than eight hundred years after his death, Snorri’s books are the basis of a best-selling American novel and a TV series. And Neil Gaiman is not the only author Snorri influenced.

Wellspring of Western Culture

Snorri Sturluson died, accused of treason by the king of Norway and murdered by thugs, in 1241. His books over time were forgotten, though manuscripts of them were preserved in Iceland and Norway. 

Then in the early 1600s Snorri was resurrected. Translations from Old Norse began to appear throughout Europe. The craze led to the Gothic novel and ultimately to modern heroic fantasy. 

Snorri has influenced writers as various as Thomas Gray, William Blake, Sir Walter Scott, the Brothers Grimm, Thomas Carlyle, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Richard Wagner, Matthew Arnold, Henrik Ibsen, William Morris, Thomas Hardy, Hugh MacDiarmid, J.R.R. Tolkien, Jorge Luis Borges, W.H. Auden, Gunther Grass, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, A.S. Byatt, Seamus Heaney, Jane Smiley, Michael Chabon, and Neil Gaiman.

Through Tolkien, Snorri has inspired dozens of writers of fantasy. Fantasy and science fiction now account for ten percent of books published, and few books on the fantasy shelves of modern libraries or bookstores are free of wandering wizards, fair elves and werewolves, valkyrie-like women, magic swords and talismans, talking dragons and dwarf smiths, heroes that understand the speech of birds, or trolls that turn into stone—all drawn from Snorri’s Edda and Heimskringla. 

An incomplete list of fantasy writers indebted to Snorri includes: Douglas Adams, Lloyd Alexander, Poul Anderson, Terry Brooks, David Eddings, Lester del Rey, J.V. Jones, Robert Jordan, Guy Gavriel Kay, Stephen King, Ursula K. LeGuin, George R.R. Martin, Anne McCaffrey, and J.K. Rowling.

Snorri has inspired countless comic books—from Marvel’s Thor to the Japanese anime Matantei Loki Ragnarok—and games, including the wildly popular Dungeons and Dragons, World of Warcraft, and Eve Online. The hit movie The Avengers would not exist without Snorri.

Snorri Sturluson is the most influential writer of the Middle Ages. His Edda, according to one translator, is “the deep and ancient wellspring of Western culture.” That comment was published in 1909—how much more true it is today. 


Join me again next Wednesday at nancymariebrown.blogspot.com for another adventure in Iceland or the medieval world.