War of the Gods

by Poul Anderson

  Wind tossed his hair. He glimpsed a lock. Its hue was golden. His clothes were the blue, green, and white of summer seas. When he walked forward over ground hidden by low-eddying mists, the lameness was gone from his step.

  One stood awaiting him, tall, gray beard falling over bluegray cloak. Only the right eye shone below a shadowing hat. Its look struck as keenly as would the spear he held.

  His voice rolled thunder-deep. “Greeting and welcome.”

  The newcomer halted before him. “So we meet again,” he said slowly. “You told me we never would.”

  “Never on earth, while you were what you then were. But that is now ended.”

  The newcomer passed a hind across his brow. “I do not understand.”

  “No. You have made the longest trek of all and are still bewildered. But you shall soon remember that which you laid aside for a span. Come.”

  They set forth across the clouds. “It was needful,” said the Wanderer. “Great was the wrong you suffered, and great was your wrath. When you foreswore our friendship, you were wholly within your rights. Yet the sundering would have led to another war among the gods, a war that would have brought them down in untimely wreck. How could we cleanse ourselves of what had happened and make whole again your honor?

  “The word of the Norns cannot be gainsaid. That which is done is done forever. But seeking through time, with the knowledge I won on the far side of death, I found that deeds may be done over again in the morrow, and thus may a wrong be set right. They must be true deeds, however, done without foresight of their meaning, a life lived in and for itself.”

  “I begin to see,” whispered he who had returned.

  Also he saw with his eyes. Somehow he and the other had already walked down from above the sky. It reached half-clear, half-cloudy over the high hillside on which they now were. Rain had lately fallen. The wet grass flashed with its drops. Nonetheless sight swept far and far, across woodlands, meadows, homes of men, and the sea roaring along a broad strand. A rainbow glimmered.

  “But this is earth!” he cried.

  The Wanderer nodded. “You ken it again—better, I think, than ever aforetime.”

  They strode onward with the same unwearying swiftness. “I was Hadding,” knew he who had returned.

  “Thus were you born to the house of the Skjoldungs,” said the Wanderer. “Thus did you live, a man of flesh, bone, and blood, hero, father of kings, but still a man. You shared the gladness and grief, wounds and weal, victory and vanquishment, love and loss that are the lot of humans, and at last you died as they do.

  “Yet the soul in Hadding was yours. He had the freedom to choose that is every man’s, but being you, he took what you would have taken. And I launched his life on Midgard into such waters that it would likely in some wise follow the course that you follow among the gods. I helped him steer clear of the worst that had befallen you, and helped him again when black wizardry would have overwhelmed him before he had won what was his. Otherwise he who was you wrought his own fulfillment, which was likewise yours. He won a name that will live as long as the world stands, and that honor is also yours.”

  “You sent him on strange ways.”

  “Yes, for I wanted him to know fully who and what the one was who befriended him in his need. He had seen too much of trollcraft, too early and too closely.”

  “Not all of them who wielded it were his foes.”

  “True. Such was the way he must go, like to the way that you and your kinfolk had gone. In the beginning, the untamed earth, ruthless, reckless, and shameless. Then war and wild farings, the way of the Aesir. Then the flowering of the soul that is yours, which shall grow beyond ours.

  “For you alone among us will live without blame; and the spaewife who made known to me what shall be has foretold that at the downfall of the gods, you will go home to your Vanir; and when the new world rises from the sea and Baldr comes back from the dead, you will be there to help build its peace.”

  They stopped, for they had reached the foot of the rainbow. Its trembling bridge soared to the walls of Asgard.

  Before they betrod it, Odin laid a hand on his fellow’s shoulder. “But first,” he said, “here and now, will you renew the oaths we swore? At the end of his life, Hadding gave himself to me. Thereby you took what I offered you, and we are in brotherhood again.”

  “Yes,” answered Njord, god of the sea, “from this day to the last, we are brothers.”

  Dedication

  To

  Diana Paxson

  farer in lands afar

  Afterword

  Dark and violent even by saga standards, the story of Hadding is also one of the most enigmatic that has come down to us from the old North. Looked at closely, it reveals itself as more than a series of adventures and exploits. They have a unity, a deeper meaning; but what? For a century and a half, mythologists and folklorists have wondered.

  Aside from a few incidental mentions elsewhere, our only source for it is the Qesta Danorum of Saxo. That we know so little about this writer adds to the irony.

  He was a Dane. He states that his father and grandfather fought for King Valdemar I, who reigned from 1157 to 1182. Thus he himself must have been born about 1150. His favorable references to the people of Zealand, compared to others both in the kingdom and abroad, indicate that he hailed from that island and probably spent most of his days there. He says that he undertook his work at the behest of the great Archbishop Absalon. The latter died before it was completed, and so it is dedicated to his successor Archbishop Andreas and to King Valdemar II. This was about 1208, which seems to be more or less the year of Saxo’s death.

  His clerical connections, the fact that he wrote in Latin, and his (somewhat limited) classical education have caused most scholars to take for granted that he was a monk. However, we have no direct evidence. His chauvinism, delight in scenes of derring-do, and occasional eroticism imply that he could have been a layman. The appellation “Grammaticus,” meaning “master of words,” only came to him in the fifteenth century, when interest in him revived.

  As for his chronicle, he meant to write the history of Denmark from the days of King Svein Estridsson (d. 1076), but Absalon persuaded him also to seek out and set down traditions from earliest times. Although they had been Christian for some two hundred years, the Scandinavians remained fascinated by the deeds and beliefs of their ancestors. In this, the Icelanders became pre-eminent, and Saxo gives them due credit. A person or persons on that island recorded those poems we call the Elder Edda. A generation after Saxo, Snorri Sturluson wrote the Younger Edda, the Heimskringla, and very likely the saga of Egil Skallagrimsson. Others were similarly engaged.

  We do not know how long or how widely Saxo delved, whom he questioned, what notes he took, how much he simply recalled of what he heard in childhood or at hearthsides, how much he patched together from scraps or his own imagination. It is clear that he was acquainted with ancient poems still on the tongues of skalds and common folk. He either made prose of them or translated them into his Latin. Sometimes we have Norse versions to compare. Mostly, though, we can only attempt to reconstruct the originals from the materials he has left us.

  His narration is usually bald, his style usually florid and often preachy. He has misunderstood a great deal of what he was handling and garbled a great deal more. Nevertheless he saved this treasure hoard for us, damaged though it may be. It includes the oldest extant account of Hamlet. All honor to Saxo Grammaticus.

  The story of Hadding comes near the end of the first book. There is no point in searching for a historical kernel of it. Saxo places Hadding three generations before Hrolf Kraki. Some truth undoubtedly lies behind that saga, which can be dated to the middle sixth century. But a fuller, though later Icelandic rendition does not square with the Qesta Danorum. For instance, Hadding’s son Frodi cannot be identical with Hrolf’s great-uncle of that name. Saxo was probably fitting together what pieces he had in a rather arbitrary fashion.

  Besi
des, the tale of Hadding is not properly even a legend. It is a myth. Saxo may have had some intimation of this, but if so, it was dim. Into his chapter he inserts an awkward description of Odin as a mortal sorcerer, then completely fails to recognize Odin when the god appears to Hadding in person.

  Just the same, here is a grand yarn, full of action, color, and glimpses of a world altogether strange to us. I have long wanted to share it with modern readers. Georges Dumézil’s brilliant study Du mythe au roman: La Saga de Hadingus et autres essais shows that Hadding was actually the god Njord. This first suggested to me how the tale might be made into something more than another sword-and-sorcery swashbuckler. I owe considerable as well to the Eddas, the Heimskringla, and the work of archeologists and literary scholars.

  On the whole, the earthly part of this retelling follows Saxo’s text. Mainly I have tried to flesh it out, find causes and motivations for events he leaves obscure, and limn their background. That background is frankly anachronistic—not the Germanic Iron Age, in which the story ostensibly takes place, but the viking era. Societies, technologies, horizons, and doings belong, in an ahistoric fashion, to the ninth or tenth century, as they do in Saxo. However, though avoiding Latinisms as much as possible, I have not sought to imitate the austere style of the Icelanders. What was familiar to them is alien to us and needs explaining. I hope I have evoked a little of it.

  Some things may strike you as unfortunate. For example, various names are easily confused, notably Hadding, Hunding, and Haakon. I did not presume to change them, or any other important part of my source, but I made an effort to write for clarity. Nor did I pussyfoot very much about the brutality, the ethnic prejudices—especially against Finns—or the status of women—although that was rather higher than it got to be later. These were of the milieu. Most persisted through subsequent centuries. Our own has seen massive resurgences of them. As for people’s feelings about wolves, animals that I too like and admire, that was also the way it was; and there is some reason to think that in fact they were more dangerous to humans before the appearance of firearms than they have been since.

  Now and then I must resort to sheer guesswork, most conspicuously in the case of the Niderings. Saxo tells us nothing about them except that they were somewhere in Norway. The ancient name of Trondheim, Nidaros, gave me the idea that they might have lived in that area. Perhaps they were absorbed afterward by the historical Thronds, or perhaps they merely sprang from a linguistic confusion in Saxo’s mind. Apart from this fantasy requiring some real-world geography, it doesn’t matter.

  With the cosmic framework I have taken a still freer hand. After all, we have lost much. Lines here and there hint fleetingly at what must once have loomed high, and more heroes than Hadding seem to be gods in disguise Snorri too euhemerizes myths, leaving us to guess what they formerly said—not that the mythology of preliterate peoples was ever very coherent or consistent. We know almost nothing about the war between the Aesir and the Vanir, except that it happened. I found that with a bit of rearrangement and a few minor additions I could unify a number of fragments. To some extent I have drawn on Viktor Rydberg’s nineteenth-century conjecture about the captivity of Njord, Freyr, and Freyja under Hymir. It is written that Odin and Loki once swore blood brotherhood, which helps explain how Loki got away with what he did for as long as he did; but we do not know why. That incident is my own invention. So, of course, is the whole concept of Hadding not as a redaction but as an actual avatar of Njord.

  Here names are generally in their current English forms. Among other things, this means that d frequently represents edh, i.e., th as in “that,” especially when following a vowel or at the end of a word. As for other pronunciations, j is sounded like y in “yet,” ag is approximately ow as in “how,” and ei as in “rein.” The rest should be fairly obvious.

  Terms get their nearest English equivalents, e.g., “chieftain” rather than hersir, “housecarles” rather than hird, “sheriff” rather than lencirrnadr, etc. In some cases this was not practical. Thus, jar, though cognate, does not really correspond to “earl.”

  Nor does Svithjod to “Sweden.” The southern end of what is now that country, Scania, was then Danish. North of it seem to have been the people known in Beowulf and elsewhere as Geats; this is not certain, but I have assumed it. North of them in turn lay Svithjod, the realm of the Swedes proper. Borders were rather vague and changeable, and there were complications, including still other tribes, which I have ignored. Similarly for such areas as Wendland (roughly, maritime Prussia, Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia) and Qardariki (roughly, northwestern Russia).

  But these details are of no importance to any but enthusiasts, who already know about them. All that this book does is tell a story. May you enjoy it.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Poul Anderson (1926–2001) grew up bilingual in a Danish American family. After discovering science fiction fandom and earning a physics degree at the University of Minnesota, he found writing science fiction more satisfactory. Admired for his “hard” science fiction, mysteries, historical novels, and “fantasy with rivets,” he also excelled in humor. He was the guest of honor at the 1959 World Science Fiction Convention and at many similar events, including the 1998 Contact Japan 3 and the 1999 Strannik Conference in Saint Petersburg, Russia. In addition to the Hugo and Nebula Awards, he has received the Gandalf, Seiun, and Strannik, or “Wanderer,” Awards. A founder of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, he became a Grand Master, and was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.

  In 1952 he met Karen Kruse; they married in Berkeley, California, where their daughter, Astrid, was born, and they later lived in Orinda, California. Astrid and her husband, science fiction author Greg Bear, now live with their family outside Seattle.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1997 by the Trigonier Trust

  Cover design by Ian Koviak

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-6399-9

  This edition published in 2020 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

  180 Maiden Lane

  New York, NY 10038

  www.openroadmedia.com

  POUL ANDERSON

  FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA

  Find a full list of our authors and

  titles at www.openroadmedia.com

  FOLLOW US: