Have I got your attention? Good. I want to talk about
vikings.
Odin is a god of war and wisdom. What I liked most about the
Marvel movie Thor: Ragnarok was the
scene where Hela (who is NOT Odin’s daughter in the myths, but Loki’s) breaks
the ceiling and reveals the inglorious past. Odin is a war god. We sometimes
forget that.
How do war and wisdom go together? Well, you can buy the
Marvel reading and say after the war comes the wisdom; that works. But in the myths,
Odin is a war god throughout. He fights a war against the Vanir—the fertility
gods—until it’s clear no one will win, really. (Imagine how much we would save
if we had that wisdom.) He visits battlefields, blessing warriors with strength
and strategy, and he collects soldiers in Valhalla against the coming of Ragnarok.
He is the patron of kings, part of whose job description is knowing when and
how to wage war.
But he’s also the god of wisdom. The other part of the king’s
job is knowing when not to fight--knowing how to support, sustain, and provide
for your people. And it means knowing what it takes to ensure a civilization
endures.
Old Norse myths include rollicking stories of adventure, but
they’re also full of wisdom poetry. I have a whole day in my myth class devoted
to wisdom texts.
These wisdom poems serve lots of functions besides painting beautiful mental images of Norse culture. They are designed to be memorized and performed, and they preserve cultural knowledge like fairy tales and other oral texts do.
They almost always feature Odin. Odin hangs himself on Yggdrasil
(“The World Tree,” or more literally, “Odin’s Steed’) to learn the runes. He
journeys to Jǫtunheim to challenge the giant Vafthrudnir (“Riddle-Weaver”) to a
contest of knowledge. He journeys to the underworld to talk to dead witches and
learn from them, and he tests others, including his own son, Thor, while in disguise.
Odin never stops wanting to learn more and test how much he knows.
He shares his knowledge with kings, in an effort to improve
the world. He’s a believer in trickle-down wisdom. When a king he’s trained
doesn’t work out, he tests him first and then instructs and installs his
replacement. We know all this because there
are numerous poems narrating his exploits and filled with stanza after stanza
of truths Icelanders did not want to lose. These texts read like the biblical Proverbs or
the Welsh Triads, with small, pithy messages in series.
So they memorized Odin’s words and preserved them. In later
periods they wrote them down. Snorri Sturluson, in the 13th century,
tried to summarize and capture them in sort of Reader’s Digest Condensed
versions, and he did so with academic interest and cultural pride. The result
is that we have a good number of texts that don’t fit the adventure narrative or
the divine intervention myth. In lots of them, Odin just talks.
The most famous of these is the Hávamál, or “The Sayings of the High One (Odin).” It is a long,
aphoristic list of guidelines for how to behave and live well, followed by a
diagogue with a king, and ending with an account of Odin’s acquisition of the runes.
Its wisdom is no less pertinent today than it was in the Middle Ages.
That’s the real reason we need to remember—because we’ve
learned a lot of this stuff before, and if we don’t waste time relearning, we
can go farther faster.
(The Old Norse poems I refer to in these last paragraphs are
the stories of Odin meeting Vafthrudnir, the Vǫlva, Thor, and the king Geirrod,
and I’m happy to suggest translations if you’re interested.)
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