THE KING GOD AND HIS CONNECTION WITH SACRIFICE IN RELIGION

BY

AKE V. STROM Uppsala

That kingship in Old Scandinavia was entirely sacral, is nowadays considered as a mere matter of fact. Scholars as SCHUTTE, ErTREM and DE VRIES have pointed to the subject in different connections,1) VON FRIESEN maintained the idea that the king was regarded as the husband of the fertility goddess,2) IvAR LINDQUIST tried to show that political and sacral leadership was the same thing from the be• ginning,3) and NILS Lrn holds the opinion, that the king already ,,in this life was one with the god and bore his name."4) Drawing the lines from old Arian religion GEORGE DuMEZIL has discovered the Indo• European priest-king-ideology also in Scandinavia, where , the mythical ancestor and patron of the kings, is pictured as an old Arian priest-king with his functions "souverainete magique, force guerriere, fecondite."5) This is the background to the threefold role of the king in the Scandinavian sacrifice, called blot.

1) G. SCHUTTE, Gttdedrabning i nordisk Rittts, in: Samlaren XXXVI, 1915, pp. 21-36, S. ErTREM, Konig Attn in Upsala und Kronos, in: Festskrift till HJ. Falk, Oslo 1927, pp. 245-261, J. DE VRIES, Altgermanische Re!igionsgeschichte II (= Grundriss der Germ. Philol. XII: 2), Berlin-Lpz. 1937, pp. u7-u9. 2) 0. VON FRIESEN, Har det nordiska kttngadomet sakralt ttrsprttng?, in: och sed 1932-1934, Uppsala 1934, pp. 15-34. 3) I. LrNDQUST, Kttngadb'met i hednatidens Sverige, in: Festskrift till ]bran Sahlgren, Lund 1944, pp. 221-234. We have the word 'king', kunttkaR, i.e. kttnungaR or konungaR (plur.) already on the runic stone of Rak (p. 23 2). Cf. LrNDQUIST's inter• pretation of the Sparkisa-stone from the VII. century with its clear conception of the king-god (Religib'.ra runtexter II = Skr. utg. av Vetensk.-Soc. i Lund XXIV), Lund 1940, pp. 6 f. and 181). 4) N. Lrn, Gudar OR gudedyrking, in: Nordisk kultur XXVI, Religionshistorie, Oslo 1942, p. 99. 5) G. DuMEZIL, Mythes et dieux des Germains ( Mythes et religions), Paris r 9 39, p. 20. Cf.A. V. STROM, Vetekornet(= ActaSem. Neotest. Ups. XI), Uppsala 1944,pp. 35 f. KING GOD AND SACRIFICE IN 70 3

1. The king was the bloter par preference In the first part of Snorri's Ynglingasaga, where the gods are pre• sented as the prototypes of the Svia-kings, it is said about Odin as king of Svipi6o: "He should protect their country against war and blote for a year."6) The following quotation about Nior, who ac• cording to Vafpr. 38 disposes of countless hargar and vi's, which shows a good old tradition by Snorri, states that he "kept up the blot and was called the king of the Sviar."7) Here we have a perfectly clear and evident connection between kingship and blot. This was the case, too, in real history. Not only the Ynglingasaga reports the blot of Ynglinga-kings in chapter after chapter. Other sources, too, tell us e.g. that the king had to give to Frey the largest boar available at yule-time. 8) The conflict between king Inge and Bl6t• Sveinn in 1080 A.D. reveals to us the old Swedish opinion about the king's irremissible duty to perform the sacrifice,9) already mentioned in a scholy to Adam of Bremen about king Anund in Upsala.10) In the same way king Hakon in Norway, who was a Christian, was forced to take activ part in the blot-veizla, which proves the stubborn ideas about the role of the king as the true bloter by virtue of his office. 11) Other bloters performed their duty as representatives of the king. There are two kinds of not regal bloters, namely state officials and

6) Ynglingasaga (abbr. Ys.), chapter 8, , ed. F. J6NSSON (abbr. Hkr.), I, pp. 20 f. On the euhemerismus of Snorri see A. HEUSLER, Die gelehrte Urgeschichte im altislandischen Schrifttum ( = Abhandl. der preuss. Akad. der Wiss. 1908: 3), pp. 88-90, and W. BAETKE, Die Giitterlehre der Snorra-Edda ( = Berichte uber die Verhandl. der Sachs. Akad. der Wiss. zu Lpz, Phil.-hist. Klasse, XCVII: 3), Berlin 1950, pp. 20-32. 7) Ys. 9, p. 22. 8) Hervarar saga ok Heiareks konungs (= Samfund til Udg. afGammelNordisk Litteratur, abbr. SUGNL, XLVIII), Khvn 1924, pp. 54: 24 f. and 129: 6-9. 9) Hervarar saga, p. 160. Cf. H. LJUNGBERG, Den nordiska religionen och kristen• domen (= Nordiska texter och undersiikningar XI), Uppsala 1938, p. 233-38, which discusses the question of sources and estimates the Hervararsaga as a valuable one (p. 235, note 1). 10) Schol. 140. See WESSEN, Studier i Sveriges hedna mytologi och fornhistoria ( = Upps. Univ. Arsskr. 1924: 2, Fil. 6), p. 188. 11) Saga Hakonar gMa, ch. 17 (Hkr. I, pp. 191-193). R. VON KIENLE seems to show a complete lack of understanding about the special role of the king in sacrifi• cial matters, when he writes that king Hakon was forced to blote "sicher nicht nur um den christlichen Konig wieder dem Heidentum zuzufiihren, sondern weil die Teilnahme an einem solchen Opfer notwendige Selbstverstandlichkeit war fiir den Stammesgenossen" (Germanische Gemeinschaftsformen, Deutsches Ahnenerbe, Reihe B, Abt. Arbeiten zur Germanenkunde, Bd. 4, 1939, p. 25 3).