As per usual, a single-part post just isn't going to cut it. Having ranted at considerable length against the Norse sagas (of Flame Tree's Norse Myths and Tales) in part one, in this much more interesting conclusion it's time to enter the weird world of Nose mythology. As before, I'll use VT to refer to the "Viking Tales" book and TNM to refer to Larrington's The Norse Myths That Shape The Way We Think. I'll try not to repeat things I covered already in the latter, except for a few interesting points of difference.
2) The Mythologies
One other thing about this particular collection I need to mention is that the stories are arranged by theme rather than chronology. This can make things more than a little confusing, jumping between Loki being tortured by and then best pals with Thor. It also repeats the story of Baldur's death twice, but, fortunately, this is actually really interesting because the two versions have significant differences from each other, with the second version being far more bloodthirsty.
In some ways the mixed-up ordering is perversely fitting. Underpinning the whole mythology is, of course, the sense of doom. This is completely unlike the Celtic or Greek stories, which are entirely about what the gods did in the past by way of illustration as to what might happen in the future. With the Norse, both past and future are known, including that the gods will eventually die. So at what point in the timeline did the Norse believe they were at ? In the second version of the apocalypse stories, it's said that Loki was unleashed on Earth and corrupted men to evil. But it's also said elsewhere that he remains imprisoned underground, under the dripping of a serpent's venom as torture for his murder of Baldr, resulting in volcanoes and earthquakes.
When are we, then ? Is Loki still galivanting around with the other gods*, trapped underground, lose in the world causing mischief... ? And, perhaps more importantly, how come men know of the fate of the gods but the gods apparently don't ? Or if they do, why do they bother fighting a hopeless cause and are so woefully unprepared when the forces of chaos break free ? How did the Norse people themselves view the effect of the rise of Christianity on the prophecies of the end of days, or did it not matter ? Answers are to be found here none. Like the Greek myths, presumably there were a multitude of different versions of the stories, with nobody seeing any need for (or having the authority to) impose any sort of consistency.
* Even who Loki is is actually ambiguous. According to some he's Odin's brother, while other's say Odin did have a bother but it wasn't Loki. Other interpretations have it he's another class of deity altogether, the remnant of an earlier age.
What also becomes immediately apparent is that the stories have very different styles to each other. They're every bit as complex as the Greek myths, with a pantheon of gods that if anything is considerably more complex (and with habitations that are a veritable multiverse, with the structure of reality playing a much larger role than in the Greek stories). But whereas the Greek myths tend to veer towards serious tragedy, the Norse, by and large, lean if anything more towards comedy. There's a lot of good-natured aspects to the myths, the danger sometimes clearly not serious; it's hard to escape the impression of a Marvel-like, unserious-but-important tone to the whole thing. They're almost self-subversive in mocking their own underlying doom by putting a big beardy man in a dress to marry a giant.
Yet at other times the sense of destiny and drama eclipses almost anything in the Greek world. Odin hanging himself in tortured sacrifice to himself, "myself to myself", in screaming agony felt throughout the worlds for nine days, or Loki imprisoned with the entrails of his torn-apart sons, the emergence of Ymir in the Yawning Gap, and the apocalypse stories alike... all of these are epic melodrama of the highest order.
Again, it's clear there wasn't a single set version, no definitive dogma. For example, the goddess Hel is in one version cruel and stern, reluctant to relinquish Baldr, allowing one possibility of release only because duty demands it. In another it's the exact opposite : she would dearly live to release poor beloved Baldr, but duty permits her only one possibility !
Baldr himself can sometimes seem like he exists only to die, having no other function – an empty shell of a character. But in other descriptions he's literally goodness itself. His death is significant because it directly precipitates Ragnarok as the gods begin to age, with his loss giving strength to the forces of evil and chaos. He doesn't actually do very much except die, but he acts as a sort of moral lynchpin to the universe, without which it all falls apart.
Death also permeates the stories far more than in the Celtic tales. In Grettir's saga there's a draugr, a zombie living in a barrow, but even in Hel's own domain (where Baldr resides after his death) there are graves where Odin resurrects a seer : there is, it seems, both life and death after death. The gods can die in what seems to be a very final sense indeed, but undead mortals – as physical, roaming corpses rather than mere ghosts – are common.
The moral character of almost all of the gods is grey in the extreme (if "extreme greyness" isn't an oxymoron). Odin is supposed to be beneficent but appears here very much neutral, a powerful figure who's obsessed with knowledge, not morality : on the side of humans to be sure, but meaning the human species rather than any individual person – and even then only to recruit them as warriors for the final battle. His actions often have distinctly sinister overtones to them, rarely evil, but often horrific. Conversely Loki, though often cruel and ultimately evil, is capable of being entirely altruistic, in at least one case demonstrating greater intelligence than all the other gods, and taking considerable risk to himself, all for the sake of saving a peasant's child. Even Thor, who is largely compassionate towards both humans and humanity, isn't adverse to murder, and unlike Hercules he isn't wracked with regret should this prove necessary.
For the god's main adversaries, the giants, ambiguity is again the rule. It's totally unclear why Odin and his brothers (which may not may not include Loki) killed Ymir, the first giant who emerged from the blending of the primeval fire and ice. Plenty of gods, including Odin, have sexual and romantic relationships with giants, some of whom are described explicitly as good* – so why Odin thought Ymir in particular should die is never answered. The giants are in no way demonic forces of pure evil, and only seem to challenge the gods because frankly the gods provoked them out of their own sense of insecurity (just as the Fenris wolf only became bent on destruction to revenge himself against his godly captors, being hitherto an innocent pup).
* The giants, that is, not the sex.
Nor are the giants even lesser than the gods, often being considerably stronger; Odin himself has to be rescued from them on several occasions. Sometimes Thor alone is able to defend the other Aesir, and then only thanks to his mighty hammer. Likewise the gods aren't especially knowledgeable or wise compared to the giants, with Odin having to steal Mimir's knowledge through deception. It isn't even especially clear what attributes he has that make Odin deserve to be leader : save that he was there from the very early days, he's not really anything special in terms of strength, wisdom or powers. Ambiguity, then, permeates all aspects of the mythological figures, not just their morality.
So while there might be a few extreme cases of the embodiment of good and evil, by and large, almost everyone is much more complex than that. It's also surely significant that one of those extremes (Baldr) is killed, whereas the morally flexible but intelligent like Odin and Loki survive considerably longer. And it's the ambiguous ones who create the world we know, including humans.
Perhaps all this is a result of the nature of the gods. Christianity (at least the modern form) is pretty clear that God is, when you get right down to things, It. Mind came first, matter later. Not so in the Norse or Greek myths, in which the act of creation itself is quite unexplained. The gods and giants emerge from primordial forces but they're not the same as them. They create humans, but they never reach anything even approaching omniscience, let alone omnipotence. The Greek gods don't share the sense of struggle against doom, but they too are in many ways closer to humans than they are to the Christian God. Certainly both Norse and Greek gods alike have aspects of embodying or personifying natural forces, but they're ultimately far more complex than that. It is, maybe, more that Thor took on the mantle of thunder rather than being thunder itself.
I suggest that it might be this that really distinguishes the supposedly monotheistic Christianity from the so-called pagan religions. Christianity has its own multitude of supernatural entities, but they're not the same at all. In the pagan traditions such beings are, ultimately, a physical part of the natural world. In Christianity they are of a different order altogether, truly incomprehensible to mortals, with what we see being a mere raiment of their true form. More important than replacing the myriad of deities with a single supernatural being (which Christianity never really managed) might be that it had this much more radically different concept, the idea that the world was basically of the mind of god, not one of matter with God acting as a glorified overseer.
It then becomes easier to understand how pagan deities, being essentially of the same stuff of reality as the rest of us, could get away with having such imperfect and fascinatingly complex characters, rather than the goody-two-shoes attitude of Jesus et al. The Christian deities are all about morals and instruction because they exist outside of our reality; morality is their whole being and function. The pagan deities, though of a totally different order to humans, more differ in their quantity than quality. They are much more similar to us than to the angels.
Not that there wasn't a radical difference in the pagan gods and ordinary mortals. One thing that seems relatively underappreciated is the sheer size of Valhalla, which is itself just one of several halls in one of many worlds. This single hall alone has 540 (or sometimes 500) doors, through each of which 800 warriors can march abreast. Hang on, that means each door is going to be at least a kilometre wide ! So we have of order 500 km of doors alone, plus we'll need some walls in between them or they can't count as doors – that would make Valhalla a sort of cosmic gazebo, which just isn't going to work. The upshot is that we're talking about a hall several hundred kilometres wide, able to receive 432,000 warriors in a single step (say about a million warriors a second), with an ultimate capacity in the tens of billions. It'd take days or weeks just to walk to the centre.
And that, remember, is just for the selected male warriors. Women and others go to other halls. So just how many people the Vikings thought were dying each day is hard to guess, but a quick Google reveals that the total global death rate today is about 150,000 : far short of Valhalla's capacity alone ! They were certainly thinking in cosmic scales*, if not in concepts. Though what the significance of their cosmic myths meant to them, how literally we should take the structure of Yggdrasil and the nine realms, the dismemberment of Ymir and all that, is hard to say. Perhaps it was meant to be symbolic of something deeper that is now lost. Certainly, despite the sheer bizarreness of the creation myth, it feels like there is something more profound and meaningful behind it all.
* Not always though. At one point Loki is carried away by an eagle with an entirely unimpressive 8 ft wingspan, while in another story the wall surrounding Hel is described as being "20 ft high at least !". There's a sometimes comic and sometimes just thoughtless mismatch between the physical scale and tone of the events being described.
I should probably bring this to end with (what else ?) Ragnarok. Or rather, post-Ragnarok. The apocalypse itself is dramatic, and beautifully deadly, but the aftermath doesn't seem nearly as much talked about. Not only does the Earth eventually re-emerge from the sea, verdant and renewed, but several of the gods survive. This includes Baldr, presumably freed now that Hel is dead, but a couple of others also need be mentioned. Vidar, the son of Odin and giantess, has a single giant shoe, possibly formed of all the bits of leather that cobblers have discarded. With this he holds down and breaks the jaw of Fenris. Another is Vali, the son by rape (sorry, "compelled to become his wife", as the text puts it) of Odin and a Russian princess. Also of note is that while the introductory text describes (as in TNM) the dragon Nidhug flying overhead with corpses in his wings, in the actual story given this is not seen : everything is a picture of harmony.
That everything at least basically works out in the end puts a very different slant on the whole thing, especially that not all of the gods are doomed. Regeneration is another common theme throughout the stories, especially regenerating animals for food. Here the change is more substantial. Odin, Thor and most of the rest appear to be truly gone : the old order will not return, replaced with one which is simpler, less interesting, but more benevolent. Ragnarok is truly an ending, but it is not the end. Nothing ends completely Even the worse calamities bring renewal and hope.
In these posts I've mentioned a few times that I don't really see Christianity as monotheistic. It should also be clear that I don't find Bible stories particularly interesting, which might seem unfair since they feature many of the same elements as the pagan ones : divine beings with magical powers doing strange things to people. So what gives ?
I think it's mainly because they're so morally fixated and certain. The mechanics of miracles is rendered bland and dull because it's always just down to the unimaginable powers of God. The morality is always framed as having one certain answer, with any deficiencies brushed under the carpet as missing the point. The structure of the cosmos, the nature of reality – these play no part at all in anything (at least, all this is how it was taught to me at school). Plenty of interesting events happen but the stories are all tediously moralising sermons, perpetually serious and loaded with endless judgement.
While the pagan and Christian stories share some elements, the resemblance is superficial. Pagan stories do have moral judgements in them, but far more often they simply raise moral questions without clear answers. The gods themselves frequently behave like arseholes, often comically. The myths practically invite us to ask questions both moral and physical without ever judging our own answers : was it right that the gods did that ? How does magic work ? Paganism also allows the believer access to magical powers of their own, rather than reducing everything to God.
Now as a scientist the appeal should be clear. A world view which is inherently amoral rather than immoral, with uncertainty as one of its core principles, and allowing the user scope to both investigate and change reality... in more than a few ways, paganism may have more in common with science than Christianity. The attempt of Christianity to unite moral and physical beliefs is to me ultimately unsatisfying, or at least uninteresting since the answer is so often deemed to be beyond investigation. For Christianity any moral failings of the stories are a problem; for paganism they're an active feature. It feels far easier to view paganism metaphorically, whereas in Christianity things are often supposed to be meant rather more literally.
It's the very lack of answers in paganism that I find appealing. I would much prefer to have to ask interesting questions than deal with answers I can't accept, to paraphrase Feynman.
I shouldn't go too far with this, mind you. I stand by a previous review of Tom Holland's Dominion as one of the best books I've read in recent years, doing a commendable job of advocating for the benefits of Christianity from an atheistic perspective (especially its truly revolutionary concern for the poor). And I'm acutely aware that many Christian thinkers do ask deeply philosophical questions, that theology at a beyond-school level can be altogether different from being taught right from wrong "because the book said so" as a child. Nevertheless, the Christian stories themselves feel loaded with judgements in a way the pagan stories simply don't. So while Dominion did change my views of ancient peoples in a way no other book has done, ultimately... I still find paganism to have a stronger appeal.
Not that I'll ever be signing up to anything. The subversive elements of pagan stories are certainly much more rewarding than the holier-than-thou Bible stories as literature, but as a guide to anything (moral or physical) they seem all but useless. Perhaps most importantly of all, I just don't see the need for invoking deities as either physical explanations (except perhaps a prime mover) or for daily moral instruction. Science, philosophy, and discussions with others provide all of that in abundance. To me there's just nothing to be gained, and quite a lot to lose, by signing up to any particular belief structure. Better by far to just muddle through.
