10.2 — Norse, Celtic and the North

A mythology in which the gods know the date of their own defeat and go to war anyway, and a body of Celtic material that survives only because Christian monks wrote down what they were supposed to be replacing.

Norse

Where does Norse mythology actually come from?

Two Icelandic books written after Iceland was already Christian, which is a problem worth being clear about.

The Poetic Edda is a collection of anonymous poems preserved in a thirteenth-century manuscript, some of them considerably older in oral form.

The Prose Edda was written around 1220 by Snorri Sturluson, an Icelandic chieftain, politician and historian — and he wrote it as a handbook for poets. Skaldic poetry used dense mythological allusion, and Snorri was worried that young poets no longer knew the references. So he set out the myths systematically so that the poetic tradition could continue.

This means almost everything we know about Norse religion was written down by a Christian, two centuries after conversion, for a literary purpose. Snorri also frames the gods as human kings later mistaken for gods, which was a standard way of handling pagan material safely.

The material is still substantially reliable, because it agrees with much older skaldic poetry, with place names, with archaeology and with accounts from elsewhere. But the neat systematic structure is probably Snorri's, and actual Norse religious practice varied enormously by region.

Who are the main figures?

Odin — one-eyed, the chief god, and not a comfortable figure. He is the god of poetry, wisdom, magic, war and the dead. He gave one eye for a drink from the well of wisdom, and hanged himself on the world tree for nine nights, pierced by his own spear, to learn the runes — sacrificing himself to himself. He is deceitful, breaks oaths, and collects dead warriors for a battle he knows he will lose.

Thor — the son of Odin, red-bearded, with the hammer Mjölnir, a chariot pulled by goats, and enormous strength. He was by far the most popular god among ordinary people, judging by the number of hammer amulets found and by personal names, because he was the protector against the giants rather than a god of kings.

Loki — not a god of evil, and not Odin's or Thor's brother. He is a giant by descent, sworn as Odin's blood-brother, and functions as a trickster who both causes and solves the gods' problems. He is the parent of three monsters: the wolf Fenrir, the world serpent Jörmungandr, and Hel, who rules the dead. He is also the mother of Odin's eight-legged horse Sleipnir, having transformed into a mare to lure away a giant's stallion, which is a story that is exactly as strange as it sounds.

Freyja and Freyr, deities of fertility, prosperity and love — from the Vanir, a second family of gods who fought and then merged with Odin's Aesir. Freyja takes half the battle-dead, and Odin gets the other half, which is generally left out of the popular account.

Frigg, Odin's wife, who knows all fates and says nothing. Heimdall, who guards the bridge and can hear grass growing. Tyr, who lost a hand binding Fenrir, having placed it in the wolf's mouth as a pledge of good faith he knew was false.

What are the nine worlds and the tree?

Yggdrasil, an immense ash tree whose branches and roots connect nine worlds, which include Asgard (the Aesir), Midgard (humans, literally the middle enclosure), Jotunheim (giants), Alfheim (elves), Svartalfheim (dwarves), Niflheim (mist and cold), Muspelheim (fire), Vanaheim (the Vanir) and Hel (the dead who did not fall in battle).

The tree is under constant attack. A dragon gnaws its root, deer eat its shoots, its side rots. A squirrel runs up and down carrying insults between the dragon and an eagle at the top. Three Norns water it daily from a well to keep it alive, and the whole structure is being maintained rather than simply existing — which is the same theme as everything else in this mythology.

What is Ragnarök, and why does it matter?

The end, foretold in detail, which everybody knows is coming.

Three years of winter with no summer. The wolf Fenrir breaks his chain. The world serpent rises from the sea. Loki, bound for his part in Baldr's death, breaks free and leads the giants. Heimdall blows his horn, the gods arm and march to the plain, and almost all of them die.

Odin is swallowed by Fenrir. Thor kills the world serpent and walks nine paces before the venom kills him. Heimdall and Loki kill each other. The sun is swallowed, the stars fall, the earth sinks into the sea.

And then it comes back. A new earth rises, green. Two humans who sheltered in the world tree emerge. Baldr returns from the dead. A few of the younger gods survive and find the old chess pieces in the grass.

The theme is what makes it distinctive. These are gods who know they lose, know when, and fight anyway — and the material treats that as the only honourable response. It is a mythology built around a doomed defence, which is why it has been so heavily borrowed by later fiction, and why Tolkien, a professional scholar of exactly this material, wrote what he did.

Wednesday, Thursday and Friday are Odin's, Thor's and Frigg's days, and Tuesday is Tyr's, per 2.7.

What did Vikings actually do, versus the picture?

They did not wear horned helmets. No horned Viking helmet has ever been found in an excavation. The image comes from nineteenth-century Romanticism, and specifically from costume designs for Wagner's operas in 1876.

They were farmers, traders and settlers as much as raiders. Norse traders reached Baghdad, and Arab silver is found in Scandinavian hoards in enormous quantity; the Rus who founded the state that became Russia were Norse. They settled Iceland, Greenland, and reached Newfoundland around 1000 CE, five centuries before Columbus — confirmed archaeologically at L'Anse aux Meadows in 1960.

Iceland's parliament, the Althing, was founded in 930 and is generally called the oldest surviving parliamentary institution.

Celtic

Why is Celtic mythology so hard to pin down?

Because the Celts did not write it down, on principle.

Caesar recorded that the druids considered it improper to commit their learning to writing, and required students to memorise material over as much as twenty years. So the entire pre-Christian religious tradition was oral, and the people who held it were largely destroyed by Roman conquest and then by conversion.

What survives was written by Christian monks in Ireland and Wales from about the eighth century onward — the same situation as Snorri, and with the same caveats. The Irish material is by far the richest, because Ireland was never conquered by Rome and converted comparatively gently, so the monastic scribes had access to a living oral tradition and appear to have been genuinely interested in preserving it.

What is in the Irish material?

Four cycles, conventionally.

The Mythological Cycle: the Tuatha Dé Danann, a divine race who arrive in Ireland, defeat earlier inhabitants, and are eventually defeated themselves by the Milesians — after which they retreat into the hollow hills and become the sídhe, the fairies. That is the origin of the entire European fairy tradition: not small winged creatures but a displaced older people living underground, dangerous, and best not offended.

The Ulster Cycle: centred on Cú Chulainn, who takes up arms as a boy after hearing a prophecy that whoever does so that day will be famous and die young, and who single-handedly holds off an invading army at a ford. In battle he undergoes the ríastrad, a berserk distortion in which his body twists and one eye sinks and the other bulges. He dies standing, tied to a stone so he will not fall, and his enemies only approach when a raven lands on his shoulder.

The Fenian Cycle: Fionn mac Cumhaill and his warrior band, and his son Oisín, who goes to the otherworld for what seems three years and returns to find three hundred have passed.

The Historical Cycle: kings, some real.

The Welsh material is the Mabinogion, which contains the earliest surviving Arthurian stories — Arthur appears there as a folk-hero figure long before the French romances made him a courtly king.

Where do Halloween and the seasonal festivals come from?

From the Celtic quarter days, and Halloween is the clearest survival.

Samhain, at the start of November, marked the end of harvest and the beginning of winter. It was believed the boundary between worlds thinned, and the dead and the sídhe could cross. People left food out, and disguised themselves so as not to be recognised by whatever was abroad.

Christianity placed All Saints' Day on 1 November and All Souls' on 2 November, and the eve of All Saints — All Hallows' Eve — kept the older practices. Costumes, going door to door for food, and carved lanterns all descend from it; the turnip lantern became a pumpkin in America because pumpkins were available and easier to carve.

The other three quarter days: Imbolc in February, later St Brigid's Day; Beltane on 1 May, with fires and cattle driven between them; Lughnasadh in August, harvest.

The pattern of a festival being overlaid rather than abolished is completely standard, and it is why so many Christian feasts sit on older dates.

The shared north

Where does the Arthur legend come from?

Nobody knows whether Arthur existed, and the evidence is thin in a specific way.

The earliest references are Welsh and describe a war leader fighting the Saxons around 500 CE — not a king, and with none of the familiar apparatus. Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain (about 1136) is where most of it appears, and Geoffrey was writing something closer to historical fiction than history: he supplies Merlin, Uther, Tintagel and the conquest of much of Europe.

The rest was added in France. Chrétien de Troyes in the late twelfth century supplies Lancelot, the affair with Guinevere, and the Grail quest. The Round Table, Camelot and Excalibur accumulate over the following centuries, and Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur in 1485 assembles the whole thing into the version everyone knows.

So the legend is a European collaborative fiction built over 400 years on a possible Welsh war leader, and each layer reflects the concerns of the century that added it — which is why the courtly love material appears exactly when courtly love was the fashionable literary subject.

What is the underlying pattern in all this?

Three things recur across Norse, Celtic and Greek material, and noticing them makes any unfamiliar mythology easier to read.

A world that is made and will end. Not eternal, and not stable — maintained against forces that are winning slowly.

A boundary that can be crossed, at particular places and times: a hollow hill, a ford, a cave, a date. The living can go there and the dead can come back, and both are dangerous.

Fate that is known and not avoidable. The Norns, the Moirai, the prophecy at the boy's arming. Every character told their fate acts to avoid it and thereby causes it, and this is so consistent that it is clearly the point rather than a plot device. Oedipus, Cronus, Cú Chulainn, Odin.

The comparative mythologist Georges Dumézil argued that Indo-European mythologies share a three-part structure — sovereignty, force and productivity — reflected in Odin/Thor/Freyr, in Jupiter/Mars/Quirinus, and in Vedic Mitra-Varuna/Indra/the Ashvins. The thesis is contested, and it is the standard starting point for anybody comparing these systems.

What comes next

The next page goes south and east, to two mythologies obsessed with the afterlife and with the flood — Egypt and Mesopotamia.