Germanic Mythology and Indo-European Society

mentaton see here, and elsewhere in the poem, a Christian meaning, These will be more inclined to accept as genuine the defective stanza which follows the present stanza 49 in one manuscript, and which Schach includes, A literal translation carries so many inevitable, but perhaps inappropriate, connections with Christian terminology that I prefer to place it here, It seems in any case hard to fit mto the chronology and what seems to me the spirit ofthe poem, at least without the lost passages which must have accompamed It. The mighty one come, down on the day ofdoom, th.t powerful lord whorule$overaU, The final stanza bas also been the subject ofmuch conflicting interpretation, in whichthe dragon is seen in a variety offunctions from purifyingto threaten ing, Like Peter Hallberg and Paul Schach, I see its presence as a reminder that good cannot be disentangled from evil; to separate light from the darkness is to intensify the darkness, THE GODS: A:SIR.AND VANIR q,",?,Vu",uif Mythology frequently joins the same characters [Odin, Thor, and Frey1 in a triad, Among them alone are divided the three treasures forged by the dwarfs after losing a bet with the malicious mki: Odin gets the magic ring, Thor the hammer that is to be the instrument of his battles, and frey the wild boar with the golden bristles,! It is they, and only they, whom the v~luspd (strs, 53-56) describes as beingjolned in the supreme duels and deaths ofths eschatologi cal battle,' More generally, it is they-and the goddess freya, closely associated with frey and Njord-who dominate, who indeed monopolize almost all the frmnGaJso{rh<AH,itntNorthm,nbyG<otge,DIlrnlzilCoPl"'lsh"hORegOm,oflheurnversltyofcau. fO'tu.. R.opr;medbypemt;,slon PART 7 SCANDINAVIA AND THE GERMANIC TRIBES JJ'l1i.r;•••. ,€>I, ••• ""..I' mythologicalmateriai.ltis no less signifIcant that the three gods who splitthe nothing decisive results from these contrary movements. because (23)thegods property ofthe dead--the last two under rather obscure conditions-are Odin, hold an assembly for peacewbere theydi5CUSs eventual compensation.? who consigns to himself the nobles or "half the dead" from the battlefield, Thor, to whom go the thralls (more correctly, no doubt, the nonnobles), and b) SkQldskaparmdl (chap. S,ProseEdda) (The response ofBragi to the question freya, who according to one text' takes the otherhalfofthose killed in battle ''Whence comes the art called poetry?,,): andaccordingtoanothertexttakesthedeadwomen.~ The beglnning of It WIIS that the gods were at war with the people known as Such is the pI'eSentsituation. But this union and this happy harmony, founded theVanirandtheyarrangedforapeacerneetingbetwe~nthemandmadea ona dear analysis ofhllman wishes, have not always exlsted, a<xording to the tr\lCi! In thl. way: they both went up to a crock and spat into it. When th~y legend. in a far distant past the two divine groups lived at first separately, as were going awtrj, the gods took the truce token and would not allow it to be neighbors; then they fought a fierce war, after which the most distinguished iost, and madeofit arnan.Bewa.calledKvasir. He bSDwtsethatnobodyasks Vanir were associated with the .£sir, wtth the rest of their "peopJe"living some him any question he is unable to answer. He travelled far and wide """rthe world to teach men wiiidom and came once to feast with some dwarfs, rJalar cult. where away from the struggle and the cares of their Four strophes from andGalar.Thesecalledhtmasldefurawordlnprivateandkilledhlln,\etting that breathless poem, the vplwpd, in which the sibyl relates quite allusively hlsbloodrunintotwocroo::k::iandonekettle.Theb.tt!ewascalled6orOrir,but the entire history of the gods; two texts of the erudite Snorr!; and fUllllly an the crocks were known as SOn and Bo6n. They mixed hi' blood with honey, unadroit plagiarism by hlscontemporarySaxoGrammaticus-these infoI1ll us of and it became the mead whlch makes whoever drinks of it a poet or a scholar. this initiaicrisisofthegods,whichispresupposed a1sOinseveralpassagesfrom The dwarfs told the JEslr thatKvasir had choked with learning. because there other Eddic poems. These documents are not homogeneous: two present the wasnoonesuffictentlywell-informedtocompetewithhlrninknowledge.3 event in mythological terms, two transpose It into historical andgeographicai (There follows the story of the acquisition of the mead by odin, who Is to be terms. The fIrst group includes strophes 21-24 of the v~ and a passage in lts greatest beneficiary). Snorri's mythological manual written for the use of poets, the S/cdldskapanndJ (chap.4);thesecondlncJudeschapters1,2,4,andSoftheYngliI'!9asagG1,dls c)Yf'I9li~(thebeginningoftheHeimskrlngkl)(chaps.1,2,4,5): cllSSingtheYngliRgQT,supposeddescendantsoffrey,andchapter7ofthefirst book of SUo's Gesta DarlOrum, a fragment of the "saga ofHadingusH which fills 1. of the Three Contbu!nts.-Theearth's round, on whlch rnankind Uves, chapters S through II of that bOOL Is much indented. Great.eas rut into the land from tho ocean. We know that a.ea goes from the Norva Sound [the StraIt ofGibraitarj ali the way to J6r salaland ["Jerusslern Land; Palestine]. From this sea a long arm extends to a) Vplu5pli 21-24.1 have elsewhere' made anextended analysis of this passage, the northeastwhiGh Is called the Biack Sea. It separatos the three parts of whlch the hypercritical Eugen Mogk' sought to eliminate from the dossier on the wotld. The part to the eastwardis called Asla; but that whlch lies to the the lEsir and Vanir. The order of events-described as "the first war of armies westofitiscalledbysom~Europe,byoth""'End.NorthoftheBiackSealies in the world"-seems somewhat confused in these rapid and discontinuous Svfthj6ththeGreatortheCold. strophes, which do not narrate, but content themselves with evoking episodes sorne men consider svlthj6tll the Great not less in sb;e than Serklandthe already known to the listeners. There is extensive reference to a female being Greal: ["Sal'3C<!nLand; North Africa],andSDme think It is equal In size to Bla calledGuUveig,literally,"gold-drink,gold-drunkenness;' sent by the Vanirto land ["Blackrnan's Land; Africa].The northern part of svlthj6th ls uncultl the lEsir, who, despite metallurgical treatment, cannot rid themselves of her. vatedonw::ountoffro.tandcold,jllStas the southempartofBhIlandl1 a des ertbecauseoftheheatofthesun.lnSvfthj6ththerearelUanylargeprovlnce$. A sorceress, she sows corruption, particularly among women. There is also There are also many tribes and many tongues. There are giants and dwarfs: reference (24) to aspear, apparently magic, thrown by odin against an enemy there are black men and lIlBnykinds ofstrange tribes. Also there are anJmals army, which does not prevent that "broken was the wall of the stronghold of and dragons ofrnarwlious sUe. Outofthe north, fnllU the rnountains whlch the lEsir" and that "the warlike (1) Vanir were able to trample the plains." Bllt i. 4 ) 71r~ G~ fm<U!ic worid C~IJort' w~t"',',.s then hept i5a ~·. The second is that &owulf and Grettis<aga come re.pectively at the beginning and the end of,heat tested Old Gemlanic heroic literaf)·traditioo. The two arc separaled by nearly600yealS (8th 10 14th century), yet they arc veryclosc (o each other. perhaps idcntic~l, in theme and message, i.e. in ~mean ing"'. It is a remarkable testimony to the tenacity of the Gem.anic tradition. 43 Perhaps the clearest e_idcnce for aCOOlmon Germanic (at any rate West and NOllh Germanic) dragon·,laying myth arc the respec ti ve genealogies of the heroes Sigemund in 8rowulfand Sigmundr·S i guI~r ("Siegfried"') in Old NOIse: Wa:ls The Germanic world ,----l----, i VQI ~u ngr I ·Sister (. ",) Sigemund Sign)' ("') Sigmundr=o I (the W",[sing) I I Fitela(nrjaofSig.) Sin·fjQlli Sigur"r I. Myth and Hero (d. OHG PN IMHG Si gfritJ (Sintar·)FizziloJ The earliest Gennanic literature. Old English, Old High German, Old Saxon, and Old Nor ~, knows a great many combats between heroes and dragons or heroic :!dversar. The identity orthe names and their re!atiom , the mythopoeic incest motif(probably ie5 . epical conflicts which hav e continued to seile popular imagination from the Dark rewnstructible for Old F.nglish as well), all point unequivocally to a common Ages right down 10 the 19th and 20I h centuries, in Ihe,.spon,e wlhe operas ofRi chard Gc""anic mythographic bao;kgrOllnd, whether the dragolHlayer is Si gemund as in Wagner, the still unabated vogue uflhe li terary creations of lhe di stinguished Browu/f.orhissonSigurl:lr/S igfritasclsewhere, lt iswiththis myth that wemaybegin. philologist J. R. R. Talkien. and the immense success of the game Dungeons and Sigemund's exploit is narrated as pan ofthe victory song composed tocelebrate Dragon... The themes of all theM: epic poems and tales have been repeatedly studied. B ~wulfsvictoryoverGrendel{g67ff,) . Inthisvictorysoogwehave a treasure house c3talogued,andanalyzedbyphilologistandfolklori .talike.andlheir.,imilarity to the ofthemetalanguage of Old Germanic poetry. 'Mindful orlays' (gidda If""'y"dig)the themes or Greek. Indi•. arid OIhu legend<lry material has been noIed since the 19th poet 'found another poem, truly bound (i.e, rightly alli terative]" {word6&rfandf sdJt cemury. \ The thematic ,imilari ties m~y be presumed as given: our concern he re is I>" b~ndt nl , (With the neuter plural word compare Gree k [11.00.) He began to 'vary l~ngu3g e . words' (wordu m wrLdanl, as Klaeberputs it (ad 874) 'in the customary manner of A number of verbal parallels among the various Germmic dragon-slaying Gcrrnanicpoetry'.andIOldofthcdccd.OfSigemund: legends have been adduced,' which prove, by the tenets of the compar ative method, thatthey.vegcneticallyre!atedandcommoninheritance. Suchistheremarkab!eand Sigemundegesprong methodologically indispensable agreement in what Meinet (192~:J) would term the reflerdcal'xl"'ge d6munlj'te1. critical 'd€t ail singuli er', the hfpt;·sax 'hilled knife', WEAPON ofGiant adversary in 'Yl>"an w(ges heard wyrm ;/cwealdc, the Gl¥lIissalia (§66) and a hapax in Old Nors e.

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