Sága
One of these aspects, or handmaidens, is Sága, who in the Younger Edda is listed second after Frigg herself. Sága lives in Sokkvabek (Sunken Hall), “a very big place.” In Grimnismál 7 we are told,
Sokkvabekk the fourth is called,
where waters cool roll round about;
there Odin and Sága drink every day,
glad from golden cups.
I suspect that while Odin and Sága are drinking together, they are trading stories. According to the Icelandic-English Dictionary, the name Sága is
akin to segja (to say) and saga, which is a story, tale, legend, history. The very word owes its origin to the fact that the first historical writings were founded on tradition only; the written record was a “saga” or legend committed to writing; the story thus written was not even new, but had already taken shape and had been told to many generations under the same name. (Cleasby and Vigfusson 1874)
One can picture them matching beers and competing to see who can outlast the other in capacity both for booze and for stories. We are familiar with Odin's role as a patron of poetry, but his friendship with Sága gives him a connection to prose narrative as well.
Freyja
Odin's relations with his wife are well documented. Except for the “endless battle” story in the Flateyjarbók, his relationship with Freyja can only be inferred, but the idea that an involvement existed is accepted by many Heathens today. For evidence, we look at Völuspá and Lokasenna in the Elder Edda and Snorri's account of the early history of the Æsir in Ynglingasaga.
In stanza 21 of Völuspá, the seeress who is recounting the ancient tales for Odin tells of the “first war of the world.” Oddly enough, it begins not with a challenge by men but with the arrival of a mysterious female called Gullveig (“Gold drunk” or “Gold power”), who walks into the Hall of Hár. The response is not hospitable:
Gullveig with spears they stabbed
And in the hall of Hár burned her.
Thrice she was burned, thrice reborn,
Often, over, and yet she lives.
The following stanza suggests why:
Heidh she is called when she comes to houses,
Völva and spae-woman. Gand she knew,
Seið she understood, messed with minds by Seið,
Ever was she dear to ill-working women.
In other words, she was a witch, wielding a kind of magic the Æsir did not understand. Gullveig and Heidh may be seen as separate figures, but Lindow (2001, 155) and a number of other scholars conclude that at least in this passage they are names or titles of Freyja. After she leaves, the gods meet to discuss whether they should pay tribute, and decide to fight the first war in the world. Odin casts his spear over the enemy, but the Vanir are clearly winning.
For what happens next we must turn to Ynglingasaga 4, where we learn that after some inconclusive fighting, they held negotiations in which they exchanged hostages to guarantee the peace. The hostages sent by the Vanir were Njordh and Frey. With them came Frey's sister Freyja. “She was a priestess and she first taught the Asaland people seidh, which was in use with the Vanir.” Since a page or two later we are told that Odin practiced seidh, he must have learned it from Freyja.
That this relationship also included sex can be concluded from Loki's assertion at Aegir's famous party that Freyja has slept with every male in the room. This may or may not have been a problem. As her father Njordh points out in her defense, “It is no crime that a woman have both husband and lover” (Lokasenna 33).
In the Sörla Tháttr, an episode included in the Flateyjarbók, which was written down in the 14th century, Freyja is a mortal woman, the concubine of “King Odin.” To win the wonderful necklace Brisingamen, she spends a night with each of the dwarves who forged it. Following Odin's orders, Loki steals it. To win it back, Freyja must cause two kings and their men to engage in endless battle. The poem Húsdrápa offers another version in which Heimdall and Loki fight in the form of seals, and Heimdall recovers the necklace.
This is not the only association of Freyja with battle. In the survey of the homes of the gods with which Odin begins his download of the lore in Grimnismál 14, we learn that
Fólkvangr (the field full of folk) is the ninth, where Freyja decides
Who shall sit where in the hall.
Half of the slain she chooses each day,
And half Odin has.
Today, most people seem to think that Freyja chooses first. In the words of Lorrie Wood's Freyja song,
Weeping gold, you walk the world now,
Falcon-winged, ply windy ways.
Ygg's men fight, but none can say how
Freyja's first-picked spend their days.
But what does she want them for? Again, we can only speculate. The lore does not say what happens to the goddesses after Ragnarök. Perhaps the warriors who drink in Sessrumnir (Freyja's “many-seated” hall) will guard her as she helps to rebuild the world.
The final question about Freyja's relationship with Odin has to do with her mysterious husband, Ódh. The only thing we know about their marriage is that he gave her two daughters and then disappeared. Eventually she went after him. In Gylfaginning 35, Snorri explains that she (like Odin) has so many bynames because she “adopted many names when she was travelling among strange peoples looking for Ódh.”
The fact that the name of Freyja's husband is the first syllable of Odin's name does make one wonder. As Patty Lafayllve puts it in her book about Freyja:
Important in this case are two concepts, the first a question: are Od and Odin one and the same? There is no real answer to this, but as shall be seen, Odin and Freyja have quite a lot in common . . . it is interesting to consider that Freyja traveled many worlds seeking her spiritual arousal (or, to stretch the metaphor, an ecstatic state of inspiration). This author often wonders if all these realms were in the mundane world. (Lafayllve 2006, 50)
Given the kind of magic Freyja was teaching him, the relationship between her and Odin must have transcended physical sexuality. If Frigg provides an enduring stability, I think that Freyja is the one who challenges Odin and pushes him beyond his boundaries, and perhaps he does the same for her. When we are doing trance work with both Freyja and Odin, the priestess of Freyja has been known to take charge and calm the mediums carrying Odin when they get too boisterous—in one case, threatening to “take back every bit of magic I taught you” if the god did not return the medium to normal consciousness once more.
In modern Heathenry, Freyja seems to be second only to Odin as a recruiter. I know of at least as many people who have dedicated themselves to her as to him. Some of those who follow her are hostile to Odin, but sometimes the god and the goddess work together, as in the case of a dream a male friend on the Troth members' list, who is just getting into Heathenry, sent to me.
So, not very long ago I was into Germanic Mythology as an interest, not a belief. One night I had this dream. I was running through a village, which looked like it could be in England, New England, or Europe. As I was running I looked down, and my deceased dogs materialized beside me. They led me inside a house which had a rich golden light and beautiful hardwood floors. The walls were a glimmering ivory.
I felt the warm presence of family and friends, but I didn't get a chance to look at anyone, because I was distracted by my pet cat (who I had to put down earlier that year); he kept rubbing on me and getting underfoot. He also kept climbing into a pine tree which was indoors and set up like a Yule tree or a Christmas tree, while a woman was trying to tie ribbons on its branches.
She giggled as he was climbing inside the tree. Her hair was braided which led to a bun on the back of her head. Her hair was a golden-reddish yellow color that emitted the same color light. Her face looked like the face of every beautiful woman I've ever seen. She seemed very sweet and loving, but also had this intense sexual energy about her; the kind in which a guy would have to tell himself to not be too enamored by her, because she'd unintentionally break his hea
rt. Better to know her as just a friend and nothing more. Not even a lover in the most casual sense.
I woke up from that dream, and I asked myself who that woman was, and something told me it was Freya. It made sense, of course that my cat would go to her, as her sleigh is pulled by cats. Then I realized that she was putting ribbons on a Yule tree. The following day, just for fun I did a Google image search of “Yule,” and I came across an image: It was a picture of a cat curled up in front of a roaring fire with the words “May your Yule and Winter Solstice be warm and bright,” signed, “Odin.”
I'm aware of the intended humor in the image. But the cat in this picture could've very well been mine, and the picture looks like it could've been a scene from my dream. I know a person made this image, and it wasn't Odin himself. And I think Odin means it in an ironic sort of way, to confuse me, as I've always thought of him as a tough love kind of guy. Maybe he has that type of humor in which you don't know if he's being serious or pulling your leg.
I think the way signs work is that they are things which are to be found by someone in a kind of sequence, after or before an event; in my case the dream. For me it's significant, because I've always felt closer to my pets than to most of my family. I've always been the oddball. I know, I know, my mysterious heathen dream is about my cat. Yes, I'm very aware how crazy this makes me sound. I know it's not an awesome dream in which Odin handed me a rune, or a dream about Thor slaying a giant with Mjolnir. I've never been the guy who puts on a macho front, I don't try to be anyone I'm not. To tell you the truth, I really miss that little guy and my other animal family, and I am very grateful that they have taken refuge with Freya.
Gunnlödh
Odin's affairs with goddesses seem to have been conducted on equal terms. Some of his relations with other females are problematic, although in at least one case—his attempt to seduce the daughter of Billing, a lady who “had sport of me with all manner of mockery, and I had not my way with her”—he failed (Hávamál 102). Odin is also acquainted with giantesses. When he trades insults with Thor in Harbardsliodh 18, he tells of his visit to the island Algroen (All-green), where, unlike Thor, he has been seducing giantesses instead of slaying them. He alone is able to win their lust and their love.
It is tempting to cherry-pick the lore and skip those episodes that show Odin's darker side. We will be considering his reputation as a seducer in more detail when I discuss Odin as Bölverk in chapter 8. Here, however, I want to examine the motivation behind his visit to Gunnlödh and see if it can be, if not excused, at least viewed in a more positive light. The poem that precedes this chapter is my attempt to understand how Odin came to lie with her and what each of them got out of the exchange.
Among the deeds of Odin, three are especially famed because they result in gifts to humankind. One of them, as we have already seen, was acquiring the runes. In chapter 10, I tell you the story of how Odin gave his eye to gain wisdom. The third achievement is the winning of the mead of poetry. Part of the tale is told rather allusively in Hávamál 104–110. In parts 57–8 of Skaldskaparmál, we find the full story.
The mead of poetry is the product of a complicated series of events that occur during the conclusion of the war between the Æsir and the Vanir. It eventually comes into the possession of the giant Suttung, who stores it in three cauldrons, called Odhroerir, Bodn, and Son (in Norse mythology, everything has a name), hidden in a cave inside a mountain and guarded by his daughter Gunnlödh. Odin enters the mountain in the form of a serpent, using the name Bölverk.
Bölverk went to where Gunnlödh was and slept with her for three nights, and she granted him three drinks of the mead. In the first he drank everything in Odhroerir, in the second everything in Bodn, in the third everything in Son, and so he had all the mead. Then he changed himself into an eagle and flew off as quickly as he could, but when Suttung saw the eagle flying, he changed himself into an eagle and flew after him. But when the Æsir saw where Odin was flying, they put their barrel out front, and when Odin came over Asgard, he spat up the mead into the barrel. But Suttung was so close to catching him that he sent some mead out the back, and this was not saved. Everyone who wished had some of that, and it is called the bad poets' share. But Odin gave the mead to the Æsir and to those humans who could compose verse. (Lindow 2001, 225)
Two points occur to me when I read this tale. The first is that Gunnlödh is a giantess. The fact that Thor fights more female than male giants would suggest that they are well able to defend themselves, so what happened in that cave was certainly not a rape, though it might be a seduction. In Hávamál 106, Odin admits that he dealt her an evil reward for her good will and left her with a heavy heart, and later (110), that he broke a promise made on an oath-ring. “To Gunnlödh he brought sorrow.” Clearly what happened between them was something more than simple physical pleasure. The tone suggests that he felt love for her, as well, and regretted having to leave her.
Which brings us to a second point. For Odin, pain is not a deterrent. Again and again we see him risking and enduring it to achieve some greater goal. In this case, it was bringing to the world the gift of poetry, a fundamental part of Norse culture, and an art that has the power to teach the deepest truths. If leaving Gunnlödh hurt him as well as her, it was the price of doing business. Those who work with Odin today recognize that he cannot always spare them, but our experience is that he will share their pain.
Women of Wisdom
Freyja is not the only woman from whom Odin learns magic. In chapter 3, there was the passage from Lokasenna in which Loki accuses Odin of not only working with women but also of being like a woman as he worked seidh on Samsey Isle. Viewed from the deck of a boat, Samsø (off the east coast of Jutland) is an unimpressive gray blur on the horizon, but it had quite a reputation in Viking times as the burial place of Angantyr and his brother berserkers, the setting for the wonderful scene in Hervararsaga in which Hervor wakes her father from sleep in his grave-mound and demands his magic sword.
When Odin came there, he learned ecstatic practices, possibly trance induced by drumming and dancing, “like the völur” (plural of völva). One imagines a sisterhood of witches living on the isle. When Odin had learned their magic, he fared forth among men in the form of a vitki, a term that could mean a man of wisdom or a sorcerer, either a Gandalf or a Saruman. The stanza conjures images of an old earth magic, women's magic that was even less acceptable for a male than Odin's own galdor.
So Loki calls Odin “args adal,” having the quality of being effeminate, which is rather a laugh coming from the mother of Sleipnir, as Frigg implies in the next stanza when she tells the two of them to stop talking about their past. Argr, or ergi, is a complicated concept that I have tried to disambiguate in an article called “Sex, Status, and Seidh: Homosexuality in Germanic Religion” (1997). The term ergi was used as an insult, implying that one takes the receptive role in sex. Snorri's statement that formerly both men and women learned seidh but that by his time it was considered so ergi that it was only taught to priestesses (Ynglingasaga 7), indicates a decrease in status for women and any quality associated with them, possibly stimulated by the growing influence of Continental European Christian culture.
One of Odin's bynames that has puzzled students is “Jalk,” translated as “gelding,” which is surely one of the last terms one would expect to apply to the god. I am not alone in suspecting that this is the name he might have used on Samsey Isle.
Seeking the Seeress
If the völur of Samsey Isle sound like hedge witches, the Völva who speaks the prophecies of Völuspá seems to be considerably higher in status and nobler in kind. From the authority with which she demands whether Valfather wants her to recount the tales of ancient times to the final prophecy of Ragnarök, she lays it out in soaring poetry. She knows where Odin's eye is hid. She knows that Baldr will die and who will avenge him and the dreadful list of disasters that will herald the doom of the gods. And she is rewarded (Völuspá 29).
; The father of armies gave rings and necklace,
(from her he) got spae spells and spae magic.
She sees widely over the worlds.
We do not know when and why Odin sought her counsel, but we do have some background for the other poem in which he seeks out a seeress. In Baldrs Draumar (the Dreams of Baldr), the gods meet to discuss why Odin's son is having bad dreams. When no one can explain them, Odin (traveling under the name of Vegtam) saddles Sleipnir and rides to the grave-mound of the Völva who is buried outside the eastern gate of Hel. As we know from Hávamál, he has spells that can compel the dead. He uses them to summon the seeress, who rises from her grave, complaining loudly at being disturbed. He asks about Baldr, and she foretells the whole story, until at last she realizes to whom she is talking and with an exchange of insults sends him on his way.
The fact that Odin is told exactly what will happen by the Völva and yet does nothing to prevent it is one of the mysteries of Norse mythology. One senses not only ambivalence in not only the motivations of Baldr's parents but also the workings of a wyrd so powerful that it binds even the highest gods.
In Wagner's Ring operas, the role of the Völva, who for some reason known only to Wagner is referred to as the Vala, is filled by the earth goddess Erda, summoned by Wotan at the beginning of act 3 of Siegfried. Their conversation is unproductive, since she first asks why Wotan has not gone to Brünnhilde for counsel. When he explains that the Valkyrie has been punished for disobedience, Erda grows confused, and when he asks how Wotan can avoid the coming destruction, she goes silent. Disappointed, he sends her back to sleep, proclaiming that he will cease to fight fate and allow Siegfried, free of the gods, to deal with the Ring.
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