Appearance
11.5 — Norse I: Odin and the Nine Worlds
A caution before anything else.
Almost everything we know about Norse mythology comes from two sources written down in Iceland in the thirteenth century — the Poetic Edda, a collection of older poems, and the Prose Edda by Snorri Sturluson, a Christian politician and poet writing around 1220.
Which means: the material is genuinely old, and it reaches us through a Christian who was organising it into a system and who may have shaped it. 1.4's mechanism applies.
The creation
And it is the strangest creation story in this Part.
In the beginning there was Ginnungagap, a great emptiness, with a world of fire to the south and a world of ice to the north.
Where they met, the ice melted, and from the drops came Ymir, a giant, and a cow, Audhumla, who licked the salty ice and uncovered a man.
Ymir's descendants are the frost giants.
And the first gods — Odin and his brothers — killed Ymir.
They made the world out of his body. His flesh became the earth, his blood the sea, his bones the mountains, his skull the sky, and his brains the clouds. From his eyebrows they made the wall around the world where humans live: Midgard, the middle enclosure.
The world is made from a murdered body. Compare the Purusha hymn (9.1), where the world is made from a sacrificed cosmic being — the same idea, and both are Indo-European (11.1).
Yggdrasil and the nine worlds
An enormous ash tree holds everything together.
Three roots, reaching to three wells. Under one lives Mimir, whose well is wisdom. Under another, the Norns, three women who tend the tree and shape fate.
And the tree is being eaten. A dragon gnaws the root. Deer eat the leaves. It rots on one side. The Norns pour water on it daily to keep it alive.
The world tree is dying, continuously, and is maintained by daily labour. That is the Norse mood in one image.
Nine worlds hang on it: Asgard (the gods), Midgard (humans), Jotunheim (the giants), Vanaheim (the other family of gods), Alfheim (elves), Svartalfheim (dwarves), Niflheim (mist), Muspelheim (fire), and Hel (the dead who did not die in battle).
Odin
And he is nothing like Zeus.
Zeus is the king who enforces. Odin is a wanderer in a broad hat and a grey cloak, missing an eye, who travels in disguise, asks questions, tells riddles, and is not to be trusted.
He is the god of wisdom, poetry, war, death and magic — a strange combination — and of the frenzy that makes a warrior fight beyond himself.
The two sacrifices
And the two stories that define him.
He wanted to drink from Mimir's well, which is wisdom.
The price was an eye.
He paid it, and it stays in the well.
And the second, which is stranger. To gain the runes — writing, and the magic in it — he hanged himself from Yggdrasil, wounded with a spear, for nine nights, with no bread and no drink.
His own account, in the poem: I know that I hung on a windswept tree nine long nights, wounded with a spear, given to Odin, myself to myself, on that tree of which no man knows from where its roots run.
Given to Odin, myself to myself. He sacrifices himself to himself.
And at the end he sees the runes below him, screams, takes them up, and falls.
What Odin is for
The chief god of this pantheon is a figure who mutilates himself for knowledge, twice.
And the point is stated plainly by the structure: wisdom has a price, the price is permanent, and you pay it in advance without knowing exactly what you will get.
Which is different from every other tradition in this Part. **The Greek gods acquire nothing. The Indian gods are given things. Odin trades parts of himself.
And what he buys with it is not comfort. What he learns is that Ragnarok is coming and that he will die in it (11.6). He spends the rest of the mythology preparing for a defeat he knows is certain.
Wisdom, in this tradition, is knowledge of your own ending, purchased at a permanent cost, and it does not save you.
The other gods
Frigg, Odin's wife, who knows all fates and says nothing.
Tyr, the god of law and oaths, and the story that defines him.
The wolf Fenrir, who was growing dangerously, had to be bound. The gods brought a magical fetter and asked him to test his strength against it. He was suspicious and agreed only if one of them put a hand in his mouth as a pledge.
Only Tyr would do it.
The binding held, and Fenrir bit off his hand.
The god of oaths broke one, knowingly, to protect everybody — and paid with his sword hand. A war god who cannot fight properly, for the rest of time, because he was the only one willing to be the guarantee.
Heimdall, the watchman, who can hear grass growing and will sound the horn when the end comes.
**And the Vanir, a second family of gods — Njord, Freyr and Freyja — associated with fertility, prosperity and the sea, who fought a war with the Aesir and were integrated by exchange of hostages. Probably a memory of two religious traditions merging (11.2 has the same shape).
Valhalla, and what it actually is
Half the warriors who die in battle go to Odin's hall, chosen by the Valkyries. Half go to Freyja.
And in Valhalla they fight every day, killing each other, and are healed each evening, and feast.
The popular reading is that this is a warrior's paradise.
It is a barracks.
Odin is not rewarding them. He is assembling an army for Ragnarok — and he needs it, and it will not be enough, and he knows that too.
Which is a bleak and very honest thing for a warrior culture to have said about its own afterlife: you are not being honoured, you are being recruited for a battle that will be lost.
The mood
And it is worth naming, because it is unlike anything else in this Part.
This is a mythology in which the world is made from a corpse, the world tree is rotting and kept alive by daily labour, the chief god has mutilated himself twice for knowledge that tells him he will lose, the god of oaths broke one and lost a hand, and the dead are being assembled for a battle nobody survives.
And nobody in it despairs.
That combination — total certainty of defeat, and no despair — is the tradition's contribution, and 11.6 is where it pays off.
What to carry from this page
Wisdom is bought with something permanent, paid in advance, without knowing what you will get. An eye, and nine nights on a tree.
And what it buys may be knowledge of your own defeat. The tradition is unusually honest that understanding does not save you.
Somebody has to be the guarantee, and it costs them their hand. Tyr is the only god who would put his hand in the wolf's mouth, and the story is about what that role actually costs.
And the world tree is being eaten and is kept alive by daily watering. Everything you value is in that condition, and the daily maintenance is not a sign that something is wrong.
Next: 11.6 — Thor, Loki, the death of the best of them, and the end that everybody knows is coming.