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Germanic Heathenism

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GERMANIC HEATHENISM

Attempts to reconstruct the great edifice of ancient Teutonic religion base themselves on two main sources of information: the Continental and the Scandinavian. English evidence stands midway between the two. With the exception of Tacitus, the Continental writers seldom do more than let fall some chance remark on religious practices, their chief concern being with other matters in Classical and post-Classical times with the wars of these "barbaric" races, and later, with their conversion to Christianity. We also possess some early laws, and the histories of those tribes fortunate enough to have inspired a medieval chronicler, but the laws date in their present shape from Christian times, and the histories are hardly more sympathetic towards heathen ideas than are the Lives of martyred saints or the edicts of Church Councils. The chief sources from Denmark, Norway and Sweden comprise a great wealth of archaeological information, their early laws, and Saxo's history of the legendary kings of Denmark, written about 1208. It is Iceland which furnishes us with almost all the literary evidence, beginning with the mythological poems of the Older Edda, which can in one sense be termed Icelandic with impunity, in the midst of the conflict as to their origin, since they only reach us from that country. With them may be classed the earlier skaldic poems from the Norwegian court. Then come the Sagas, prose histories of Icelandic families and Norwegian kings, often dealing with events which occurred before the conversion to Christianity about A.D. 1000, but not committed to writing till the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

Neither source of evidence is perfectly satisfactory. The Scandinavian Sagas, though originating among a people with an extraordinarily keen instinct for historic truth, are far from contemporary with the events they relate. The Continental references to the subject are indeed often contemporary, but they are the observations of alien eyes, and some of them are open to the further objection that the superstitions mentioned may occasionally be mere survivals of the religious legacy of Rome. Fortunately there is more agreement between these two sources than we could have dared to expect, and this common factor in both is the more valuable since, though one channel of information begins where the other leaves off, they are yet practically independent of one another. While fully admitting that there were extremely wide local divergences in the practices and belief of the various tribes, the following survey of the

main features of Germanic heathendom is yet based with some confidence on this common factor, to which a third stratum of evidence, folk-lore, contributes subsidiary testimony. It has seemed best in almost all cases to begin with the fuller, though later, Scandinavian sources, in the light of which it is sometimes possible to interpret the more meagre references of Continental writers.

A problem confronts us at the outset with regard to the position of the two chief gods, Odin and Thor, in Scandinavia. Most of the poetical sources depict Odin as the chief of the gods, as the Allfather of gods and men, while the prose writings contain frequent indications that Thor, the Thunder-god (Anglo-Saxon Thunor) stands highest of all in the popular estimation. There can be no doubt that the Sagas are right with regard to their own territory. The frequent occurrence of proper names compounded with Thor (such as Thorolf, Thorstein, etc.) testifies to his importance in Scandinavia, especially as we are told that a name compounded with that of a god was esteemed a safeguard to its bearer. At least one out of every five immigrants to Iceland in heathen times bore a name of which Thor formed part. His is certainly a very ancient cult. His whole equipment is primitive: he is never credited in Scandinavian sources with the possession of a sword, a horse or a coat of mail, but he either walks or drives in a car drawn by goats, and wields the hammer or axe. The sanctity of this symbol appears to date from very remote times: in fact the Museum at Stockholm contains a miniature hammer of amber from the later Stone Age. Another indication of the antiquity of the cult is afforded by Thor's original identity, not only with Jupiter and Zeus, but also with Keltic, Old Prussian and Slavonic thunder-gods. But like these, Thor is much more than a thunder-god. In Scandinavia he is called the Defender of the World, a title which he may have earned in his encounter with the "jötnar." This word usually denotes daemonic beings, but it seems that it may originally have applied to the early non-Aryan inhabitants of Scandinavia, whom the Teutonic settlers drove gradually northwards. We may hazard the conjecture that the Teutonic invasion, which crept forward from the Stone Age till the close of heathen times, was made as it were under the auspices of Thor. He is also the guardian of the land. In Iceland we hear of settlers consecrating their land to Thor, and naming it after him. It is interesting to note that an ancient method of allotting holdings in Sweden was known as the "hammer-partition," while among the Upper Saxons the throwing of a hammer was held to legalise possession of land. But this is probably connected with Thor's guardianship of law and order. The Older Edda represents him as dealing out justice under the great world-ash Yggdrasill. Most of the Scandinavian assemblies began on a Thursday-the day named after Thor-and there seems no doubt that it was he who was invoked under the name of "the almighty god" by those swearing oaths at the Icelandic Things. The Russian historian Nestor, of the eleventh century, records C. MED. H. VOL. II. CH. XV. (c)

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that the Scandinavians from Kiev ratified a treaty with the Byzantines by swearing by their god "Perun," the Slavonic Thor. The Frisians attributed their laws to a supernatural being with an axe. Among the Upper Saxons a hammer was the summons to the assembly. In later times in Iceland a small object called "St Olaf's axe" served this purpose. It is likely that this "axe" was originally a "Thor's hammer," for by the irony of fate, many of the attributes of his old enemy Thor attached themselves in popular belief to the sainted king Olaf, who rooted out his worship in Norway. An Icelandic settler invokes him in sea-voyages, and Adam of Bremen states that the Swedes sacrifice to him in famine and in pestilence. As regards disease, we have the further testimony of an Old Norse charm found in an Anglo-Saxon manuscript, which appears to call on Thor to drive away an ailment, and it was until recently a common Swedish practice to mix in the fodder of cattle powder ground from the edge of a "Thor's hammer" or flint axe, to avert disease. It is possible that the miniature T-shaped hammers, often of silver or gold, of which over fifty are to be seen in the Scandinavian museums, were worn to shield the wearer from disease, but the protective functions of Thor were so numerous that the symbols may have served other purposes as well. It has recently been recorded that Manx and Whitby fishermen wear the T-shaped bone from the tongue of a sheep to protect them from drowning; and slaughterers at Berlin wear the same bone suspended from their necks.' The appearance of the bearded Thor himself, hammer and all, on a baptismal font in Sweden, has been considered to prove that the hammer was used at the heathen ceremony of naming a child, and we have some ground for supposing that it figured at weddings and at funerals.

Sacrifices to Thor are constantly mentioned, and range from the daily offerings of the Goth Radagaisus in Italy at the beginning of the fifth century to a song in his honour composed in the year 1006 by one of an Icelandic crew starving off the coast of America. It seems probable that the sacrifice at the beginning of all Things was to Thor. At one place of assembly in Iceland we hear of a "stone of Thor" on which "men were broken," but human sacrifice is so rarely mentioned in Iceland that the statement is looked upon with suspicion. We must note that Tacitus fails to mention a Germanic Jupiter. It has been suggested that he represents Thor by Hercules.

After the enumeration of the manifold activities of Thor, there seems hardly room for the imposing figure of Odin, and indeed in Scandinavia, besides being the Lord of Valhöll, Odin only presides over war, poetry and magic. Yet in one point he stands nearer to the race of men than Thor, in that he is regarded as the ancestor of most of the royal families of Denmark and of England (where the form of the name is Wodan). It is perhaps hardly correct to speak of Thor and Odin 1 A. C. Haddon, Magic and Fetishism, London, 1906.

as ruling over different social spheres, for Thor numbers earls and others of high degree among his worshippers, but persons of royal blood and their followers seem to devote themselves to the worship of Odin the cult of a royal ancestor. Nomenclature affords interesting testimony to some such social division. We have seen what a large proportion of Norwegian proper names contained "Thor" as a component part, but we do not find any of these borne by a single Norwegian, Swedish, Danish or English king. Not even among the petty kings of the period preceding the unification of Norway under King Harold Fairhair do such names occur. Now we are told that it was just these petty, often landless, kings who with their followings practised war as a profession, and it was certainly in Norwegian court circles that skaldic poetry - an art attributed to Odin- took its origin. If the position of Odin was at all similar on the Continent, it would be easy to explain the prominence of this god in all Continental accounts from Tacitus onwards, for it seems probable that there also each king or prince was surrounded by a body of warriors devoted to his service, and that these took the principal part in wars.

In Iceland there is no mention of Odin-worship, though there is one instance of the "old custom" of throwing a spear over a hostile force, a rite which originally devoted the enemy to Odin. The existence of the cult in Norway is vouched for by the custom of drinking a toast consecrated to him at sacrificial feasts, but we must note that a toast to Odin is only mentioned at courts. In Sweden, however, Odin is more prominent. There is a statue of him "like Mars" by the side of Thor in the great Upsala temple, and the people are said to sacrifice to him in time of war. A legendary king sacrifices his nine sons to him for long life for himself - a gift which another story shews it to be within Odin's power to bestow, if he receives other lives in exchange. It is generally agreed that he was originally a god of the dead, before he became a god of war, and it is in the guise of a soul-stealing daemon that he seems to appear in folk-lore. For Denmark the tales of heroes under Odin's protection, and the importance of the god in Saxo's stories (where he sometimes appears himself to demand his victim), form a considerable body of evidence. Of the Frisians we are told by Alcuin that the island Walcheren was sacred to a god whom later accounts identify with Mercury. Mercury is the name under which Odin appears in Tacitus and all Continental writers, and shews that the god must there have borne much the same character as is ascribed to him in Scandinavian sources, where he is described as shifty and full of guile, skilled in magic and runes, and the inventor of poetry. To judge from the evidence of place-names, his cult extended as far south as Salzburg. It is also noteworthy that the Scandinavian account of his equipment, armed only with a javelin, corresponds to that of the Germans in the time of Tacitus.

An ancient form of sacrifice to Odin in Scandinavia is the gruesome

"cutting of the blood-eagle" or removal of the lungs of the victim, of which we hear once or twice, but there seems ground for believing that the usual ritual frequently combined both hanging and stabbing. In fact all those who fell in battle were regarded as sacrifices to Odin. Tacitus tells us that on the eve of the battle between the Chatti and Hermunduri each side dedicated their opponent's army to Mars and to Mercury. By this vow both horses and men, in short everything on the side of the conquered, was given up to destruction. After their victory over the Romans at Arausio (B.c. 105) the Cimbrians hung all their captives and destroyed their spoil. The complete destruction of the legions of Varus, and the total massacre of Britons after an Anglo-Saxon victory, have been suggested as other instances of the same wholesale sacrifice. In some places in Denmark immense masses of heaped up spoil, mostly intentionally damaged, from the fourth century A.D., have been found. These must have been offered as a sacrifice after victory, and have lain undisturbed on the battle-ground owing to a stringent tabu. A dedication of whole armies to Odin is mentioned in later Scandinavian Sagas, where it seems to be connected with the idea that the god needs more warriors in Valhöll.

While Odin and Thor, however inimical to each other they may be, are both regarded as Æsir (gods) in the mythology of the north — in fact Thor is made Odin's son we are told that Frey and his father Njörd were originally hostages from the "Vanir," a rival race. Certainly their functions in historical times are very different from those of Thor and Odin. Frey, whose name is derived from a word meaning "lord," is only known in Scandinavia. He is a god of fertility, with the usual attributes of such a deity. He is especially honoured by the Swedes, and Adam of Bremen tells us that his statue stood by the side of Thor in the temple of Upsala, that sacrifices are made to him at weddings, and that he grants men peace and pleasure. Tacitus' account of the peaceful, wealth-loving "Suiones " (Swedes) closely corresponds to what we should expect of a nation whose chief god was Frey, and places beyond question the old-established nature of a cult of this kind. In Norway we hear of toasts drunk to Frey and his father Njörd "for prosperity and peace," and a sacrificial feast at the beginning of winter, to secure the same benefits, is associated with Frey in Iceland, where he and Njörd are invoked in legal oaths. A legendary saga relates that Frey, in the company of a priestess who was regarded as his wife, was in the habit of peregrinating the country round Upsala in the autumn, for the purpose of causing plenty. This is the clue which leads us to detect traces of an allied cult on the Continent. The goddess Nerthus, who is worshipped according to Tacitus by seven tribes, apparently in Zeeland (possibly at Naerum, older Niartharum), journeys round her island at certain seasons in a covered vehicle. During this time peace prevails, and her presence is celebrated by festivities. The ritual of lustration described