The Witch's Heart

In her novel, The Witch's Heart, Genevieve Gornichec picks apart the ancient tapestry of Old Norse myths, sorts and irons out the colored threads, adds some narrative silver wire and sparkling jewels, and embroiders a stunning new story of the Norse gods and giants.

Much of what we know about Norse mythology comes from one short book written in Iceland in the early 1200s by a man named Snorri Sturluson. It's called the Prose Edda, or Snorri's Edda. By the time Snorri wrote it, Iceland and the rest of Scandinavia had been Christian for 200 years. No one exclusively worshipped the old gods. Snorri himself was educated in a powerful Christian family. When Snorri was 17, his foster brother, Páll, was elected the Bishop of Skalholt.

As I explain in my 2013 biography of him, Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths, Snorri had no intention of "collecting" or "preserving" pagan myths for us to enjoy 800 years later--though that's what he did. Snorri was not thinking about his "legacy." Like every writer, he had an immediate audience and purpose in mind when he sat down to write. His audience was the 16-year-old Norwegian king. His purpose was to teach the young king to appreciate the poetry of the ancient North--so that he himself could obtain a powerful position at court.

Snorri was an expert in the songs of the Vikings. He had memorized nearly a thousand poems and could write in the ancient skaldic style himself, with its convoluted word order, its strict rules about rhyme and meter and alliteration, and its many vague allusions to mythology. When he went to Norway in 1218, Snorri brought a new poem to recite. He expected to be named King's Skald, or court poet.

But young King Hakon thought skaldic poetry was old-fashioned. It was too hard to understand. He preferred the tales of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, which were just then being translated from the French.

Snorri must have been shocked. Skalds, or court poets, had been a fixture at the Norwegian court for 400 years. Skalds were a king's ambassadors, counselors, and keepers of history. They were part of the high ritual of his royal court, upholding the Viking virtues of generosity and valor. They legitimized his claim to kingship. They were time-binders: They wove the past into the present.

Snorri wrote the Edda to teach the young king his heritage.

To appease the bishops, who controlled the young king, Snorri put a Christian slant on the myths he told. He wasted few words on female characters, choosing instead stories that would excite a young man: stories of fast horses, magic swords, and trials of strength.

When goddesses and giantesses do appear in Snorri's Edda, they are reduced to objects of lust--or disgust.

Such as the one at the center of Genevieve Gornichec's The Witch's Heart.

"There was a giantess called Angrboda in Giantland," Snorri writes (in the 1987 translation by Anthony Faulkes). "With her Loki had three children. One was Fenriswolf, the second Iormungard (i.e. the Midgard serpent), the third is Hel. And when the gods realized that these three siblings were being brought up in Giantland, and when the gods traced prophecies stating that from these siblings great mischief and disaster would arise for them, then they all felt evil was to be expected from them, to begin with because of their mother's nature, but still worse because of their father's." The gods capture the three children and take them away--but Angrboda, their mother, lover of the Trickster God Loki, is never mentioned again.

In The Witch's Heart, Genevieve Gornichec fills that void, imagining the Tale of Angrboda that Snorri never told. It's a love story, an origin story, a coming-of-age tale, and a quest, with an indomitable witch at its center. The mother of Loki's monster children will win a place in your heart.

For more stories of powerful Viking women, see my book The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women, or read the related posts on this blog (click here).

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and may earn a commission if you click through and purchase the books mentioned here.

Odin's Wife

In his Edda, the 13th-century Icelander Snorri Sturluson presents Norse mythology through a wisdom match between the clever King Gylfi and three gods--High, Just-as-High, and Third--who sit on thrones in Valhalla.

Asked "Who is the highest and most ancient of all gods?" High responds with a list of twelve names, beginning with All-father. Later he applies the name All-father to Odin--along with 52 more names.

"What a terrible lot of names you have given him!" objects King Gylfi in Anthony Faulkes’ 1987 translation. "One would need a great deal of learning to be able to give details and explanations of what events have given rise to each of these names."

Responds High, "You cannot claim to be a wise man if you are unable to tell of these important happenings."

Snorri Sturluson considered himself a wise man. In his Edda and in Heimskringla, his collection of sagas about Norway's kings, Snorri quotes apt lines from nearly a thousand poems, most of which had not been written down before.

But because he wrote for an audience of one--young King Hakon of Norway, brought to the throne at age 14--Snorri's tales in these two books skew toward the interests of a boy. As I pointed out in my 2013 biography of him, Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths, Snorri wasted few words on women, human or divine. It's no surprise that he fails to tell us the many names of Odin's wife, or to relate the events that gave rise to them.

In Odin's Wife: Mother Earth in Germanic Mythology, William P. Reaves attempts to fill in the gaps in Snorri's Edda--proving himself a wise man by High's definition. Reaves is webmaster of the site germanicmythology.com, which aims to compile everything of interest to students of Norse mythology that exists in the public domain. It shouldn't surprise you that Odin's Wife is similarly comprehensive.

Snorri tells us that Frigg is Odin's wife and the mother of his son Baldur, while the Earth, or Jörd, is the mother of Odin's son Thor. According to the Edda, these are two separate goddesses. But as Reaves points out, "while evidence for Odin's wife Frigg and his wife the Earth are contemporary and congruous--occurring at the same time in the same places and genres--they are never shown together. Like Diana Prince and Wonder Woman, we apparently never see Frigg and Jörd side by side." Both goddesses are also called by several other names; one they hold in common is Hlin, which means "protector."

As Reaves lays out his "preponderance of evidence," the goddess Frigg leaps out of the shadows in which Snorri wrapped her. She convincingly becomes the powerful Earth-Mother and Mother of Gods, including not only Baldur and Thor, but also Freyr and Freyja, whom she had with her brother, Njörd. As Reaves concludes, "She is Odin’s equal in all respects, surpassing him in practical power."

That Frigg sits beside Odin on his throne, watching (and meddling in) all the Nine Worlds, "should not come as a surprise," he adds: "The sons of Borr bestowed senses, wit, and spirit on Ask and Embla alike. Women are not subordinate to men. The sources, both religious and historical, are rife with strong, independent women. Both men and women appear on the battlefield, as mythological, historical, and archaeological evidence affirms. Equality of the sexes was a Germanic reality, long before modern times."

See my complete review of Odin's Wife: Mother Earth in Germanic Mythology by William P. Reaves at The Midgardian.

For more about the powerful women of the Viking Age, see my book The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women, or read the related posts on this blog (click here).

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and may earn a commission if you click through and purchase the books mentioned here.

The Viking Creation Story

The Viking Age, I was taught, was an era of strict gender roles. The woman ruled the household. The man was the trader, the traveler, the warrior.

This interpretation—as I've noted previously on this blog—has been taught since the 1800s, the Victorian Age, when elite women were told to concern themselves only with church, children, and kitchen.

But it’s not the only way to read the sources.

In my book The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women, I argue that roles in Viking society were decided—not by these Victorian ideas of men’s work vs. women’s work—but based on factors much harder to see.

I was convinced this was true by studying Norse mythology.

Our best sources on Norse mythology were written by the Icelandic chieftain Snorri Sturluson. But Snorri is not trustworthy. In 2012, I wrote a biography of him (Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths) and showed that, not only did he put a Christian slant on the myths he told, he was a terrible misogynist.

In writing down the Norse myths, Snorri wasted few words on females, human or divine. They did not fit his audience or his purpose.

He began writing the Prose Edda in about 1220 for the 16-year-old Norwegian king to teach the young king to appreciate the poetry of the ancient North, with its many allusions to mythology; Snorri’s real goal was to gain an influential position at court.

Snorri wrote Heimskringla, his history of the kings of Norway, during the same king’s reign, again to impress the younger man.

Women in both books are honored mothers or objects of lust, Mary or Eve, as they were in Snorri’s own lifetime. It was the orthodox view of women in medieval Christian society, where even marriage and childbirth were considered matters for churchmen to control.

But Snorri gives us glimpses of the myths he left out—ancient stories that reflect the values of the pre-Christian Vikings. One of these is the Norse creation myth.

Here's how it goes: In the beginning two driftwood logs, one elm and one ash, are found on the seashore by three wandering gods. These gods give the wood human shape and bring it to life with blood, breath, and curious minds.

Unlike the Christian creation myth, where Eve is an afterthought, fashioned out of Adam’s rib, in the Norse myth Embla (the female) and Ask (the male) are equal:

They are made at the same time out of nearly the same stuff. As different as an ash tree and an elm, they make a good team.

Ash wood was used for spear shafts and oars. A good rower was sometimes called an “ash-person.”

Elm was used for wagon wheels. It was also the preferred wood for short, powerful bows: One archer is nicknamed “elm-twig.”

Both woods had roles in peace and war, for transportation and for killing. Their uses were determined by their size and strength, their resistance to rot or tensile stress, the denseness of their grain, and where they grew.

I think the same was likely true for the men and women of the Viking Age. They were equals, their roles in society being decided—not by gender—but based on ambition, ability, family ties, and wealth.

For more on my book The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women, see the related posts on this blog (click here) or my page at Macmillan.com.

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and may earn a commission if you click through and purchase the books mentioned here.

Snorri and the Volcanoes

There’s a volcano erupting in Iceland again. They happen quite often—I saw one in 2010, when I took these photos, just before it shut down European airspace with clouds of ash.

Eruptions are a fact of life for Icelanders. A big one happened in 871 (plus or minus two years): The dark layer of ash it sprinkled over much of the country now helps archaeologists date the time of the first settlement of Iceland to just about that time, using a technique called tephrachronology. Another big eruption in 1104 laid down a layer of ash in a conveniently lighter color, which helps archaeologists bracket the Viking Age.

Geologists estimate ten volcanic eruptions per century took place between Iceland’s founding in the 870s and when the Icelandic sagas began to be written in the early 1200s. Then the frequency increased to about fifteen per century.

So why are eruptions essentially missing from the sagas?

Only once, in Kristnisaga, the Saga of Christianity, is an eruption a plot point. The chieftains were meeting in the year 1000 to debate whether Iceland should become Christian, as the king of Norway insisted. A rider broke into the proceedings to shout, “Earth fire! In Olfus!” A volcano had erupted on one of the chieftains’ farms.

“It is no wonder. The gods are angry at such talk,” people muttered.

“And what were the gods angry about,” said one chieftain, gesturing to the black, ropy lava all around, “when they burned the wasteland we’re standing on now?”

The great Icelandic writer Snorri Sturluson, subject of my book, Song of the Vikings, grew up in the shadow of a volcano. Hekla, the cloud-hooded mountain known in the Middle Ages as the Mouth of Hell, erupted twice during Snorri’s lifetime. Possibly three times, for the church annals record “darkness across the south” the year he turned five.

The annalist knew what caused that darkness. The Saga of Bishop Gudmund, written in the mid-1200s, contains this explanation (translated here by my friend Oren Falk of Cornell University):

“There are mountains in this land, which emit awful fire with the most violent hurling of stones, so that the crack and crash are heard throughout the country.… Such great darkness can follow downwind from this terror that, on midsummer at midday, one cannot make out one’s own hand.”

To the east of Snorri’s childhood home rose the ice cap of Eyjafjallajokull--from under which erupted the volcano I visited in 2010. Snorri would have seen only tier upon tier of vast blank whiteness, a glimmering dome mingling with the clouds so that on some days the horizon disappeared.

But Snorri’s contemporaries were aware that active volcanoes lurked beneath the ice. A thirteenth-century poet told how “glaciers blaze,” “coal-black crags burst,” “fire unleashes storms,” and “a marvelous mud begins to flow from the ground.” (Again, in Oren’s translation.)

Lava also spouted from the sea in Snorri’s lifetime, forming rugged black islands that rose above the waves only long enough for a few intrepid souls to row out and give them a name, the Fire Islands.

It is not surprising, then, that volcanoes also informed Snorri’s version of the creation of the world.

In the beginning, Snorri wrote in his Edda, there was nothing. No sand, no sea, no cooling wave. No earth, no heaven above. Nothing but the yawning empty gap, Ginnungagap. All was cold and grim.

Then came the giant Surt with a crashing noise, bright and burning. He bore a flaming sword. Rivers of fire flowed till they turned hard as slag from an iron-maker’s forge, then froze to ice.

The ice-rime grew, layer upon layer, till it bridged the mighty, magical gap.

Where the ice met sparks of flame and still-flowing lava from Surt’s home in the south, it thawed and dripped. Like an icicle it formed the first frost-giant, Ymir, and his cow.

Ymir drank the cow’s abundant milk. The cow licked the ice-rime, which was salty. It licked free a handsome man and his wife. They had three sons, one of whom was Odin, the ruler of heaven and earth, the greatest and most glorious of the gods: the All-father.

Odin and his brothers killed Ymir. From his giant body they fashioned the world: His flesh was the soil, his blood the sea. His bones and teeth became stones and scree. His hair were trees, his skull was the sky, his brain, clouds.

From his eyebrows they made Middle Earth, which they peopled with men, crafting the first man and woman from an ash tree and an elm they found on the seashore.

So Snorri explains the creation of the world in the beginning of his Edda. Partly he is quoting an older poem, the “Song of the Sibyl,” whose author he does not name. Partly he seems to be making it up—especially the bit about the world forming in a kind of volcanic eruption, and then freezing to ice.

This part of the myth cannot be ancient. The Scandinavian homelands--Norway, Sweden, and Denmark--are not volcanic. But there is nothing so characteristic of Iceland as the clash between fire and ice.

The Names of the Week

Why did I write a biography of a 13th-century Icelandic chieftain who was murdered cowering in his cellar? Tonight I'm giving a talk to a book club in Burlington, Vermont, and I know that's one of the questions they'll ask me. Here’s one answer:

Have you ever wondered why Hump Day was named “Wednesday”? Or where the names Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday come from? These days of the week were named for the ancient gods Woden (or Odin), Tyr, and Thor, and the goddess Frigg or Freyja.

If it weren’t for that 13th-century Icelandic chieftain, Snorri Sturluson, we wouldn’t know much about these old gods. In about 1220, to impress a teenage Norwegian king—the same king who, 20 years later, ordered him killed—Snorri wrote a book of Norse myths called the Edda. Along with a collection of mythological poems (also confusingly called the Edda), Snorri’s book contains almost everything we know about the gods we still honor each week with the names Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.

Tuesday is named for Tyr, the one-handed god of war. According to Snorri, Tyr stuck his hand in the mouth of a giant wolf. He was guaranteeing the gods wouldn’t double-cross the wolf when they bound him with a leash made from six things: “the noise a cat makes when it moves, the beard of a woman, the roots of a mountain, the sinews of a bear, the breath of a fish, and the spittle of a bird.” Of course, the gods were lying to the wolf. They had no intention of freeing him again. So he bit off Tyr’s hand. Tyr “is not called a peace-maker” now, says Snorri, in the translation by Jean Young.

Wednesday is named for Odin, "the highest and oldest of the gods," the one with the most names and the most stories. Odin owns the hall Valhalla. He directs the Valkyries, who chose the slain on the field of battle. He is the god of poets and storytellers, the god of beer and brewing. He has two ravens, Thought and Memory, that keep him apprised of the news. I've written about the God of Wednesday (obviously) a number of times on this blog.

See, for example, the story of Odin's eight-legged horse, Sleipnir, here: http://nancymariebrown.blogspot.com/2012/11/seven-norse-myths-we-wouldnt-have_21.html

Or the story of the mead of poetry, here: http://nancymariebrown.blogspot.com/2012/12/seven-norse-myths-we-wouldnt-have.html

As Snorri says, "It will be impossible for you to be called a well-informed person if you cannot relate some of these great events."

Thursday is named for Thor, strongest of the gods. Thor drives a chariot pulled by two goats. He has three magical objects: a belt of strength, a pair of iron gloves, and a hammer called Mjöllnir, or "Crusher." "The frost ogres and cliff giants know when it is raised aloft, and that is not surprising since he has cracked the skulls of many of their kith and kin."

Friday is named for Freyja (or maybe for Frigg, but Snorri doesn’t tell us much about Frigg). Freyja is "the most renowned of the goddesses." She drives a chariot drawn by two cats and enjoys love poems. She cries golden tears, wears expensive jewelry, and is not particularly faithful to her husband. "It is good to call on her for help in love affairs," Snorri says.

Why should we care about these old stories? In 1909, a translator called the two Eddas “the wellspring of Western culture.” That may be an exaggeration, but the Eddas are the source of much of our modern popular culture.

The Marvel comic character Thor—and the blockbuster movies about him—are obviously based on the Eddas.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were inspired by the Eddas—and so, of course, were Peter Jackson’s films, not to mention all the fantasy-themed movies, books, and games that feature 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.

The Gothic novel, too, has been traced back to the Eddas.

Their influence is even felt in “high” culture, stretching from Thomas Gray (better known for “Elegy in a Country Churchyard”) in the 1750s to our latest Nobel prizewinner, Alice Munro.

And, of course, the names of these gods are on our lips four days out of every week.

Now in Paperback!

Thanks to my publisher, Palgrave Macmillan, for my best Christmas present: the paperback edition of Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths.

No gift wrap necessary. 

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

The Death of Snorri Sturluson

In 2010, on the night of Snorri Sturluson’s murder, September 23, I sat on the stones surrounding his hot tub at Reykholt in western Iceland and dabbled my feet in the warm pool. The weather had turned: A cold mist replaced the sunshine of Thingvellir, where I’d walked, picking blueberries, that afternoon, memorizing the verse on the bronze plaque beside Snorri’s Althing booth, the place he called Valhalla. In English the lines run:

Snorri’s old site is a sheep-pen; the Law Rock is hidden in heather,
blue with the berries that make boys—and the ravens—a feast.

I knew the next two lines of this poem by Jónas Hallgrimsson (in the translation by Dick Ringler):

Oh you children of Iceland, old and young men together!
See how your forefathers’ fame faltered—and died from the earth!

And knew its fears were unsubstantiated: Researching Snorri Sturluson’s life for my book Song of the Vikings, I had concluded that Snorri, who lived from 1178 to 1241, was the single most influential writer of the Middle Ages.

For that we must thank the king of Norway, Hakon IV. Only fourteen when Snorri met him in 1218, King Hakon preferred the fashionably new French legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table to traditional Viking skaldic poetry and tales of the gods Odin, Loki, and Thor. Snorri must have been shocked. It also hit him in the pocketbook. Poetry was Iceland’s cultural capital, to use a term popularized by sociologists. It was all Snorri had to sell on the international market. Iceland’s other exports were wool and dried fish. The bright-colored alum-dyed cloth from England and Flanders was more highly prized, and Norway had ample fish.

Perhaps, Snorri thought, King Hakon was just ill-educated. He simply needed a good introduction to the lore of the North. Snorri began writing his books to teach the young king to appreciate his own heritage.

His motives were not pure. Snorri was not only a poet and lover of books. He was one of the richest men in Iceland, holder of seven chieftaincies, owner of five profitable estates and a harbor, husband of an heiress, lover of several mistresses, a fat man soon to go gouty, a hard drinker, a seeker of ease prone to soaking long hours in his hot-tub while sipping stout ale, not a Viking warrior by any stretch of the imagination, but clever. Crafty, cunning, and ambitious. A good businessman. So well-versed in the law that few other Icelanders could out-argue him. At age forty-two, he was at the height of his power.

His secret ambition was to rule Iceland—and he almost succeeded. On the quay at Bergen in 1220, departing for home, he tossed off a praise poem about the king’s regent, Earl Skuli, said to be the handsomest man in Norway for his long red-blond locks. In response, the earl gave him the ship he was to sail in and many other fine gifts. Young King Hakon honored Snorri with the title of landed man, or baron, one of only fifteen so-named. The king charged Snorri, too, with a mission: He was to bring Iceland—then an independent republic of some 50,000 souls—under Norwegian rule.

Or so says one version of the story. The other says nothing about a threat to Iceland’s independence. Snorri was not asked to sell out his country, simply to sort out a misunderstanding between some Icelandic farmers and a party of Norwegian traders. A small thing. A few killings to even out. A matter of law.

This trip to Norway was the turning point of Snorri’s life. One quick, persuasive speech to the king, along with one colorful poem pronounced on the quay at Bergen, would mar his reputation—and seal his doom. When he sailed to Norway in 1218 he was, by most calculations, the uncrowned king of Iceland. When he returned in 1220, he was a suspected traitor.

The voyage did not go well. It was late in the year to sail, and the weather in the North Atlantic was fierce. His new ship lost its mast within sight of Iceland; it wrecked on the Westman Islands off the southern coast. Snorri had himself and his bodyguard of a dozen men ferried over to the mainland with their Norwegian treasures. They borrowed horses and rode, bedecked in bright-colored cloth like courtiers, wearing gold and jewels and carrying shiny new weapons and sturdy shields, to the nearby estate of the bishop of Skalholt. There Baron Snorri’s new title was ridiculed. Some Icelanders even accused him of treason, of having sold out to the Norwegian king.

From then until his death in 1241, he would fight one battle after another (in the courts, or by proxy) to see who, if anyone, would be Earl of Iceland, deputy to Norway’s king. He would die in his nightshirt, cringing in his cellar, begging for his life before his enemies’ thugs. He did not live up to his Viking ideals, to the heroes portrayed in his books. He did not die with a laugh—or a poem—on his lips. His last words were “Don’t strike!” As the poet Jorge Luis Borges sums him up in a beautiful poem, the writer who “bequeathed a mythology / Of ice and fire” and “violent glory” to us was a coward: “On / Your head, your sickly face, falls the sword, / As it fell so often in your book.”

Yet his work remains. In the twenty turbulent years between his Norwegian triumph and his ignominious death, while scheming and plotting, blustering and fleeing, Snorri Sturluson did write his books: the Edda, Heimskringla, and Egil’s Saga. He covered hundreds of parchment pages with world-shaping words, encouraging his friends and kinsmen to cover hundreds of pages more.

I had come to Reykholt to keep vigil on the night of his death. The clouds crept up on me as I drove north from Thingvellir, slowly, on the torturous, washboard roads of Uxahryggir and Kaldidalur, alone for hours, no other cars, not even a bird, only the gleaming presence of Skjaldbreidur over my shoulder, the inverted smile of Ok, a chunk of rainbow here and there, a hidden stream, patches of dirty snow, a cairn. Now, at Reykholt, I sought darkness—some place I could see if the northern lights were shining in celebration of Snorri’s life and art.

Snorri’s Reykholt is much the same as it was in 1241, though nothing medieval but his hot-tub remains: Beside an imposing church is a school, hotel, and library. Up a spiral stair is a writer’s studio. But the modern designers were in love with light. Streetlamps and spotlights washed the night sky everywhere but here, at Snorri’s pool, tucked beneath the hill beside the school. I leaned back and looked up—no northern lights; the stars were faint, veiled in cloud. I imagined Snorri’s last moments.

His enemy (and former son-in-law) Gissur of Haukadal had spies watching Reykholt. Late at night on September 23, 1241, he rode up with seventy men. They broke into the building where Snorri slept. He leaped out of bed in his nightshirt and ran next door into the fine Norwegian-style loft-house he had built at the height of his power twenty years before. He was heading, perhaps, for his writing studio and the secret spiral stair that led from it down into a tunnel to his hot-tub and escape…

It is cold in Iceland in late September. The birch leaves are bright gold, the berry shrubs crimson, the songbirds have all flown. Swans flock in the marshlands, sounding their haunting note. Night falls quickly and lingers long, the wind has the bite of ice. An old fat man in his nightshirt, barefoot, would not get far in the cold and dark of a late-September night.

Snorri hid in a cellar. A priest gave him away. Gissur sent five men down.

I dried off my feet and headed back toward the Snorrastofa writer’s studio, which I had booked for five days. On the way I heard people oohing and aahing. They were halfway down the drive, looking up at the northern lights, they said. I saw nothing. “They’re breaking up now,” said a man standing in the road.

Turns out that I, like Snorri that fateful night 772 years ago, had been looking the wrong way.

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

The Viking Art of Poetry

One thing I love about Iceland is how alive the medieval world remains. City streets, candy bars, and beers are named for Norse gods and saga heroes. Ordinary Icelanders--in this case a civil engineer--can teach an expert in Old Norse literature (me) something about Viking poetry.

What are the "songs" in Song of the Vikings? When I talk about the book, I try to explain that Vikings were not only fierce warriors, they were very subtle poets. Because of the work of Snorri Sturluson and his followers, we know the names of over 200 Viking skálds. We can read hundreds of their verses: In the standard edition, they fill 1,000 two-column pages. What skalds thought important enough to put into words provides most of what we know today about the inner lives of people in the Viking Age. 

The big surprise is how much they adored poetry--and how hard they worked at it.

I burned seaweed on the beach. 

I flung kelp to the red flame. 

Strong, thick smoke began to reek. 

That was a short time ago. 

--an anonymous 11th-century verse translated freely by Roberta Frank.

Skaldic poetry is a sophisticated art. The rules are more convoluted than those for a sonnet or haiku. In the most common form, a stanza had eight lines. Each line had six syllables and three stresses. The rhythm was fixed, as were the patterns of rhyme and alliteration. 

The music of a line was of utmost importance--these poems really were "songs," even though we don't know if they were "sung" or chanted or just recited. A skaldic poem was designed to please the ear. It was first a sound-picture, though in a great poem sound and meaning were inseparable. 

The steed runs in the gloaming,

famished, over long paths.

The hoof can wear out the ground

that leads to houses--we have little daylight.

Now the black horse carries me over streams,

distant from Danes.

My swift one caught his leg

in a ditch--day and night converge.

--by Sighvatr Þórðarson, c. 1035, translated by Peter Foote and David M. Wilson.

A skaldic poem was a cross between a riddle and a trivia quiz. Each half-stanza of a poem contained at least two thoughts. These could be braided together so that the listener had to pay close attention to the grammar (not the word order) to disentangle subject, object, and verb. The riddle entailed disentangling the interlaced phrases so that they formed two grammatical sentences. 

The quiz part was the kennings. Nothing was stated plainly. Why call a ship a ship when it could be “the otter of the ocean"? Snorri Sturluson defined kennings in his Edda, which he wrote as a handbook on Viking poetry. “Otter of the ocean” is a very easy one. As Snorri explained, there are three kinds of kennings: “It is a simple kenning to call battle ‘spear clash’ and it is a double kenning to call a sword ‘fire of the spear-clash,’ and it is extended if there are more elements.” 

The king gives currents of yeast

--that is what I judge ale to be--to men

Men’s silence is dispelled by surf

--that is old beer--of horns.

The prince knows how speech’s salvation

--that is what mead is called--is to be given.

In the choicest of cups comes

--this is what I call wine--dignity’s destruction.

--Snorri Sturluson, c. 1220-41, translated by Anthony Faulkes.

Kennings are rarely so easy to decipher as these. Most kennings refer—quite obscurely—to pagan myths, which is why Snorri filled his Edda with stories of gods and giants. He knew that once these stories were forgotten, Viking poetry would die.

When I lecture on Song of the Vikings, I like to use an example from the book Snorri Sturluson and the "Edda" by Kevin Wanner, a professor at Western Michigan University. Wanner gives this literal prose translation of one of Snorri’s own verses: 

The noble hater of the fire of the sea defends the woman-friend of the enemy of the wolf; prows are set before the steep brow of the confidante of the friend of Mimir. The noble, all-powerful one knows how to protect the mother of the attacker of the worm; enjoy, enemy of neck-rings, the mother of the troll-wife’s enemy until old age.

Who is the hater of the fire of the sea? Who is the enemy of the wolf? Who is the friend of Mimir? What does it all mean? As Wanner notes, you need to know five myths and the family trees of two gods or the poem is nonsense. Take away all the kennings, and the poem means simply, “A good king defends and keeps his land.” But then you lose all the poetry.

Kennings were the soul of skaldic poetry. Roberta Frank, in her book Old Norse Court Poetry, speaks of the “sudden unaccountable surge of power” that comes when she finally perceives in the stream of images the story they represent.

For example, here is "the enemy of the wolf": Odin, fighting the giant wolf Fenrir at Ragnarok, in an illustration by Deborah Hardy from 1909.

Kennings also make the music--the song--of skaldic poetry. With infinite ways of saying the same thing--"A good king defends and keeps his land."--the rules for rhyme, rhythm, and alliteration become, not restrictions, but spurs or challenges. They are the medium of the poet's art. 

They are also what's first lost when a skaldic poem is translated. There are no songs, no music in Song of the Vikings because I wrote only in English, not in Old Norse. And there is no music (or at least a very different, modern music) in the translations of skaldic poems I've included here. Unless you hear the poem read in Old Norse, you're not hearing a Viking song.

Last May, I learned in the usual serendipitous way how to explain what was missing. I had gone to a symposium at Oddi, site of the school where Snorri Sturluson studied skaldic poetry and began collecting it. On the way home I shared a two-hour car ride with the civil engineer and former member of parliament Guðmundur G. Þórarinsson, his son, and two friends, one of whom was a retired economist. To pass the time, the civil engineer and the economist engaged in a verse-capping contest: One recited the first lines of a poem, the other had to finish, or cap, it by reciting the next lines. (Icelanders from all walks of life still enjoy poetry.) 

So that I would not feel left out, Guðmundur attempted the same game with me, using lines from Shakespeare. He knew a lot more Shakespeare by heart than I did. 

Seeing that this attempt to entertain me had failed, and knowing that I had written about Snorri Sturluson, Guðmundur turned the conversation to skaldic verse. He wrote out on the back of an envelope some English poems composed by an Icelander, Sigurður Norland, to explain the complicated verse structure. Here is one of them:

Free your heart where fountains boil

from the dart of sorrow

Long apart from loathful toil

Live for art tomorrow.

Guðmundur read it aloud, accentuating the stresses: FREE your HEART … He circled every "f" in the first two lines and every "l" in the second two to explain the pattern of alliteration. He underlined the end rhymes (boil, toil) and internal rhymes (heart, dart, apart, art). 

As poetry, it was insipid--all sound, no sense, no kennings (unless you can count "dart of sorrow"). But as a lesson in poesy it was sublime. I took the envelope home as a souvenir.

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

Songs of the Vikings

"I know giants of ages past, … I know how nine roots form nine worlds / below the Earth where the Ash Tree rises..."

Last week I heard the "Song of the Sibyl" for the first time. I'd read this classic Old Icelandic poem, this witch's vision of the creation and destruction of the world many times in both English and the original language. I'd written about it in my book Song of the Vikings: “What troubles the gods? What troubles the elves?”

But never before had I heard someone recite it. In Old Icelandic, spontaneously, spouting off a few stanzas to make his point.

I was in Kalamazoo, Michigan, at the yearly conference of 5,000 or so of my fellow wizards, um, medieval scholars. One I'd particularly hoped to meet was Terry Gunnell of the University of Iceland. I knew him for his translations of Icelandic folklore, but Gunnell is most interested in drama--old drama, like that of the Poetic Edda, which to me was never drama before but just a bunch of poems on a page. Some, like "Song of the Sibyl," I found quite moving. Others I thought were silly.

Then I listened to Gunnell speak on "Performance and the Study of Old Norse Religions."

When we read an oral poem silently, we "necessarily" take it out of context, Gunnell said, quoting the great scholar of oral literature John Miles Foley.

Added Gunnell, "We ignore the 'happening.'" The two poems he was talking about, Eiriksmál and Hákonarmál (loosely, "the Lay of Eirik" and "the Lay of Hakon"), "were not intended as written texts. They were meant as soundscapes presented to an audience who brought knowledge to them. They demand movement in space and gesture."

Think of a mead hall like the one in Beowulf,  or our Hollywood image of Valhalla, or Beorn's hall in Tolkien's The Hobbit: a great wood-ceilinged hall with tree trunks for pillars, a long fire bisecting it, benches full of boisterous Vikings (or dwarves in Tolkien's version) brandishing their drinking horns. Someone stands up and starts reciting Hákonarmal.

"The room is dark and smoky," said Gunnell. "The long fire is raising shadows. Impure alcohol has been imbibed. The performer is saying I. He's using the words in here. He's putting himself into the role of Odin, and the audience finds itself playing a role as well: We are the dead heroes of Valhalla and Ragnarok is about to become…

"We need to get away from seeing these poems as literature and to think of them more like music," Gunnell said in the Q&A afterwards. "Listen to the music of Völuspá"--it's here he started reciting it, the syllables crashing and clashing. It wasn't at all like the version on YouTube by Sveinbjörn Beinteinsson, which is all smooth and lilting and frankly puts me to sleep:

Gunnell's version was more like the concert I saw in Boston a few months ago by Sigur Rós: hammering, pulsing, the sound cracking open the mind.

"Listen," said Gunnell. He only gave us two stanzas. "It starts slow and open, then boom-boom-boom-boom, there's this little punk routine in the middle. Think of the smoke, the light, the booze. It's a PowerPoint in your head. The poet creates images in your head, helped by the alcohol and the next morning you say, What the hell was that?"

After the lecture I went up to Gunnell. "How much beer do I have to buy you to hear you recite the whole poem?" He laughed, but I was serious. I hope to meet him again in Iceland and be transported to the mead hall. I'll never just read the songs of the Vikings again.

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

Song of the Vikings Raffle Winner!

In my March 1 post I offered to raffle off an autographed copy of my book Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths. To enter, you had to answer the question, Who is the god of Wednesday and what does he have to do with this blog? Explain me to myself, I pleaded. I promised to print the best answers.

Yesterday the names went into a hat and … Congratulations to Scott Isebrand! Scott is a most deserving winner, as you'll see when you read his answer below. There were some other great answers, too. Here are some of my favorites:

"I think you named it God of Wednesday because Odin was the wise, lonely wanderer."

"A storyteller with a wonderful horse... Gotten by quite different means, but I'm sure your horse is no less wonderful."

"You have found a kindred soul in Odin the Wanderer, as you have wandered far to pursue your craft, aided by Thought and Memory."

"I am fairly sure that you would also approve of the label 'the Odinic wanderer,' as you must surely have felt a tie to both Odin and Gandalf while making your treks through Iceland, walking in the here and now of today while seeing and feeling the spirit of northernness and ages long past all around you."

"I think any historian of Iceland and Norse literature is a kindred spirit to Odin, and willing to make sacrifices to gain knowledge."

"While perhaps best known as a battle god, Odin is also a god of inspiration, of poetry, of the bardic arts. It is he who inspires writers, musicians, and poets."

"Your blog is probably named God of Wednesday because you like Odin's attributes. You are a writer of stories that cause us to pause and think deeper about the true knowledge of the past and how it shouldn't be lost for the sake of our future."

"The god of Wednesday is Odin. The best publicist of the god of Wednesday is Snorri. And the best publicist of Snorri is Nancy Marie Brown."

"Odin lives on in western consciousness thanks to Snorri. On Wednesdays, thanks to your efforts, we are all able to channel his wit and bravery."

"Without Snorri, we would know next to nothing about the god for whom Wednesday was named."

"Snorri ensured that the people of the north would inherit a rich tapestry that gives an insight into the minds of our predecessors--treasure worth much more than gold and silver."

"What I didn't know was that Snorri Sturluson was such an influence, if not the outright inventor, of the myths and stories surrounding the Norse gods. You have shown that this is some serious influence. Here is the most fantastic (and totally true) range of his influence. I traded a camera last week to a young Malaysian journalist working in Minnesota. I sent him a link to a story about me and my horse, Draugen. He knew what the name Draugen meant from playing video games. Being a bit older than you, I hadn't thought about the influence of Snorri's writing on this form of entertainment. Can you imagine what Snorri would think of that!"

"The irony that is not lost on me is that what we think we know about what the ancient Norse believed is evidently from the fervent imagination of Snorri Sturluson. Your critical analysis of the debt that western literature in general and Icelandic lore in particular owe to Snorri is well-stated in an entertaining manner. Your blog is the highlight of my Odin's Day!"

And finally, here is Scott Isebrand's tour-de-force:
"The god of Wednesday is Odin;
The Allfather;
Lord of the Æsir;
Foe of frost giants;
Co-killer of Ymir;
Co-maker of Midgard;
Ygg;
Son of Borr and Bestla;
Father of Thor
Bereft of Thor's brother, Baldr;
The avenged by Baldr's brother, Víðar;
First husband of Frigg;
Rider of eight-legged Sleipnir and wielder of straight-shafted Gungnir;
Lord of the golden ring and the far-seeing severed head of Mimir;
Shoulderer of Thought and Memories that fly away, pitch-plumed Hugin and Munin, his two ravens;
Feeder of Greed that flanks him, fiercely fanged Geri and Freki, his two wolves;
The willfully-one-eyed god;
Vegtam the Wanderer;
Hangtyr, god of the hanged;
God of the battle-slain and lord of the flying Valkyries who bear half of them to Valhalla;
Gamer of Gunnlöð;
Sly thief of the blood-born Skalds' Mead that makes men and women into poets;
Wōden of the Angles, Wôdan of the Saxons, Wôtan of the Germans; and, finally, Fenrir's feast.
What does the God of Wednesday have to do with the blogspot-born 'God of Wednesday'?
Everything!
For without him, there would be no Wednesdays!"

Thanks Scott. Hope you enjoy Song of the Vikings. You made my Wednesday.

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

Wagner and Iceland

Wagner's grand opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen returns to the Metropolitan Opera in New York on Saturday in Robert LePage's excitingly technological production. We all know the story, with its stirring Wotan, evil dwarf Alberich, tragic valkyrie Brünnhilde, heroic Siegfried and the cruel dragon he slays. It's the German National Epic.

Even if Wagner's main sources were not ultimately German.

They were Icelandic.

Who is Wotan? None other than the God of Wednesday, Odin. And if you've been reading this blog for any length of time, you'll know that the main source for stories of Odin is the 13th-century Icelandic writer Snorri Sturluson.

In a well-known letter from 1856, Wagner jotted down the names of ten books that inspired him to write The Ring. 

Number three was Jacob Grimm’s German Mythology of 1835, which cites Snorri Sturluson's Edda, the Poetic Edda, Snorri's Heimskringla, and other Icelandic sagas. (In fact, if you take the Icelandic sources out of German Mythology, all that's left is an empty shell.)

Number four on Wagner's list was "Edda" (like most people at the time, he didn't discriminate between Snorri's Edda and the Poetic Edda).

Number five was the Icelandic Volsunga Saga, which Snorri did not write, but which was written in Iceland at roughly the same time Snorri was active. (Some scholars say it is earlier than Snorri's sagas, some say later.)

Number ten on Wagner's list was Heimskringla, Snorri's collection of sixteen sagas about the kings of Norway.

Wagner made this list just after completing Das Rheingold and Die Walküre; he wouldn’t finish Siegfried until 1871 and Götterdämmerung until 1874. The first full performance of the four-opera cycle was in 1876.

It was twenty-five years in the making. The idea for a cycle of operas based on Siegfried—or Sigurd—the Dragon-slayer and the accursed gold ring of the dwarves came to Wagner in 1851. A German translation of the Poetic Edda and some tales from Snorri’s Edda, he wrote, “drew me irresistibly to the Nordic sources of these myths,” the most expansive being the Icelandic Volsunga Saga.

Wagner had, three years before, written a libretto called Siegfried's Death based on the medieval German Nibelungenlied, or "Song of the Nibelungs." This libretto, according to Edward Haymes in his book Wagner's Ring in 1848, is quite similar to Götterdämmerung; "in fact," Haymes told me, "some of the scenes are taken over verbatim."

But Wagner wasn't satisfied. Only after he had discovered what he called "the Nordic sources," Wagner said, "did I recognise the possibility of making him [Siegfried] the hero of a drama; a possibility that had not occurred to me while I only knew him from the medieval Nibelungenlied."

The German "Song of the Nibelungs" was written at about the same time as Snorri was writing his Edda in Icelandic (c. 1220-1241). Some of the same characters appear: Sigurd the Dragon-Slayer (Wagner's Siegfried), Brynhild (Brünnhilde), Gudrun (Gutrune). But half of the "Song" takes place after their deaths; it has no counterpart in Wagner's Ring.

And much that Wagner loved about the Sigurd story exists only in the Icelandic sources: the dragon, the ring, the valkyries, the sibyl; the characters of Odin and the other gods, the giants, the dwarfs, Idunn’s apples, the rainbow bridge, the magical helmet, Valhalla, the Twilight of the Gods.

In his 2003 book, Wagner and the Volsungs: Icelandic Sources of Der Ring des Nibelungen (which is online here: http://www.vsnrweb-publications.org.uk/Wagner.pdf), Icelandic scholar Arni Björnsson concludes that 80 percent of Wagner’s motifs are Icelandic. Five percent are German. Most of the remaining 15 percent are shared, appearing in both the Icelandic and German sources, though some—like the Rhine Maidens—are Wagner’s own invention, for he was nothing if not creative.

Like Snorri, Wagner took bits and pieces of myth and made of them something magical.

Join me again next Wednesday at nancymariebrown.blogspot.com for another adventure in Iceland or the medieval world. And don't forget to enter the raffle for a free, autographed copy of Song of the Vikings. For details, click here.

Making Middle Earth

When I wrote earlier about the Norse creation story, as told by Snorri Sturluson in his Edda, I described how the god Odin and his brothers fashioned the world out of the body of the frost giant Ymir:

His flesh was the soil, his blood the sea. His bones and teeth became stones and scree. His hair were trees, his skull was the sky, his brain, clouds. From his eyebrows they made Middle Earth, which they peopled with men, crafting the first man and woman from driftwood they found on the seashore.

From his eyebrows? Notice how quickly I skipped over that. Middle Earth is clearly the place where men and women live. Elsewhere Snorri says the earth (or the world, depending on the translator) is round. Now whether you think of it as “round” as a disc (as some scholars still do, in spite of the overwhelming evidence that medieval people knew the world was a sphere [link to Flat Earth blog]) or “round” as an apple (as the Norse did in Snorri’s day, according to the 13th-century encyclopedia called The King’s Mirror), it’s still hard to imagine the world we live in as being made from eyebrows.

So what is Snorri’s “Middle Earth”?

Kevin Wanner of the University of Western Michigan has a brilliant answer. Wanner was one of the scholars who most influenced my understanding of Snorri Sturluson as a writer. Somehow I missed his 2009 article, “Off-Center: Considering Directional Valances in Norse Cosmography,” when I was working on my biography of Snorri, Song of the Vikings.

Admittedly, the part that’s snagged my interest now is not Wanner’s main argument. It’s the definition of the Old Norse word Miðgarðr, which I’ve always seen translated into the Tolkienish Middle Earth.

As Wanner notes, forms of this word appear in many northern languages. In Old English, for example, middangeard is clearly the Latin mundus, the world as a whole. But Old Norse writers (Snorri included) usually use the word heimr to refer to the world as a whole. So what really is Miðgarðr?

The first part, mið, isn’t contested. It means “middle.”

But garðr, Wanner points out, has two meanings. One is the cognate “yard,” in the sense of an enclosure. The second is “fence” or “fortification.”

Writes Wanner, “As incredible as it may seem in light of the typical understanding and use of the term among scholars, there is not one occurrence of ‘Miðgarðr’ in Snorri’s Edda or eddic poetry in which the second element of the name unambiguously carries the sense of yard or enclosure.” There are many cases, on the other hand, of garðr meaning a fortification.

Instead of “Middle Earth,” Wanner concludes, Miðgarðr might just mean “fence down the middle.”

Go back to those giant eyebrows—which Wanner explains could instead be eyelashes. In either case, think of two arcs of hair. Bushy eyebrows. Spiky eyelashes. A fence of giant hair.

It makes perfect sense if you add another part that I skipped over when retelling Snorri’s creation story: the reason why Odin and his brothers made Miðgarðr. The gods had already given lands on the shore of the sea to the giants, Snorri writes. Then, because of the “hostility of the giants,” they made Miðgarðr—the fence down the middle—to protect the people they were about to fashion from driftwood.

Now whether this fence was an arc, a circle, or a wiggly line I’ll leave it to Wanner to convince you. His paper was published in Speculum (2009): 36-72.

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