11.6 — Norse II: Thor, Loki, Baldr and Ragnarok

Thor

Odin's son, and the most popular god in Scandinavia by a considerable margin — far more common in place names, personal names and amulets than Odin, who was a god for kings and poets.

Thor was the god of ordinary people. Red-bearded, enormous, direct, and defined by what he protects rather than what he rules.

His hammer, Mjolnir, was made by dwarves, and its handle is too short because Loki interfered with the forging. It always returns when thrown.

And Thor is not clever, and the stories are honest about it, and frequently funny about it.

The journey to Utgard

The best Thor story, and it is a comedy that turns.

He and Loki travel to the hall of a giant king, and are set three contests.

Loki is challenged to an eating contest and is beaten by a servant who consumes the bones and the trough as well.

Thor's companion is challenged to a race and loses badly.

Thor is challenged to drain a drinking horn. He takes three enormous draughts and barely lowers the level.

Then to lift a cat off the floor. He gets one paw up.

Then, humiliated, to wrestle the king's old nurse. She forces him to one knee.

They are sent away in disgrace.

And then the king catches up with them and tells them the truth.

It was all illusion. Loki was eating against wildfire, which consumes everything. The runner was thought. The drinking horn's other end was in the sea — and Thor's three draughts lowered the ocean and created the tides. The cat was the world serpent that encircles the earth, and Thor lifted it off the ground. And the old woman was old age, which nobody beats, and Thor forced her to one knee.

The king says: never come back.

And Thor swings the hammer, and the hall and the king are gone, because they were illusions too.

What it teaches

He performed impossibly well and experienced it as failure, because he was measuring against what he was told the tasks were.

Which is exactly what happens to a person judging themselves against a standard they have not examined. The contest was rigged and the performance was extraordinary, and he walked away humiliated, and only learned the truth by accident afterwards.

And nobody beats old age. Forcing it to one knee is the best available outcome, and the story treats that as an enormous achievement rather than a defeat.

Loki

The most interesting figure in the mythology and the hardest to classify.

He is not a god by birth — his father was a giant — and he lives among the gods, is Odin's blood-brother, and is not trusted by anybody.

He is a trickster (11.10), and the shape of his career is worth watching.

Early on, he causes a problem and then solves it, and the solution is usually better than the original situation. He cuts off Sif's hair as a prank, is threatened, and goes to the dwarves — who make replacement hair of gold, and while they are at it, Odin's spear, Freyr's ship, and Thor's hammer. The gods' greatest treasures exist because Loki did something stupid.

He gets Thor's hammer back when it is stolen, by dressing Thor as a bride.

And he is the mother of Odin's eight-legged horse, having taken the form of a mare to distract a stallion — one of several occasions on which he changes sex, which the tradition records without much comment.

And then it turns.

Baldr

Odin's son, and the best of them. Beautiful, kind, and universally loved, and the texts are unusually warm about him.

He begins having dreams of his own death.

His mother Frigg travels the whole world and extracts an oath from everything — every metal, stone, plant, disease, animal and element — that none will harm him.

And he becomes invulnerable, and the gods make a game of it: they throw things at him, and shoot at him, and strike him, and nothing touches him, and everybody laughs.

Loki, in disguise, asks Frigg whether she got an oath from everything.

She says: from everything except the mistletoe, which seemed too young to ask.

Loki makes a dart of mistletoe.

And he gives it to Hodr, Baldr's blind brother, who is standing at the edge of the game unable to join in, and offers to guide his aim.

Baldr dies.

The failed rescue

And then the part that matters.

Hel, who rules the realm of the dead, agrees to release Baldr on one condition: everything in the world must weep for him.

Messengers go out, and everything weeps — all people, animals, earth, stones, trees and metals.

Except one giantess in a cave, who says she will weep dry tears and that Hel may keep what she has.

And it was Loki.

Baldr stays dead.

What this is

The best thing in the mythology, and it is doing several things at once.

A universal precaution that missed one thing. Everything was covered except what seemed too small to matter.

And the delivery mechanism: the blind brother, excluded from the game, given something to do by somebody kind to him. Hodr is entirely innocent and he is the instrument, and he is killed for it afterwards.

And the rescue that fails because of one refusal. The whole world weeps and one being will not, and that is enough. A unanimity requirement is a requirement that anybody can veto.

And it is the beginning of the end. After Baldr's death the gods bind Loki — over his own son's entrails, with a serpent dripping venom on his face, and his wife holding a bowl to catch it, which she must occasionally empty, and in that moment the venom falls and he convulses and the earth shakes.

And Ragnarok follows.

Ragnarok

"The fate of the gods," and it is the most distinctive thing in this mythology.

It is prophesied in detail. Everybody knows it is coming. Everybody knows how it ends.

Three winters with no summer between them. The wolf swallows the sun. The stars fall. The world tree shakes.

Loki breaks free. Fenrir breaks free. The world serpent rises and the sea floods the land. The fire giants come from the south.

And the gods put on their armour and go out to fight, and they lose.

Odin is swallowed by Fenrir. Thor kills the world serpent and walks nine steps and dies of its venom. Tyr and the wolf-hound kill each other. Heimdall and Loki kill each other. Freyr, who gave away his sword for love, dies to the fire giant.

And then the fire, and the earth sinks into the sea.

And afterwards

A detail that is often left out.

The earth rises again, green. **A few gods survive — Baldr returns from the dead. Two humans, who sheltered inside the world tree, come out and repopulate the world.

Whether this ending is original or a Christian addition by Snorri is genuinely argued about. The older poem has it, but the older poem was also written down after conversion.

What Ragnarok teaches

And this is the Norse contribution to this volume, and it is unique.

Every other tradition in Part 11 either has a good ending or has no ending.

This one says: you will lose, you know you will lose, you know approximately when and how, and you fight anyway.

And the fighting is not futile in their terms, because the point was never winning.

The Norse ethical world runs on this. What matters is how you conduct yourself, and specifically what is said about you afterwards. The most famous stanza in Norse poetry: cattle die, kinsmen die, you yourself will die; one thing I know that never dies — the reputation of each dead man.

Which is a completely different answer to mortality from anything else in this volume. Not liberation, not heaven, not release from the cycle — the memory of how you behaved, held by people who will also die.

It is a thin answer and it is an honest one, and it produced a culture that was not afraid.

And 11.4's Sisyphus is the closest parallel: the value is entirely in the conduct, with no expectation of a good outcome, and consciousness of the situation is what makes it a choice rather than a fate.

What to carry from this page

You may be performing extraordinarily against a rigged contest and experiencing it as failure. Check what you are being measured against before you accept the verdict.

Nobody beats old age, and forcing it to one knee is the achievement.

The thing too small to bother securing is the one that gets through, and the instrument will be somebody innocent who was given a job by somebody kind.

A unanimity requirement is a veto handed to everybody.

And you will lose, and how you conduct yourself is the whole of what is available. The Norse said it plainly and did not soften it, and it is worth having as one of the possible answers.

Next: 11.7 — Egypt, where the answer to death was an enormous technology of preservation, and where your heart gets weighed.