Germanic Folklore (8) The Cult of Óðinn in Iceland

                      

 The Cult of Óðinn in Iceland

When we read Snorri's Edda, it is obvious that Snorri considered Óðinn the most powerful and foremost god in the heathen hierarchy. According to Snorri, Óðinn is supreme among all the gods: 'This Óðinn with his brothers (Vili and Ve) will be ruling heaven and earth.' Another name for Óðinn is Alfoðr (Father of All): 'He will live throughout all ages governing all his dominions and ruling all things great and small.'

The Poetic Edda, tells us that Óðinn dominates everything. The sibyl in the Voluspa directs her words in the first place to Óðinn; Óðinn forces her to tell her secrets. It was Óðinn, with two lesser gods, who came upon two lifeless tree-trunks and gave them ond, making them man and woman and thus ancestors of us all. We have to thank Óðinn for the most precious of gifts, the gift of poetry. Under the name of Bolverkr (the Evil-doer), Óðinn robbed the holy mead from the fastness of the giants and brought it home to Asgarðr.

But it is not enough to call Óðinn the god of poetry; he is god of all secret wisdom. While he hung for nine nights on the wind-torn tree, Yggdrasill, as if it were a gibbet, he spied the runes; he seized them and took them to himself. Óðinn is master of magic and he knows all the magic songs. He awakens a dead sibyl and compels her to tell of the fate in store for Baldr. He forces hanged men to talk to him, and thus he knows the secrets of death. Odinn has other gifts besides these; he can stop a spear in flight by the glare of his eye alone and, when he chants under the rims of the shields of his friends, they march to battle assured of victory.

It is plain that Óðinn was god of war and warriors. He was patron and protector of the most renowned heroes, as is told time and again in Heroic Sagas. Óðinn chose the horse Grani for Sigurdr and accompanied Sigurdr on his way to avenge his father. Óðinn counselled Sigurdr when he went to attack the dragon Fafnir. In the same way, Haraldr War-tooth lived under the protection of Óðinn for a century and a half: 'Such a spell was cast on King Haraldr that no iron could cut him, and afterwards he never bore a shield in battle, but yet no weapon got a hold on him.''

When at last these chosen heroes fell dead, it was not because Óðinn had deserted them, but rather because he loved them more than others. He could not be without them in Valholl, where they became Einherjar and passed their days with warfare, even until the Ragnarok. Then the dead heroes will march out of Valholl in military formation to fight against the wolf at the side of Óðinn.

We cannot know when this terrible day will come, but we know this, that the grey wolf, Fenrir, is breaking his bonds, ready to spring and fall upon us: We cannot know for sure; the grey wolf is glaring on the dwellings of gods.

Scholars agree that many of the Icelandic manuscripts were compiled or composed by Icelandic authors, e.g. Snorri's Edda and the Voluspa. But it is probable that some of these sources derived from Norway. We may regard it as certain that similar conceptions of Óðinn were dominant in Norway and in Iceland in the tenth century, at least among certain classes.

Icelandic scholars living today have shown that the aim of most authors of Islendinga Sogur and the Landnamabok was artistic. But this does not imply that Sagas of Icelanders are of no use as sources of history. The authors drew on sources unknown to us, forgotten poems, oral tales and older writings, compiled as early as the twelfth century but now lost. It is, therefore, not presumptuous to assert that some sagas give a true picture of the civilization of Iceland in the tenth century.

When we turn to the Landnamabok, the foundations are more secure. The book had very ancient origins, and that much of the material in it was compiled already in the days of Ari the Wise, only three or four generations after the Icelanders had adopted Christianity.  

It is plain that the gods played an important part in the lives of ancient Icelanders; they had their place in the social order. We know that 'temples' were set up in many parts of the country, and there can be no doubt that one god or more was worshipped in each of them. The Law of Ulfljótr, describes various practices observed in the chief temples. It is said there, among other things:

An arm-ring, weighing two 'ounces' or more, must be kept in every chief temple ... Everyone who had to perform legal business in court must first swear an oath on that ring and name his witnesses ... 'I call to witness of this,' he must say, 'that I swear an oath on the ring, a legally binding oath. So help me Freyr and Njorðr and the all-powerful (almáttki) god that I shall prosecute this case or defend it, bear witness or deliver judgment or sentence as I know to be most just, most true and in closest accord with law.'

Njorðr

Thus,  at least three gods were worshipped in Iceland and this worship was established by law. People were obliged to invoke the Vanir, Freyr, and his father Njorðr and, besides these, the nameless 'all-powerful' god (áss). Some mythologists have maintained that hinn almáttki áss was Þórr. But yet other scholars, and among them the most eminent, have stated without hesitation that the words hinn almáttki áss denoted Óðinn. It is unthinkable, according to some, that men would swear the most sacred of oaths, the oath on the holy ring, without calling Óðinn to witness.

 The sources hardly suggest that Óðinn was worshipped in Iceland.  On the other hand, we find ample evidence of the worship of other gods in Icelandic sources, and especially of the worship of Þórr. One of the most famous stories of the cult of Þórr is the one about Þorolfr Mostrarskegg found in Landnamabok and Eyrbyggja Saga. According to Landndmabok, Þorolfr was a zealous sacrificer and put his trust in Þórr; he went to Iceland because of the tyranny of King Haraldr. Þorolfr was a chieftain and landowner of south-western Norway. He had venerated Porr in his native land and had taken the cult of Þórr to Iceland, together with the main pillars of his temple, on one of which an image of Þórr was carved.

The temple which Þorolfr erected at Hofsstaðir in western Iceland must have been dedicated to Þórr, but it is not impossible that people worshipped other gods besides Þórr in that temple. Þorolfr, and his Icelandic descendants looked on Þórr as their chief friend and patron.

A number of Icelanders, and Greenlanders as well, worshipped Þórr. It seems that, when the settlement of Iceland began, people were very liberal about religious belief. Some thought that belief in Þórr was not inconsistent with the Christian faith. We may think of the story of Helgi the Lean, who believed in Christ, but would yet invoke Þórr for voyages at sea and matters of great moment. But when heathendom was drawing to its end, it seems that Icelanders regarded Þórr as the guardian of the ancient religion. It was Þórr who challenged the White Christ to a duel and wrecked the ship of the German missionary, Þangbrandr. Þórr was the protector of our world {Miðgarðr) and, as it seems, of the World of Gods (Ásgarðr) as well.

Þórr was not the only god who, according to story, was worshipped by Icelanders. When men swore an oath on the holy ring, they were obliged to invoke Freyr. Place-names, such as Freysnes, Freysholar, might suggest that the cult of Freyr was prominent in eastern Iceland.

It is obvious that the authors of Gisla Saga and Viga-Glúms Saga saw Freyr as a god of fertility, as did Norwegians and Swedes. We may think of the story of Þorgrimr Freysgoði, who intended to hold an autumn sacrifice at the 'winter nights', welcoming winter and offering sacrifice to Freyr. After the death of Þorgrimr, there was an event which was thought peculiar: snow never lay on the southwestern slope of Þorgrimr’s howe, and it never froze. It was understood in this way, that Þorgrimr was so loved by Freyr because of his sacrifices, that the god would not wish frost to come between them. We may also remember Gisli's verse as he gazed at Þorgrimr 's howe in winter, exclaiming in cryptic language ‘that he saw shoots sprouting upon it.' According to Viga-Glums Saga, Freyr is again god of fertility. Near to his temple at Hripkelsstaðir lay the fruitful cornfield Vitazgjafi (the Certain Giver), upon which crops never failed.

As god of fertility, Freyr was god of the harvest. Norwegians used to drink a toast to Freyr for fruitful harvest. Icelanders, breeding animals and fishing more than cultivating crops, were, therefore, less dependent on the harvest than their kindred peoples of Norway and Sweden. It is not surprising that medieval writers in Iceland state that Freyr was particularly the god of the Swedes.

 

Snorri says that Njorðr should be invoked for voyages at sea and catches; he was god of riches. Originally Njorðr was a god of fertility, like Freyr, and belonged to the race of the Vanir. It is told in Icelandic sources that he was father of Freyr and Freyja. Is it conceivable that Icelanders did not worship Óðinn?

In Iceland there are neither place-names nor personal names associated with Óðinn, but Óðinn is mentioned in Icelandic literature more often than any other god.

Óðinn is a many-sided figure but he is, among other things, god of poetry. A poet working early in Christian times, in the eleventh century, called poetry 'the hallowed cup of the raven god'. When Ólafr Tryggvason forced Hallfreðr, the Troublesome Poet, to abandon the pagan religion, he missed Óðinn more than any other god.

Egill Skalla-Grimsson, the son of an Icelandic farmer, was not brought up in the cult of Óðinn, but probably worshipped Þórr, Freyr and Njorðr. But under the influence of the great chieftains of Norway, who stood in close relationship with the kings, Haraldr Finehair and Eirikr Bloodaxe, Egill came to worship Óðinn; he learnt everything that could be learnt from the cult of Óðinn. Nowhere is this burning love for Óðinn expressed more clearly than it is in the Sonatorrek, in which Egill rebukes his 'patron', who has deserted him and deprived him of his sons.  

Óðinn filled an honorable place in  of the divine world. It is sufficient to think of the numerous kennings of which names for Óðinn form an element, e.g. Yggjar bál (sword), Viðris veðr (battle). When poets used such expressions, they must certainly have thought of that mysterious, terrible god.

Georges Dumezil maintains that all, or nearly all, Indo-European peoples had one and the same religion, which developed out of a common culture. And that the same customs predominated and the same divine beings were worshipped by nearly all Indo-European peoples, by the Indians as early as the fourteenth century B.C., by the Irish in the first centuries after Christ's birth, and by Icelanders in the tenth century A.D.

Dumezil sees evidence of this  in words used to denote various kinds of officials and religious activities.  As an example I may mention the verb, which appears in Irish as cretim (to believe), in Latin as credo and in Sanskrit as crád dadhami. The Sanskrit word raj (king), the Latin rex and the Irish ri may also be mentioned. The Indo-European word deiwo- (god) is preserved in several languages, in Sanskrit as devah, in Latin as deus, in Irish as dia and, apparently, in Germanic languages as the god's name Tiwaz or Týr.

It is held that the gods reflected the social order of their worshippers. Dumezil distinguishes three classes of men, as the author of the Rigsþula distinguished between praelar, karlar, and jarlar. The king and the priest formed the highest class, i.e. in India the raj and the brahman, in Rome the rex and flamen. The second class were warriors, the bold men; in the third class were the humble tillers of the soil.

Each of these classes is said to be reflected in the world of gods. In the Rigveda, the oldest of all the Indian literary sources, the highest gods are chiefly two, Varuna and Mitra. The chief god of the middle class is the great warrior god, Indra, while the third class of men is reflected in the Asvins, who are twins, bringing fertility and health to men. Gods belonging to the first two classes despise the humble gods of fertility. Similar distinctions of class may be seen in tales of Roman and Celtic gods, e.g. in the Roman gods Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus.

In India, Rome, and the Celtic lands the priests formed a class of their own; they brought offerings to the gods and were guardians of the sacred wisdom. These holy men, brahmans, flamines, druids, had much in common; they had similar duties.

Writers, living in the first century after Christ's birth, showed that the Germans worshipped many gods; they had priests and they brought sacrifice to the gods. The religious ritual of the Germans was much simpler than among the Celtic tribes west of the Rhine. It does not seem that Germanic priests, in those days, formed a class of their own, nor that, in Germania, there were schools in which the sacred wisdom was taught.

In Dumezil's view, the Germanic social system was revolutionary.  Class distinctions had nearly been obliterated, although not altogether. Under more peaceful conditions, these distinctions were gradually restored, the same classes may be observed in Germania as in India, Rome, and the Celtic lands.

Whether they are of common origin or not, it is undeniable that the Germanic gods, Óðinn, Tyr, Þórr, and Freyr, or rather the two Haddingjar, resemble the Indian gods, Varuna, Mitra, Indra, and the Asvins, at least superficially.

The highest gods in the mythological writings of India were two, Mitra and Varuna, and they could be invoked as Mitra-Varuna, as if they were one and the same. It is said that they denote two aspects of the supreme power. In the world of gods, as in this world, there are two who wield supreme power, the king and the priest.

Varuna and Mitra, lived in concord, although they were altogether unlike in temperament. Varuna is the terrible god in the clouds. Through his own power, or with the help of his spies, he sees all and knows all. He is unconquerable, but yet he never joins in battle; he is master of magic and remarkable to look at; he is yellow-eyed, bald, and afflicted with leprosy; he is lame and supports himself with a stick; needless to say, he is immensely old. This picture of Varuna is really a composite, made from sources of various ages. But there can be no doubt that Varuna resembles Óðinn in many things.

Óðinn is blind or one-eyed, but yet he can see throughout all the worlds from his throne, Hliðskjálf. By the gift of his own sight, or with the help of his spies, the two ravens, he knows everything. He is unconquerable, but he will never join battle until the Ragnarok. Óðinn's character is many-sided, but in most things he is evil. He is god of occult wisdom and of death, leader of the Einherjar, the fallen heroes. In other words he resembles Varuna in that he is not god of our world, but of the Other World.

 Mitra, as it seems, represents the other side of the supreme power. If Varuna is the king, Mitra is the priest. Mitra is the god of this world; he upholds law and justice. Tyr was the chief god of justice among Germanic peoples, although Ullr was also worshipped as god of justice among some tribes. Tyr was the god whom Romans often called Mars, and he was sometimes called Mars Thincsus, which appears to mean 'Tyr of the Þing'. It is known that this god was worshipped widely in Germany.

Icelandic sources have little to tell of Tyr, but he is said to be einhendr áss (one-handed god). Tyr sacrificed his hand to save the gods from the wolf Fenrir. He placed his hand as a pledge in the jaws of the beast and, thereby, deceived him.

The Roman hero Scaevola sacrificed his hand to deceive the Etruscans and afterwards concluded an agreement with them. In the Irish story of Nuadu with the silver hand, Nuadu's right hand was struck off in battle and, as a result, he made an agreement with his enemies.

Óðinn is the highest of all in the divine world of the Germanic peoples. He is the god to whom people looked up and whom they feared most. He is the regnator omnium deus, the terrible god whom the tribe of the Semnones worshipped in the holy grove.  But the strange thing about this is that Óðinn is the lawless god, while Ullr and Tyr are seen as gods of justice like the Indian Mitra and the Celtic Nuadu.

Whereas gods of justice dominated among most peoples and were seldom driven from power, the power of the lawless, the furious god, dominated among the Germanic peoples.

In his Gallic War Caesar describes the social system of Germanic tribes in a most remarkable way. No one, possessed lands (or real property), but the chieftains distributed the lands yearly. At the end of the year the farmers were obliged to leave their lands and, presumably, to surrender their produce. In a society of this kind there was no place for an aristocracy, and there could be no hereditary land-holders. A social system of this sort was based on war; it was the military leaders and warriors alone who wielded power. In fact, this was the social system reflected in Valholl, where Óðinn ruled supreme; he was the leader of the Einherjar in the world of gods and of the champions in this world.

The description which Caesar gave of the Germans on the Rhine is remarkably like that which Snorri wrote twelve centuries later of the rule of Haraldr Finehair: (He) took to himself all the hereditary estates (oSul) in every administrative district (fylki) and all the land, both inhabited and uninhabited, and even the sea and the lakes, and all farmers must be his tenants… In other words, Haraldr broke the traditional law and introduced a lawless autocracy, which conflicted with the law of the aristocracy and the hereditary farmers, who had dominated Norway hitherto. As the history of England shows plainly, autocracy and the rule of kings are ill consistent with the rule of the nobility and hereditary landowners. But in Norway, in the days of Haraldr Finehair, there were only two choices: rule of the hereditary landowners and rule of the king.

Haraldr Finehair, on his father's side,  was said to descend from the Ynglingar, the royal house of the Swedes. But his mother was closely related to Danish chieftains. There is a tale about Haraldr Finehair in the Flateyjarbok and the Agrip; it is not altogether clear, but it seems that in his youth Haraldr had once been the guest of Óðinn.

Haraldr had close relations with Denmark. He married many wives, but parted from all of them when he married the Danish born Ragnhildr. This Ragnhildr was mother of Eirikr Bloodaxe, the favourite son of his father. No king of Norway was better suited to be the chosen hero of Óðinn. He slew his brothers, drove his kinsmen to the wall, as is told—and displayed his contempt for the bonds of kindred and duties of relationship. We may remember how the evil-tempered Óðinn set brother against brother, kinsman against kinsman, as is shown clearly in Saxo's Gesta Danorum and in the Heroic Sagas. We may think of the words of Óðinn himself: I set the chieftains at odds, never did I make peace between them. It is no wonder that the poet of Eiriksmol should draw so imposing a picture of the reception of Eirikr in Valholl after his death in Britain.

The character of Óðinn is many-sided but he is, in the first place, god of lawlessness, god of footpads and champions. On such a basis we can perhaps understand why the medieval historians do not suggest that the settlers of Iceland worshipped Óðinn. In origin their leaders were largely noblemen and hereditary landowners of western Norway; their civilization was based on traditional law and family relationship. It is said that they fled from Norway because of the tyranny of King Haraldr; it could as well be said that they fled before the tyranny of Óðinn. Óðinn is rather the god of lawlessness and, it seems, of the royal court. Such conceptions were southern in origin and hardly struck root in Norway or in Iceland until heathendom was falling into its decline.

This need not imply that the name of Óðinn was not known in Scandinavia before the Viking Age; there are good reasons to believe that it was. While there are no place-names containing the element Odin- in Iceland, there are a number in Norway, more in Sweden and proportionately more in Denmark. Some of these appear to be of great age, e.g. those compounded with -akr (cornfield), -vin (meadow). These last two suggest that for some people, at one time, Óðinn was god of fertility, rather than the ruthless god of kings, champions, perjurers, and poets, which he appears to be in the literary sources.

For such reasons, I think it improbable that men in Iceland, swearing an oath on the holy ring, called on Óðinn. What point could there be in invoking Óðinn on such an occasion? We may remember the words of Óðinn himself: I believe that Óðinn has sworn an oath on the ring; how should we trust his pledges?"

In conclusion I would say that I think Dumezil is right in supposing that the divine world reflects our world. It may well be that the religion of Indo-European peoples was originally one and the same religion, but if so, peoples' religious beliefs must have been very variable.

The highest gods did not, among all these peoples, correspond with the Indian Mitra-Varuna, but men chose their chief god according to their social system, their way of life, and their needs. The Swedes depended on the fertility of the soil and, therefore, their chief god was the fertility god, Freyr. Inhabitants of western Norway, and hence the Icelanders as well, chose the trusty Þórr, who must have been hinn almáttki áss in their eyes."

But kings and champions, those who fought their way to power, may well have worshipped the lawless, creative god, Óðinn. I consider it unlikely that the cult of Óðinn, as we know it, was common among West Norse peoples before the ninth century, but it may well be that Óðinn had been the chief god of the continental Germans for many centuries. This view is in some ways old-fashioned, but it is not necessarily wrong for that reason.

 

Modern Language Review, G. Turville-Petre [1972]