Norse mythology

“ The imperishableness of nature appears more strikingly in the stupendous mountains and gigantic forests than in the fertile, cultivated and protected parts of the earth. Now let us again ask: Is there nothing here for the poet or artist? Has the Norse mythology nothing that can be elaborated and clothed with beautiful forms and colors? Does this mythology not contain germs that art can develop into fragrant leaves, swelling buds and radiant blossoms? Does not this our Gothic inheritance deserve a place with the handmaids of literature? ”

“ If you do not believe that the Norse mythology furnishes suitable themes for poetry, then do not echo the voice of the multitude and cry the idea down because it seems new. Men frequently act like ants. When a red ant appears among the black ones, they all attack it, for they have once for all made up their minds that all ants must necessarily be black; they have themselves been black all their lives, and all their ancestors were black, so far as they know anything about them. Thus it has become a fixed opinion with many, that mythology necessarily means Greek or Roman. ”

“ The variety enhances the beauty. The Greek mythology is rich, for profuseness of illustration is wealth. The Norse mythology is poor, because it is so strong; it consumes all its strength in the profoundness of its thought. The Norse mythology excels in the concentratedness and strength of the whole system; the Greek excels in the beauty of the separate groups of myths. The one is a religion of strength, the other of beauty. ”

“ Beholding in external nature and in his mythology the struggle of conflicting forces, he naturally looked on life as a field for warfare. The ice-bound fjords and desolate fells, the mournful wail of the waving pine-branches, the stern strife of frost and fire, the annual death of the short-lived summer, made the Norseman sombre, if not gloomy, in his thoughts, and inured him to the rugged independence of the country. ”

“ Existence has become articulate, melodious by him; he first has made Life alive!—We may call this Odin, the origin of Norse Mythology: Odin, or whatever name the First Norse Thinker bore while he was a man among men. His view of the Universe once promulgated, a like view starts into being in all minds; grows, keeps ever growing, while it continues credible there. In all minds it lay written, but invisibly, as in sympathetic ink; at his word it starts into visibility in all. ”

“ The old mythological stories of the Norsemen abound in poetry of the truest and most touching character. These stories tell us in sublime and wonderful speech of the workings of external nature, and may make us cheerful or sad, happy or mournful, gay or grave, just as we night feel, if from the pinnacle of Gausta Fjeld we were to watch the passing glories of morning and evening tide. There is nothing in these stories that can tend to make us less upright and simple, while they contain many thoughts and suggestions that we may be the better and happier for knowing. ”

“ While the Greek mythology foreshadowed all the petty states of Greece, as well as those of South Europe and South America, the Norse mythology foreshadowed the political and social destinies of united Scandinavia, united Great Britain, united Germany, and the United States of North America. When the Greeks unite, they fall. We Northerners live only to be united.
As we would be led to suppose, from a study of the physical and climatical peculiarities of Greece and Norseland, we find that the Greek mythology forms an epic poem, and that the Norse is a tragedy. ”

“ Thor, after many adventures, clapping the pot on his head, like a huge hat, and walking off with it—quite lost in it, the ear of the pot reaching down to his heels! A kind of vacant hugeness, large, awkward gianthood, characterizes that Norse system; enormous force, as yet altogether untutored, stalking helpless, with large, uncertain strides. Consider only their primary mythus of the Creation. The gods having got the giant Ymer slain—a giant made by warm winds and much confused work out of the conflict of Frost and Fire—determined on constructing a world with him. ”

“ The influence that the outward features of a country exercise upon the thoughts and feelings of men, especially during the vigorous, imaginative, poetic and prophetic childhood of a nation, can hardly be overestimated. Necessarily, therefore, do we find this influence affecting and modifying a nation’s mythology, which is a child-like people’s thoughts and feelings, contemplating nature reflected in a system of religion. Hence, it is eminently fitting, in comparing the Norse mythology with the Greek, to take a look at the home of the Norsemen. ”

“ Animals occupy a somewhat different position in Norse mythology. They are also survivals, very likely, from an earlier stage of life when animals were worshipped, but when we meet with them in the Norse myths they have become symbols of the various ideas of mankind in regard to the mind and [137] spirit, and no longer appear simply as personifications of the events of nature like Indra and the cows in Hindoo mythology.
The Norse gods appear galloping into view on their wonderful steeds across the rainbow bridge, Bifrost, from Heaven to Earth. ”

“ It is this deep longing for Balder that every year brings thousands of Norsemen to alight upon our shores and scatter themselves to their numberless settlements in these United States. Still every Norse emigrant, if he has aught in him worthy of his race, thinks he shall once more see those weird, gigantic, snow-capped mountains, that stretched their tall heads far above the clouds and seemed to look half anxiously, half angrily after him as his bark was floating across the deep sea. ”

“ Ragnarök, in the Norse mythology the twilight of the gods, when it was predicted "the Divine powers and the chaotic brute ones, after long contest and partial victory by the former, should meet at last in universal, world-embracing wrestle and duel, strength against strength, mutually extinctive, and ruin, 'twilight' sinking into darkness, shall swallow up the whole created universe, the old universe of the Norse gods" ”

“ Mark, at present, so much: what the essence of Scandinavian, and, indeed, of all paganism, is: a recognition of the forces of nature as godlike, stupendous, personal agencies—as gods and demons. Not inconceivable to us. It is the infant thought of man opening itself with awe and wonder on this ever stupendous universe. It is strange, after our beautiful Apollo statues and clear smiling mythuses, to come down upon the Norse gods brewing ale to hold their feast with Aegir, the Sea-Jötun; sending out Thor to get the caldron for them in the Jötun country ”

“ Other scholars (Snorre Sturleson, Saxo Grammaticus, Suhm, Rask, and others,) give us what is called an historical interpretation, asserting that Odin, Thor, Balder, and the other deities that figure in the Norse mythology, are veritable ancestors of the Norsemen,—men and women who have lived in the remote past; and as distance lends enchantment to the view, so the ordinary kings and priests of pre-historic times have been magnified into gods. ”

“ The king of heaven is but one, but he embraces the earth in various forms, and the earth is, in a new form, wedded to the god of thunder; nay, the vans, or divinities of the sea, arise and fill the land with blessings in various ways. The manner in which the gods are combined and interlinked with each other in one grand system is a feature peculiar to the Norse mythology. There is not, as in the Greek, a series of separate groups and separate dwellings, but the gods come in frequent contact with each other. ”

“ If our poets would but study Norse mythology, they would find in it ample material for the most sublime poetry. The Norse mythology is itself a finished poem, and has been most beautifully presented in the Elder Edda, but it furnishes at the same time a variety of themes that can be combined and elaborated into new poems with all the advantages of modern art, modern civilization and enlightenment. ”

“ From a variety of circumstances, but two before all the rest—the one their settlement in Iceland, which preserved their language and its literary treasures incorrupt; the other their late conversion to Christianity—their cosmogony and mythology stands before us in full flower, and we have not, as elsewhere, to pick up and piece together the wretched fragments of a faith, the articles of which its own priests had forgotten to commit to writing, and which those of another creed had dashed to pieces and destroyed, wherever their zealous hands could reach. ”

“ The Norse mythology shows that our ancestors had a deeply-rooted belief in the immortality of the soul. They believed in a state of retribution beyond the grave. The dissolution of the body was typified by Balder’s death, and like the latter it was result of Loke’s malignity, just as the devil brought death upon Adam and Eve, and through them upon all mankind. ”

“ But, besides these gods, there were heroes of the race whose fame and glory were in every man's memory, and whose mighty deeds were in every minstrel's mouth: Helgi, Sigmund, Sinfjötli, Sigurd, Signy, Brynhildr, Gudrun; champions and shield-maidens, henchmen and corsechoosers, now dead and gone, who sat round Odin's board in Valhalla; women whose beauty, woes, and sufferings were beyond those of all women; men whose prowess had never found an equal. ”

“ Such were the gods, and such the heroes of the Norseman; who, like his own gods, went smiling to death under the weight of an inevitable destiny. But that fate never fell on their gods. Before this subjective mythological dream of the Norsemen could be fulfilled, the religious mist in which they walked was scattered by the sunbeams of Christianity. A new state and condition of society arose, and the creed which had satisfied a race of heathen warriors, who externally were at war with all the world, became in time an object of horror and aversion to the converted Christian. ”

“ All nature seeks light. Does not the eye of the child seek the light of the morning, and does not the child weep when light vanishes, when night sets in? Does not this myth of Balder repeat itself in the old man, who like Gœthe, when death darkened his eyes, cried out: mehr licht (more light) ? Does not the eagle from the loftiest pinnacle of the mountain seek light? The lark soars on his lofty pinions and greets in warbling notes the king of day welcome back into his kingdom. ”

“ In Heroes and Hero Worship, Thomas Carlyle makes the following striking comparison between Norse and Greek mythology: To me, he says, there is in the 55Norse system something very genuine, very great and manlike. A broad simplicity, rusticity, so very different from the light gracefulness of the old Greek paganism, distinguishes this Norse system. It is thought, the genuine thought of deep, rude, earnest minds, fairly opened to the things about them, a face-to-face and heart-to-heart inspection of things—the first characteristic of all good thought in all times. ”

“ The common people seem to connect with them a deep feeling of melancholy, as if bewailing a half-quenched hope of salvation. Their sweet singing may occasionally be heard on summer nights out of their hills, when one stands still and listens, or, as it is expressed in the ballads, lays his ear to the elf-hill; but no one must be so cruel as by the slightest word to destroy their hopes of salvation, for then the spritely music will be turned into weeping and lamentation. The Norsemen usually call the elves hulder or huldrefolk, and their music huldreslaat. ”

“ But in the glory of morning dawn, when the sun rises again from Jotunheim, Mimer drinks from his golden horn the clear mead which flows over Odin’s pawn. Heaven and this lower world mutually impart their wisdom to each other.
The norns watch over man through life. They spin his thread of fate at his birth and mark out with it the limits of his sphere of action in life. Their decrees are inviolable destiny, their dispensations inevitable necessity. The gods themselves must bow before the laws of the norns; they are limited by time; they are born and must die. ”

“ It is sincerely hoped that by this our effort we may, at least for the present, fill a gap in English literature, and accomplish something in awakening among students some interest in Norse mythology, history, literature and institutions. Let it be remembered, that Carlyle, and many others of our best scholars, claim that it is from the Norsemen we have derived our vital energy, our freedom of thought, and, in a measure that we do not yet suspect, our strength of speech.
We are conscious that our work contains many imperfections, and that others might have performed the task better ”

“ You will find that simple and martial religion which gave the Norsemen that restless unconquerable spirit, apt to take fire at the very mention of subjection and constraint; that religion which forged the instruments that broke the fetters manufactured by the Roman emperors, destroyed tyrants and slaves, and taught men that nature having made all free and equal, no other reason but their mutual happiness could be assigned for making them dependent. ”

“ THE NORSE MYTH As the Norse peoples, in their land which for so large a part of the year was ice-bound, dreaded the long, hard winter, and looked forward to the blessings brought by the summer, they imagined that the evil forces in the world worked through cold and darkness, the good forces through warmth and light. Thus they feared and hated the "frost giants," while they loved and reverenced the gods, whom they pictured as living in a world of brightness and warmth.
According to the Norse religion, or mythology, the world began in a contest between heat and cold. At first there was no earth ”