Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [145]
Although separate Norse groups developed throughout northern Europe, all Norsemen shared the same way of life. It was a harsh culture, in which women and slaves were second-class citizens and unwanted children were exposed to the elements and left to die. This brutal culture had a mythology to match—of fierce war gods, often demanding blood sacrifice. There are stories of a sacred site to the Norse gods in Uppsala, in Sweden, where sacrificed men hung in trees. One account of a Viking king’s burial includes the sacrifice of a slave concubine who is strangled and added to the funeral pyre after all of the dead king’s companions had sex with her. The Vikings believed that a warrior’s death ensured passage to a fighters’ paradise called Valhalla. There, in the great Hall of the Slain, the Norsemen thought they would live among the gods, fight by day and feast by night, until the world came to an end in one all-encompassing, apocalyptic Battle of the Gods.
But the fighting didn’t wait until after death for the Vikings. Known as “Danes,” “Norsemen,” or “Northmen,” they terrified most of Europe as they conquered or looted parts of France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. The “Northmen” became “Normans” when they established a base in France (Normandy) and then invaded England under William the Conqueror in 1066. The Swedish branch of the Viking family tree settled in eastern Europe and was called the Rus, and Russia was named for them. The name “Viking” probably came later from Vik, in southern Norway. The expression “to go a-viking” meant to head off to fight as a pirate.
But in spite of their well-deserved reputation for ferocity, the great majority of Norsemen were simple farmers who lived in villages. These villages comprised a society that was roughly divided into three social classes—nobles, freemen, and slaves—who had little upward mobility. The freemen included farmers, merchants, and traders, and the slaves were often those who had been captured in Viking raids and battles. All Vikings spoke a Germanic language with two major dialects that everyone understood. They also had an alphabet system called runes, a strange script that was used primarily by priests for secret ritual purposes. Like the Celts, the Vikings didn’t record any of their myths and legends until after they had been Christianized.
Even so, there is a vast body of Norse literature collected in two works called Eddas that were set down during the Christian era from an earlier oral tradition. The Poetic, or Elder, Edda is a collection of poems composed anonymously between 1000 and 1100 CE. Twenty-four of the thirty-eight poems in the Poetic Edda are heroic tales, many of which recount the exploits of the great hero and dragon slayer Sigurd (Siegfried in German; see below). The other fourteen poems include accounts of the creation and the end of the universe in a fiery conflagration known as Ragnarok, in which the gods die.
The second collection is the Prose, or Younger, Edda, written during the 1200s by Snorri Sturluson (1179–1241), an Icelandic poet, historian, and courtier. Sturluson’s Prose Edda was designed as a primer, or textbook, for other poets, and consists of a preface and three sections. The first of these sections tells about the Norse deities, while the second and third parts provide techniques for aspiring poets. Besides the Prose Edda, Sturluson also wrote a history of the kings of Norway stretching from early times to his own day. A wealthy and powerful man in Iceland, as well as a medieval Icelandic poet, Snorri Sturluson became involved in Norway’s court