God Post: Nidhogg

I got this from Norse Mythology for Smart People.

Nidhogg (Old Norse Níðhöggr, literally “Curse-striker” or “He Who Strikes with Malice”) is the foremost of several serpents or dragons who dwell beneath the world-tree Yggdrasil and eat its roots. This is highly injurious to the tree, which holds the Nine Worlds of the cosmos.^[1] Nidhogg’s actions have the intention of pulling the cosmos back to chaos, and he, along with his reptilian cohort, can therefore surely be classified among the giants (or, as they were called in pre-Christian times, “devourers”).
From this it would make sense for Nidhogg to have a prominent role in Ragnarok, the cyclically recurrent event in which the giants succeed in destroying the cosmos. This does indeed seem to be the case. In one especially important Old Norse poem (the Völuspá or “Insight of the Seeress”), Nidhogg is described as flying out from beneath Yggdrasil during Ragnarok, presumably to aid the giants’ cause.^[2]
Later in the same poem, Nidhogg is also said to preside over a part of the underworld called Náströnd (“The Shore of Corpses”) where perjurers, murderers, and adulterers are punished.^[3] However, this conception of the afterlife as marked by moral retribution is totally foreign to the indigenous worldview of the Norse and other Germanic peoples, and must be an instance (one of many) of Christian influence upon the poem.

God Post: Garm

I got this from Norse Mythology for Smart People. Enjoy.

Garm (Old Norse Garmr, whose meaning/etymology is unknown) is a dog or wolf associated with the underworld and the forces of destruction. Little is known about him, since the references to him are sparse and vague. There’s just barely enough material in the surviving Old Norse sources to get a general idea about the kind of being he was perceived to be during the Viking Age.
In the Grímnismál, one of the poems in the Poetic Edda, Garm is said to be to canines what Odin is to gods and what Yggdrasil is to trees – that is, the greatest among them, the exemplar.^[1]
In the Völuspá, another Eddic poem, Garm is mentioned as part of a refrain that repeats throughout the poem:

Now Garm howls wildly
Before Gnipa Cave.
Chains will snap
And the wolf will run.^[2]

While the reference to Garm in the Grímnismál calls him a hundr, “dog,” this reference in the Völuspá uses the word freki, “wolf.” This refrain is recited as part of an account of the events leading up to and during Ragnarok, the destruction of the cosmos and its re-submergence into chaos. Another one of the events that heralded Ragnarok was the escape of the wolf Fenrir, who had been tied up by the gods and left in a remote swamp so that he wouldn’t devour the cosmos. The two images of bound wolves breaking loose at the same time can’t help but make one wonder whether or not Fenrir and Garm are ultimately the same figure.
This interpretation is supported by the fact that, as the gods and the forces of chaos battled during Ragnarok, the god Tyr is said to have engaged Garm in single combat.^[3] Since Tyr had earlier tricked Fenrir into allowing himself to be bound in an unbreakable chain, and since Fenrir had bitten off the god’s hand in the process, it would make sense for the two to have had a vendetta against each other, which in turn makes it likely that the wolf Tyr fought during Ragnarok was none other than Fenrir.^[4]
Some scholars have also linked Garm with the nameless hound of Hel mentioned in another Eddic poem, Baldrs Draumar. The reference to the dog in the poem is only in passing; he barks at Odin as the god rides into the underworld.^[5] The identification of Garm with this hound is difficult to demonstrate conclusively due to the fact that we have no idea what or where “Gnipa Cave” is. Still, cave imagery is used to depict the underworld in mythologies from all over the world, which makes the suggestion that Gnipa Cave is an entrance to the underworld, and Garm its guardian, far from unreasonable.
Regardless of whether or not Garm, Fenrir, and the hound of Hel are the same figure, they certainly seem to be little more than multiplications of the same type of figure: a canine associated with the underworld and the forces of chaos who breaks free at the world’s end as an omen of its destruction and in order to aid its destruction. The exact differences between these figures are highly ambiguous, and, in any case, superficial.

God Posts: Ran and Aegir

I got this from Norse Mythology for Smart People.

Note: I've mentioned Aegir but Ran had no info. This site has info about Ran. So I'm including both info for Ran and her husband.

Aegir (pronounced “EYE-geer;” Old Norse Ægir) and Ran (pronounced “RAN;” Old Norse Rán) are two of the most often-mentioned giants in Norse mythology. Unfortunately, as fragmentary as the sources for our knowledge of Norse mythology are, that doesn’t come out to a particularly large number of mentions. Still, some of the most general characteristics attributed to Aegir and Ran by the pre-Christian Norse can be discerned.
Aegir and Ran are, respectively, husband and wife. They dwell in a magnificent hall beneath the ocean, and can be seen as the animating powers of the ocean and its varying qualities. Aegir (“Ocean”), who is often portrayed as a gracious host, seems to correspond to its more benevolent aspects. Ran (“Robber”^[1]) seems to correspond to its more sinister aspects; in Old Norse poetry, she’s usually mentioned in the context of drowning unfortunate seafarers and dragging them down to dwell in her underwater abode.
While the relationship between the Aesir gods and the giants is ambivalent at best, and often marked by considerable strife, Aegir and Ran enjoy an overwhelmingly friendly relationship with the gods. The gods are apparently regular guests at Aegir’s magnificent feasts.
Together the couple has nine daughters, who are usually interpreted as being spirits of the waves.

Blog of an Independent Astaruer Up for Eleven Months

Hail!

Today marks eleven months that my blog has been up. We've moved and I will be, hopefully, coming around and doing more posts. Have to wait for the net to get on, which is why this is written at the library. Have a great month and thanks for reading.

God Post: Odr (God)

I got this from Norse Mythology for Smart People.

Odr (pronounced “O-der,” from Old Norse Óðr, “ecstasy, inspiration, fury, frenzy;” sometimes shortened to Óð or “Od”) is an obscure, seldom-mentioned god. According to the medieval Icelandic scholar Snorri Sturluson, Odr is the husband of the Vanir goddess Freya, who is the mother of his daughter Hnoss.
Snorri also briefly mentions one story about Odr, in which the god plays an entirely passive role: once, Odr went far away from the other deities. His destination and the reasons for his departure are never stated. Freya searched in vain for him, and wept tears of gold in his absence.^[1]
Odr’s existence, at least, is corroborated by two of the poems in the Poetic Edda,^[2][3] and he is alluded to in an 11th-century poem by Einarr Skulason.^[4] It’s therefore impossible for him to have been merely an invention of Snorri’s; Odr was an authentic, if perhaps rather late, feature of pre-Christian Norse mythology.
As sparse and cryptic as these mentions of Odr in Old Norse literature are, the evidence points ineluctably toward a single interpretation of Odr: he was an only nominally distinct counterpart to Odin.
Freya, Odr’s wife, can hardly be distinguished from Odin’s wife, Frigg, as I show in the articles on Frigg and Freya. The name Odin (Old Norse Óðinn) is Óðr with the masculine definite article (-inn) attached to the end to mean “master of óðr” or “exemplar of óðr.” Odin’s and Odr’s names, therefore, are practically identical. Odin was once exiled by the other gods for a long period, and Odr’s absence surely corresponds to this time.
However, it’s noteworthy that Snorri doesn’t mention any children of Odr besides Hnoss. Odin has numerous children, including very prominent gods such as Thor and Baldr. If Snorri had seen Odr and Odin as being truly identical, he certainly would have mentioned Odin’s children amongst Odr’s.
It seems that by the medieval period at the latest, and quite possibly in the earlier Viking Age, Odin had been split into two gods, and Freya/Frigg had been split into two goddesses. This change must have occurred relatively shortly before the 11th century, given how indistinguishable the characters of the bifurcated deities still were to each other by the time the major Old Norse literary sources were written.
This, of course, begs the question of why this change occurred. While we aren’t certain of the reasons why, it’s probably highly significant that in each of the split pairs, one deity belonged to the Aesir tribe of gods, and the other to the Vanir tribe of gods. The split between the Aesir and the Vanir was itself unique to later Norse mythology; such a division of the deities doesn’t seem to have occurred amongst any of the other branches of the Germanic peoples, nor amongst the Norse in earlier times. And as with the two pairs of deities we’ve been considering here, it’s difficult to point to any concrete features that distinguish the Aesir and the Vanir. There may have been differing tendencies or differences of emphasis, but any formulation that states that “the Aesir were the gods of such-and-such” and “the Vanir were the gods of these other things” is oversimplifying.
Perhaps, then, the split between Odr and Odin and between Freya and Frigg occurred as part of the larger split between the Vanir and the Aesir. This division would have still been young enough at the time of Christianization to be more of a change of name than of substance, given how difficult to differentiate the characters of the deities in question remained.
That suggestion, in turn, begs the question of why the gods were being cut into two groups just prior to the 11th century. That, however, is a topic for another article.

God Post: Gullveig

 









I got this from Norse Mythology for Smart People. Enjoy.

Gullveig (pronounced “GULL-vayg”) is a female figure mentioned only in two stanzas in the Völuspá, one of the poems in the Poetic Edda. The stanzas describe the events leading up to the Aesir-Vanir War, the war between the two main tribes of deities in Norse mythology, the Aesir and the Vanir.
The two stanzas read:

Now she [the seeress recounting the events of the poem] remembers the war,
The first in the world,
When Gullveig
Was studded with spears,
And in the hall of the High One [Odin]
She was burned;
Thrice burned,
Thrice reborn,
Often, many times,
And yet she lives.
She [Gullveig] was called Heiðr
When she came to a house,
The witch who saw many things,
She enchanted wands;
She enchanted and divined what she could,
In a trance she practiced seidr,
And brought delight
To evil women.^[1]

The following stanzas describe failed peace talks between the two tribes of gods and the beginning of the war.
These stanzas tell us that Gullveig was a practitioner of magic, often called “seidr” (seiðr) in Old Norse. As in most ancient societies, magic was seen as highly ambivalent amongst the Norse. Its practitioners often provided valuable services, but their art inherently increased their personal power in ways that others often felt to be underhanded and antisocial.
The second verse’s last lines, “And [she] brought delight / To evil women,” underscore this point. The Old Norse phrase illrar brúðar, “evil women,” is not the least bit ambiguous; brúðar literally means “brides,” but here it clearly means “women” in a more general sense, and illr (here illrar for grammatical reasons) means “ill, bad, evil, malevolent, injurious.” (I’ve seen a few attempts to translate these lines in a way that renders them morally neutral or positive, but these are utterly spurious and are based on nothing more than wishful thinking by people who would do well to come to terms with the fact that historical pagan religions typically had a highly ambivalent view of magic and the people who practiced it.)
“The hall of the High One” is a reference to Asgard, the celestial fortress of the Aesir gods. Gullveig had evidently come to Asgard from elsewhere – in context, almost certainly from Vanaheim, the homeland of the Vanir – and was performing magic that the Aesir deemed to be gravely antisocial and dangerous. Their response was to burn her, which should be unsurprising given the instances of witches being put to death in the sagas due to the frequent malevolence of magic noted above. But, by means of the same abilities that got her into trouble in the first place, she survived.
Magic wasn’t the only alluring yet disruptive force that Gullveig introduced to the Aesir. The name Gullveig is a compound word comprised of the words gull, “gold,” and veig, “alcoholic drink, intoxication” or “power, strength.”^[2] Its meaning, then, can hardly be anything other than “the madness and corruption caused by this precious metal.”^[3] She is also called Heiðr, which, as a noun, means “fame,” and as an adjective, means “bright, light, clear,” another probable reference to gold.


This second name, like the first, has to do with wealth and prestige. Also, it’s surely no coincidence that witches called Heiðr are likewise found in Landnámabók and The Saga of King Hrólf Kraki.^[4]
Norse society’s ambivalent attitude toward magic was mirrored by its similarly ambivalent attitude toward wealth. On the one hand, wealth was desirable for the prestige, comfort, and pleasure that it brings, but on the other hand, it was seen as a potentially socially disruptive thing that had to be distributed in such a way that social harmony was preserved.
This latter attitude is indicated in, for example, the stanzas of the rune poems that deal with the meaning of the F-rune, fé or fehu, literally “cattle” but more broadly “wealth.” The Icelandic Rune Poem has this to say about fé:

Wealth
source of discord among kinsmen
and fire of the sea
and path of the serpent.^[5]

And from the Norwegian Rune Poem:

Wealth is a source of discord among kinsmen;
the wolf lives in the forest.^[6]

And from the Anglo-Saxon Rune Poem, with a slight Christian overlay:

Wealth is a comfort to all men;
yet must every man bestow it freely,
if he wish to gain honour in the sight of the Lord.^[7]

We can also say with a reasonable degree of certainty that Gullveig is the Vanir goddess Freya by another name. Freya weeps tears of gold and owns the golden, jewel-studded necklace Brísingamen, perhaps the most precious piece of jewelry in Old Norse literature. It was she who, according to the Ynglinga Saga, first brought seidr to the Aesir, and who first taught it to Odin.^[8] Thus, the connections between Freya and Gullveig’s defining characteristics – magic and material wealth – are quite clear, making an identification of the two quite probable.

The Rational Heathen: Wiccatru -- Or Should We Take Another Look at the ...

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