Odin was a mighty warrior who had wandered far and won for himself many kingdoms; he was so victorious that he won every battle, and through that it came about that his men believed he must needs be winner in every fight. It was his wont when he sent his men to battle or on any other journey to lay his hands on their heads and give them his blessing; they then believed that all would go well with them. And so it was with his men: when they were hard beset on sea or land, they called on his name and always thought they got help from it; in him had they all their trust.
In the film version of Tolkien's Return of the King, at the beginning of the battle of the Pelenor Fields, King Theoden rides along the line of Rohirrim riders, tapping their spears with his sword and thereby transferring his luck to them in just this way.
As we can see from this account by John T. Mainer, Odin continues to help warriors today.
My first encounter with Odin was deeply moving, and embarrassing; the former because of the changes it made in me, the latter because I was ignorant for a long time about who had taken a hand. In 1988, I was two-thirds of the way through basic training in the Canadian Armed Forces. Those who were going to drop, had dropped, and we were culled from a company down to an over-strength platoon. Those who were left were going to go all the way, they were stripped down to the core of who they were, had been tested to their limits and there was no give in any of them. I knew them all as worthy, and I wanted to open to them, but I could not. The failing was my own, which actually made it harder to accept. I had training in Go-Ju Ryu karate and Tai-Chi so I was attempting to use eastern meditation techniques to deal with my growing anger issues and problems opening up, but without much success.
I was sitting on a large boulder out back of C Barracks, on the hill above the Regimental HQ, when I slipped from meditation into vision. You have to understand, I had no knowledge of the centre boss shields used by our ancestors, and when I thought of shields, my thought was either Roman tower shields, Greek or Celtic arm strapped heavy round shields, so what awaited in my vision didn't make much sense at the time. I saw a shield wall, the men and women in it were my platoon, and they were fighting hard against a foe that outnumbered them greatly. Their wall was strong, and they were splendid warriors, but they were getting cut down because at the centre of the line was an empty file; my place. I knew the place was mine, and without my shield and spear they were falling. I could not advance and take my place, nor could I bear to watch them get cut down because of me. In my shame I turned to find a man, white haired and wild bearded. He had a dark blue hat pulled low over his face, and a dark blue (not Navy blue, just darker than royal blue) battered cloak. One blue eye blazed with utter contempt and fury at me and I literally stepped back from the force of it.
He asked me why I tarried here when my comrades were dying, did I not want to go to them and take my place? I lost it, and screamed at him that I CAN'T. He asked again if I wanted to, and this time I just nodded. Then he said simply, “Then join them” and without a word of warning, or me ever being aware that he held one at all, suddenly he plunged a spear gripped in his right hand through my chest. The head was broad, flaring near the base and you could see the hammer marks on it. It drove through my chest, splitting my breastbone from just below the nipple line, and blasting out my back.
I came out of the vision like a shot, fists raised, heart hammering painfully in my chest, every single muscle in my body hard and tensed and my adrenaline in full fight/flight mode. From that day forth, the barrier that had always prevented me from connecting was gone, and I bonded to my basic training group and the others of the Regiment as I had bonded to no one before in my life save blood kin.
The changes in how I interacted with everyone after that point made it essentially a new life, and I still had no clue who had done this. I chanced to be without a book on my way to campus for school, when I stopped at a used bookstore to buy something to read. I saw a picture of the one eyed bastard who stabbed me, and the title of the book was Brisingamen. Written by Diana L. Paxson, ironically before she was heathen, the book told of Odin and the gods in modern context and all it took was the name before the penny dropped. It had been Odin who had found and fixed me.
Being a university student and soldier, I went to the library, found the Hávamál, and read for the first time a moral code that spoke to my soul. In the words of the wanderer, in the teachings of the Feeder of Ravens, I found the teachings I had been searching for that could bring all the warring parts of me, soldier, scholar, poet, into one cohesive whole.
Note that John had this experience a year after my own encounter with the god and more than twenty years before we actually met. Odin seems to have started recruiting in earnest about then.
Thanking “Battle Glad” is easy when you win, but there is a deeper level of commitment in which you continue to stand fast even when it becomes clear that Victory father is not going to give you the victory. A case in point is the Battle of Maldon, in which an Anglo-Saxon earl makes the mistake of letting the Viking raiders cross to solid ground so they can have a fair fight. He gets killed, leaving his followers to decide whether to abandon his body or keep faith with their lord and each other by defending it. The words of the old retainer Byrthwold ring out with the clash of steel (Griffiths 1993, 312–13).
Hige sceal pe heardra, heorte pe cenre
mod sceal the mare pe ure mægen lytlað
Mind shall be harder, heart be keener,
Courage shall be more as our might lessens.
This is a colder kind of courage, based not on the assurance of victory but on honor, on keeping troth with your fellows, your god, and your highest self, the kind of bravery that will be needed at Ragnarök.
The other part of Odin's magic turns this around. In Ynglingasaga 6, Snorri tells us, “He could make his foes blind or deaf or terrified and their weapons were as nothing more than sticks.” We know from the fourth spell in Hávamál that Odin can free himself (and his followers) from physical fetters. The names Haptagudh and Herblindi tell us that psychically, as well as physically, he can apply them to others. The variety of weird-looking gear warriors have added to their armor over the centuries suggests that psychological warfare is ancient. If hearts beat faster when Victory Father incites a battle, the blood grows cold when he takes that power away. It may be more glorious to fight a worthy foe, but it is easier to defeat an enemy who cannot fight back. There is no more dangerous enemy than the one that strikes from within.
Odin's other main role in warfare is to advise. This is seen most clearly in Saxo's story of the death of King Harold War-Tooth (Grammaticus 1905, Gesta Danorum 1, 8). Odin has previously taught Harold the secret of the Svinfylking (Swine array) battle formation, which is a wedge in which each successive row of men is doubled. It is known from many cultures and was a favorite formation of the German tribes who fought the Romans. When Odin, taking the role of Harold's charioteer at the Battle of Brávellir, tells him that his opponent, Hring, has drawn up his men in the wedge formation, Harold realizes that his enemy could only have learned it from Odin and that the god has therefore abandoned him.
Battling with the Bears, Wandering with Wolves
But Odin has yet another weapon. Snorri also tells us that “his own men went about without armor and were mad like hounds or wolves, and bit their shields and were strong as bears or bulls; they slew men, but neither fire nor steel would deal with them. This was called a berserk's-gang” (Ynglingasaga 6).
The figure of the berserker has fascinated fighters and scholars alike, inspiring a variety of speculations as to the condition's cause ranging from consumption of Amanita muscaria (fly agaric) or alcohol to various mental or physical conditions. Jesse Byock (1993) proposed that it might have in some cases been a symptom of Paget's disease, a condition involving uncontrolled skull growth. At the end of Egilssaga, we're told that a hundred and fifty years after his death, Egil's body was exhumed and his skull found to be abnormally thick and hard.
The berserk fit is a state of altered consciousness in which the fighter is consumed by a fighting madness in which not only can he accomplish feats that are beyond his usual strength but he is also impervious to pain. The Roman poet Lucan, writing about the wars in the Alps during the early second century BCE, refers to what he called the furor Teutonicus to describe the fighting style of the German Teutones. In Viking tradition, berserkers identified with bears—wearing an actual or magical bear sark (skin)—or were ulfhedinn, wearers of the wolf jacket.
Old Norse literature is rich in stories of shapeshifting and words derived from the hamR root, including hamfarir (shape journey), hamrammr (shape strong), hamask (to fall into a state of animal fury), hambleyna (leaper out of his skin), and hamslauss (out of his shape). In the sagas, shape changing generally is used for fighting, although it may also be used for information gathering. As we saw in chapter 3, Odin was said to have the power to take the form of a bird or beast while in trance and in that shape to journey in the inner and outer worlds (Ynglingasaga 7).
We find another such example in Hrolfkrakisaga, in which Bodhvar Biarki fights for his king in the form of a great red bear, while his body remains in his house, apparently asleep. When his friend comes to find out why he is not at the battle, he “wakes up,” and the bear disappears. This is also presumably what is going on when Dufthak and Storolf fight in the shapes of a bull and a bear (clearly their antipathy predates the struggles of the stock exchange) in the Landnamabók.
A description of a berserker can be found in chapter 7 of Saxo Grammaticus's (1905) history of the Danes.
When Hardbeen heard this, a demoniacal frenzy suddenly took him; he furiously bit and devoured the edges of his shield; he kept gulping down fiery coals; he snatched live embers in his mouth and let them pass down into his entrails; he rushed through the perils of crackling fires; and at last, when he had raved through every sort of madness, he turned his sword with raging hand against the hearts of six of his champions. It is doubtful whether this madness came from thirst for battle or natural ferocity. Then with the remaining band of his champions he attacked Halfdan, who crushed him with a hammer of wondrous size, so that he lost both victory and life; paying the penalty both to Halfdan, whom he had challenged, and to the kings whose offspring he had violently ravished.
Even when they went to battle in groups, the bear-sarks fought as single champions. The wolf-jackets, following the habits of their totem, may have worked together in a more organized fashion. A 7th century bronze helmet plaque shows a one-eyed warrior dancing with a man in a wolf skin and may represent a ritual. King Harold Fairhair had a group of ulfhedinn, and in a praise poem for the king by Thórbiörn Hornklofi, they are described as fighting with shield and spear in a closed group. In Hrolf Kraki's saga, the kings of Sweden and Denmark both have bands of a dozen berserkers in their retinues. Kris Kershaw (2000, 58) suggests that fighting a berserk was part of a ritual in which a youth proved his manhood. He believes that the Indo-European forerunner of Odin may have been primarily associated with wolves and discusses a variety of wolf cults from Anatolia, Greece, Ireland, the Slavic lands, and India. In Norse tradition, the best known “wolf warriors” are Sigmund and his son Sinfjotli.
Now one day they went again to the forest in order to find themselves riches, and came to a cabin, and in the cabin there were two men asleep, wearing heavy gold rings. An evil fate had overtaken them, for there were wolf skins (ulfahamr) hanging above them in the cabin. They could shed the skins once every ten days. They were princes. Sigmund and Sinfjotli got into the skins, and could not get out of them again—the strange power was there, just as before, and they even howled like wolves, both understanding what was being said. (Volsungasaga 8)
In The One-Eyed God, Chris Kershaw explores an early Germanic tradition of warrior training called the mannerbunde, based on accounts of warrior training in various German tribes in Tacitus's Germania. The mannerbunde was
a cultic warrior brotherhood of young males, bound by oath to a god and to each other and in ritual union with their ancestors, in training to be the men, or the leading men, of their society. The word is used of age-set systems in which the military aspect of the youths' formation is particularly important. It is not an ideal term: the youths are not men yet; they are in process of becoming men. (Kershaw, 2000, xi)
He goes on to compare the customs described by Tacitus with ethnographic studies of warrior societies from the Vedas and ancient Greece to the Masai, involving masks; animal identities such as the dog, wolf, horse, and bear; and a cult in which, through the young men, the ancestors live again. Typically, for a good part of the period, the boy lived in the forest like the beasts of the forest; he became a hardy and crafty hunter and fighter. When a tribe went to war, these youths were used as shock troops and guerrillas, painted black, often masked, and revved up by ritual to become an army of the dead and thus immortal.
Anyone who has raised boys can appreciate the benefits of a system that gets them out of town during the years in which their growing strength and raging hormones are most likely to get them into trouble. Going into the army can serve the same purpose today. In the system described by Tacitus, once the young warriors had settled down, they were able to go home and become responsible members of society. In the Chatti tribe, certain warriors continued in this status instead of returning to the tribe and served as trainers of boys lifelong.
The altered state of consciousness that is Odin's gift to his warriors does not always involve chewing on one's shield, as we see in John T. Mainer's account of his first battle.
My first firefight was my worst. We were deployed as communications support for a multi-national peace-keeping force. Our security element was not drawn from NATO countries, and our confidence in them was low. As a result, we did one shift on communications, one on guard, and one off. I was off shift, sleeping, deeply fatigued from running two on/one off except when our moves happened in the off shift. Then, instead of sleep, you did transport and digging new generator pits and fighting positions.
The call to stand-to took me out of a deep sleep. I was dragged from my position, run to a slit trench and dropped there alone by an NCO who went to drag another warm body to the next position. I had no idea what the situation was. I was facing our supposed rear, with no idea what my safe arc of fire was, no communication, and only the sound of gunfire getting closer as a guide. It was night. Each of us might as well have been on the moon, we were so isolated. The traditional strengths of a soldier were stripped from me as I had no idea what was going on, no idea what, besides defending our location, my tasking was, where friendlies or enemies were, or what changes had been made to our ROE now that we were under direct attack. We had no night vision gear in those days. I was alone in a slit trench, a firefight happening in the tree line. No idea what to do at all. Fear paralyzed me and I had bile in my throat. I did not pray for safety, or even victory. I asked Odin, Sigfather, Victory Father, to understand what was happening.
You do not seek out the combat arms of the Service if you do not wish to test yourself in combat. I had sought this test, had thrown myself into the training and preparation for this moment. I had all the tools, but no idea how to use them, or which to bring to bear. All of this was within me when Odin came upon me to fill in the blanks, to fill me with the ice-rage, the battle coldness. I felt it come upon me and the night, although still broken by flashes of fire and sound, seemed to grow almost still. I felt a joy rise up in me and I felt my thoughts guided to consider a number of points one by one.
I focused on sound first. I noted the familiar timbre of our own weapons, noted the two groups fighting to our rear, the right-most group sounded like the familiar sounds of our own munitions. The left group did not. I then felt my eyes drawn to consider the muzzle flashes.
Flash suppressors do not hide the flash of burning propellant. You can't do that. What they do is side-scatter the blast to reduce the long tongue of flame that allows you to accuratel
y back-plot the shooter. There is a pattern familiar from a hundred exercises of our own weapons firing in the dark. The right-most group had that. The left-most group did not.
At that point the pattern of the battle unfolded for me. I felt the joy fill me. The fear was not gone, but what it was now wove with the joy into something new. I fired every two or three seconds in steady aimed fire. Many of those points of fire that I back-plotted and engaged stopped firing, either taking cover or downed by my rounds.
To be filled by the Battle-Glad, to embrace the ice rage, is not to be faster, or smarter, or stronger. It is to let everything non-essential drop away. Your training, your instincts, they remain. What the berserker feels is what the Japanese might understand as Mushin; no thought. What Miyamoto Musashi called attitude-no attitude, neither focused on attack nor on defense, simply riding the tides of battle like a raven rides the wind, instinct and training merging to allow you to act without thought as smoothly as if you had drilled this specific maneuver a thousand times before.
There is a saying in the community—slow is smooth, smooth is fast. It is not that berserkers move faster. It is that in the Ice Rage, or Mushin, as the Japanese Kendo community would know it, you do not waste thought or motion. You move at appropriate speed. You have let go of all extraneous awareness and only those things of tactical importance are left in your sight. You are only seeing and focusing on those things your long training and instinct have taught you are important, and only judging them on the criteria that you have trained yourself to consider.
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