Mythology

by Edith Hamilton

  Necessarily the same is true of humanity. If the gods are finally helpless before evil, men and women must be more so. The heroes and heroines of the early stories face disaster. They know that they cannot save themselves, not by any courage or endurance or great deed. Even so, they do not yield. They die resisting. A brave death entitles them—at least the heroes—to a seat in Valhalla, one of the halls in Asgard, but there, too, they must look forward to final defeat and destruction. In the last battle between good and evil they will fight on the side of the gods and die with them.

  This is the conception of life which underlies the Norse religion, as somber a conception as the mind of man has ever given birth to. The only sustaining support possible for the human spirit, the one pure unsullied good men can hope to attain, is heroism; and heroism depends on lost causes. The hero can prove what he is only by dying. The power of good is shown not by triumphantly conquering evil, but by continuing to resist evil while facing certain defeat.

  Such an attitude toward life seems at first sight fatalistic, but actually the decrees of an inexorable fate played no more part in the Norseman’s scheme of existence than predestination did in St. Paul’s or in that of his militant Protestant followers, and for precisely the same reason. Although the Norse hero was doomed if he did not yield, he could choose between yielding or dying. The decision was in his own hands. Even more than that. A heroic death, like a martyr’s death, is not a defeat, but a triumph. The hero in one of the Norse stories who laughs aloud while his foes cut his heart out of his living flesh shows himself superior to his conquerors. He says to them, in effect, You can do nothing to me because I do not care what you do. They kill him, but he dies undefeated.

  This is stern stuff for humanity to live by, as stern in its totally different way as the Sermon on the Mount, but the easy way has never in the long run commanded the allegiance of mankind. Like the early Christians, the Norsemen measured their life by heroic standards. The Christians, however, looked forward to a heaven of eternal joy. The Norseman did not. But it would appear that for unknown centuries, until the Christian missionaries came, heroism was enough.

  The poets of the Norse mythology, who saw that victory was possible in death and that courage was never defeated, are the only spokesmen for the belief of the whole great Teutonic race—of which England is a part, and ourselves through the first settlers in America. Everywhere else in northwestern Europe the early records, the traditions, the songs and stories, were obliterated by the priests of Christianity, who felt a bitter hatred for the paganism they had come to destroy. It is extraordinary how clean a sweep they were able to make. A few bits survived: Beowulf in England, the Nibelungenlied in Germany, and some stray fragments here and there. But if it were not for the two Icelandic Eddas we should know practically nothing of the religion which molded the race to which we belong. In Iceland, naturally by its position the last northern country to be Christianized, the missionaries seem to have been gentler, or, perhaps, they had less influence. Latin did not drive Norse out as the literary tongue. The people still told the old stories in the common speech, and some of them were written down, although by whom or when we do not know. The oldest manuscript of the Elder Edda is dated at about 1300, three hundred years after the Christians arrived, but the poems it is made up of are purely pagan and adjudged by all scholars to be very old. The Younger Edda, in prose, was written down by one Snorri Sturluson in the last part of the twelfth century. The chief part of it is a technical treatise on how to write poetry, but it also contains some prehistoric mythological material which is not in the Elder Edda.

  The Elder Edda is much the more important of the two. It is made up of separate poems, often about the same story, but never connected with each other. The material for a great epic is there, as great as the Iliad, perhaps even greater, but no poet came to work it over as Homer did the early stories which preceded the Iliad. There was no man of genius in the Northland to weld the poems into a whole and make it a thing of beauty and power; no one even to discard the crude and the commonplace and cut out the childish and wearisome repetitions. There are lists of names in the Edda which sometimes run on unbroken for pages. Nevertheless the somber grandeur of the stories comes through in spite of the style. Perhaps no one should speak of “the style” who cannot read ancient Norse; but all the translations are so alike in being singularly awkward and involved that one cannot but suspect the original of being responsible, at least in part. The poets of the Elder Edda seem to have had conceptions greater than their skill to put them into words. Many of the stories are splendid. There are none to equal them in Greek mythology, except those retold by the tragic poets. All the best Northern tales are tragic, about men and women who go steadfastly forward to meet death, often deliberately choose it, even plan it long beforehand. The only light in the darkness is heroism.

  I

  I have selected these two stories to tell because they seem to me to present better than any other the Norse character and the Norse point of view. Sigurd is the most famous of Norse heroes; his story is largely that of the hero of the Nibelungenlied, Siegfried. He plays the chief part in the Volsungasaga, the Norse version of the German tale which Wagner’s operas have made familiar. I have not gone to it, however, for my story, but to the Elder Edda, where the love and death of Sigurd and Brynhild and Gudrun are the subject of a number of the poems. The sagas, all prose tales, are of later date. Signy’s story is told only in the Volsungasaga.

  Signy was the daughter of Volsung and the sister of Sigmund. Her husband slew Volsung by treachery and captured his sons. One by one he chained them at night to where the wolves would find them and devour them. When the last, who was Sigmund, was brought out and chained, Signy had devised a way to save him. She freed him and the two took a vow to avenge their father and brothers. Signy determined that Sigmund should have one of their own blood to help him and she visited him in disguise and spent three nights with him. He never knew who she was. When the boy who was born of their union was of an age to leave her, she sent him to Sigmund and the two lived together until the lad—his name was Sinfiotli—was grown to manhood. All this time Signy was living with her husband, bearing him children, showing him nothing of the one burning desire in her heart, to take vengeance upon him. The day for it came at last. Sigmund and Sinfiotli surprised the household. They killed Signy’s other children; they shut her husband in the house and set fire to it. Signy watched them with never a word. When all was done she told them that they had gloriously avenged the dead, and with that she entered the burning dwelling and died there. Through the years while she had waited she had planned when she killed her husband to die with him. Clytemnestra would fade beside her if there had been a Norse Aeschylus to write her story.

  The story of Siegfried is so familiar that that of his Norse prototype, Sigurd, can be briefly told. Brynhild, a Valkyrie, has disobeyed Odin and is punished by being put to sleep until some man shall wake her. She begs that he who comes to her shall be one whose heart knows no fear, and Odin surrounds her couch with flaming fire which only a hero would brave. Sigurd, the son of Sigmund, does the deed. He forces his horse through the flames and wakens Brynhild, who gives herself to him joyfully because he has proved his valor in reaching her. Some days later he leaves her in the same fire-ringed place.

  Sigurd goes to the home of the Giukungs where he swears brotherhood with the king, Gunnar. Griemhild, Gunnar’s mother, wants Sigurd for her daughter Gudrun, and gives him a magic potion which makes him forget Brynhild. He marries Gudrun; then, assuming through Griemhild’s magical power the appearance of Gunnar, he rides through the flames again to win Brynhild for Gunnar, who is not hero enough to do this himself. Sigurd spends three nights there with her, but he places his sword between them in the bed. Brynhild goes with him to the Giukungs, where Sigurd takes his own shape again, but without Brynhild’s knowledge. She marries Gunnar, believing that Sigurd was faithless to her and that Gunnar had ridden through the flames for her. In
a quarrel with Gudrun she learns the truth and she plans her revenge. She tells Gunnar that Sigurd broke his oath to him, that he really possessed her those three nights when he declared that his sword lay between them, and that unless Gunnar kills Sigurd she will leave him. Gunnar himself cannot kill Sigurd because of the oath of brotherhood he has sworn, but he persuades his younger brother to slay Sigurd in his sleep, and Gudrun wakes to find her husband’s blood flowing over her.

  Then Brynhild laughed,

  Only once, with all her heart,

  When she heard the wail of Gudrun.

  But although, or because, she brought about his death, she will not live when Sigurd is dead. She says to her husband:—

  One alone of all I loved.

  I never had a changing heart.

  She tells him that Sigurd had not been false to his oath when he rode through the fiery ring to win her for Gunnar.

  In one bed together we slept

  As if he had been my brother.

  Ever with grief and all too long

  Are men and women born in the world—

  She kills herself, praying that her body shall be laid on the funeral pyre with Sigurd’s.

  Beside his body Gudrun sits in silence. She cannot speak; she cannot weep. They fear that her heart will break unless she can find relief, and one by one the women tell her of their own grief,

  The bitterest pain each had ever borne.

  Husband, daughters, sisters, brothers—one says—all were taken from me, and still I live.

  Yet for her grief Gudrun could not weep.

  So hard was her heart by the hero’s body.

  My seven sons fell in the southern land, another says, and my husband too, all eight in battle. I decked with my own hands the bodies for the grave. One half-year brought me this to bear. And no one came to comfort me.

  Yet for her grief Gudrun could not weep.

  So hard was her heart by the hero’s body.

  Then one wiser than the rest lifts the shroud from the dead.

  … She laid

  His well-loved head on the knees of his wife.

  “Look on him thou loved and press thy lips

  To his as if he still were living.”

  Only once did Gudrun look.

  She saw his hair all clotted with blood,

  His blinded eyes that had been so bright,

  Then she bent and bowed her head,

  And her tears ran down like drops of rain.

  Such are the early Norse stories. Man is born to sorrow as the sparks fly upward. To live is to suffer and the only solution of the problem of life is to suffer with courage. Sigurd, on his way to Brynhild the first time, meets a wise man and asks him what his fate shall be,

  Hide nothing from me however hard.

  The wise man answers:—

  Thou knowest that I will not lie.

  Never shalt thou be stained by baseness.

  Yet a day of doom shall come upon thee,

  A day of wrath and a day of anguish.

  But ever remember, ruler of men,

  That fortune lies in the hero’s life.

  And a nobler man shall never live

  Beneath the sun than Sigurd.

  II

  No god of Greece could be heroic. All the Olympians were immortal and invincible. They could never feel the glow of courage; they could never defy danger. When they fought they were sure of victory and no harm could ever come near them. It was different in Asgard. The Giants, whose city was Jötunheim, were the active, persistent enemies of the Aesir, as the gods were called, and they not only were an ever-present danger, but knew that in the end complete victory was assured to them.

  This knowledge was heavy on the hearts of all the dwellers in Asgard, but it weighed heaviest on their chief and ruler, odin. Like Zeus, Odin was the sky-father,

  Clad in a cloud-gray kirtle and a hood as blue as the sky.

  But there the resemblance ends. It would be hard to conceive anything less like the Zeus of Homer than Odin. He is a strange and solemn figure, always aloof. Even when he sits at the feasts of the gods in his golden palace, Gladsheim, or with the heroes in Valhalla, he eats nothing. The food set before him he gives to the two wolves who crouch at his feet. On his shoulders perch two ravens, who fly each day through the world and bring him back news of all that men do. The name of the one is Thought (Hugin) and of the other Memory (Munin).

  While the other gods feasted, Odin pondered on what Thought and Memory taught him.

  He had the responsibility more than all the other gods together of postponing as long as possible the day of doom, Ragnarok, when heaven and earth would be destroyed. He was the All-father, supreme among gods and men, yet even so he constantly sought for more wisdom. He went down to the Well of Wisdom guarded by Mimir the wise, to beg for a draught from it, and when Mimir answered that he must pay for it with one of his eyes, he consented to lose the eye. He won the knowledge of the Runes, too, by suffering. The Runes were magical inscriptions, immensely powerful for him who could inscribe them on anything—wood, metal, stone. Odin learned them at the cost of mysterious pain. He says in the Elder Edda that he hung

  Nine whole nights on a wind-rocked tree,

  Wounded with a spear.

  I was offered to Odin, myself to myself,

  On that tree of which no man knows.

  He passed the hard-won knowledge on to men. They, too, were able to use the Runes to protect themselves. He imperiled his life again to take away from the Giants the skaldic mead, which made anyone who tasted it a poet. This good gift he bestowed upon men as well as upon the gods. In all ways he was mankind’s benefactor.

  Maidens were his attendants, the VALKYRIES. They waited on the table in Asgard and kept the drinking horns full, but their chief task was to go to the battlefield and decide at Odin’s bidding who should win and who should die, and carry the brave dead to Odin. Val means “slain,” and the Valkyries were the Choosers of the Slain; and the place to which they brought the heroes was the Hall of the Slain, Valhalla. In battle, the hero doomed to die would see

  Maidens excellent in beauty,

  Riding their steeds in shining armor,

  Solemn and deep in thought,

  With their white hands beckoning.

  Wednesday is of course Odin’s day. The Southern form of his name was Woden.

  Of the other gods, only five were important: BALDER, THOR, FREYR, HEIMDALL, and TYR.

  BALDER was the most beloved of the gods, on earth as in heaven. His death was the first of the disasters which fell upon the gods. One night he was troubled with dreams which seemed to foretell some great danger to him. When his mother, FRIGGA, the wife of Odin, heard this she determined to protect him from the least chance of danger. She went through the world and exacted an oath from everything, all things with life and without life, never to do him harm. But Odin still feared. He rode down to NIFLHEIM, the world of the dead, where he found the dwelling of HELA, or HEL, the Goddess of the Dead, all decked out in festal array. A Wise Woman told him for whom the house had been made ready:—

  The mead has been brewed for Balder.

  The hope of the high gods has gone.

  Odin knew then that Balder must die, but the other gods believed that Frigga had made him safe. They played a game accordingly which gave them much pleasure. They would try to hit Balder, to throw a stone at him or hurl a dart or shoot an arrow or strike him with a sword, but always the weapons fell short of him or rolled harmlessly away. Nothing would hurt Balder. He seemed raised above them by this strange exemption and all honored him for it, except one only, LOKI. He was not a god, but the son of a Giant, and wherever he came trouble followed. He continually involved the gods in difficulties and dangers, but he was allowed to come freely to Asgard because for some reason never explained Odin had sworn brotherhood with him. He always hated the good, and he was jealous of Balder. He determined to do his best to find some way of injuring him. He went to Frigga disguised as a woman an
d entered into talk with her. Frigga told him of her journey to ensure Balder’s safety and how everything had sworn to do him no harm. Except for one little shrub, she said, the mistletoe, so insignificant she had passed it by.

  That was enough for Loki. He got the mistletoe and went with it to where the gods were amusing themselves. HODER, Balder’s brother, who was blind, sat apart. “Why not join in the game?” asked Loki. “Blind as I am?” said Hoder. “And with nothing to throw at Balder, either?” “Oh, do your part,” Loki said. “Here is a twig. Throw it and I will direct your aim.” Hoder took the mistletoe and hurled it with all his strength. Under Loki’s guidance it sped to Balder and pierced his heart. Balder fell to the ground dead.

  His mother refused even then to give up hope. Frigga cried out to the gods for a volunteer to go down to Hela and try to ransom Balder. Hermod, one of her sons, offered himself. Odin gave him his horse Sleipnir and he sped down to Niflheim.

  The others prepared the funeral. They built a lofty pyre on a great ship, and there they laid Balder’s body. Nanna, his wife, went to look at it for the last time; her heart broke and she fell to the deck dead. Her body was placed beside his. Then the pyre was kindled and the ship pushed from the shore. As it sailed out to sea, the flames leaped up and wrapped it in fire.

  When Hermod reached Hela with the gods’ petition, she answered that she would give Balder back if it were proved to her that all everywhere mourned for him. But if one thing or one living creature refused to weep for him she would keep him. The gods dispatched messengers everywhere to ask all creation to shed tears so that Balder could be redeemed from death. They met with no refusal. Heaven and earth and everything therein wept willingly for the beloved god. The messengers rejoicing started back to carry the news to the gods. Then, almost at the end of their journey, they came upon a Giantess—and all the sorrow of the world was turned to futility, for she refused to weep. “Only dry tears will you get from me,” she said mockingly. “I had no good from Balder, nor will I give him good.” So Hela kept her dead.