If we travel from India and from Hellas to the cold North, the same characteristic features reappear. In the Teutonic religions, as we know them,[76] Odin has taken the place of the old Aryan sky-god, Dyâus. The last did, indeed, linger on in the Zio or Tyr of these systems; but he had sunk from the position of a chief divinity. The change, however, is not great. The god chosen to fill his place resembles him as nearly as possible in character. Odin, or Wuotan,[77] whose name in its etymological meaning is probably the god who moves violently or rushes along,[78] was originally a god of the wind rather than of the atmosphere of heaven. Yet along with this more confined part of his character, he bears almost all the attributes of the exalted sky-god, the Dyâus or Zeus; only he adds to these some parts peculiar to a god of wind; and we can easily understand how, as these Aryan people journeyed northwards, their wind-god grew in magnitude and power.
Odin.
It was Odin who lashed into fury their stormy seas, and kept the impatient vikings (fjord-men) forced prisoners in their sheltered bays. He it was who rushed through their mountain forests, making the ancient pine-tops bend to him as he hurried on; and men sitting at home over their winter fires, and listening to his howl, told one another how he was hastening to some distant battle-field, there to direct the issue, and to choose from among the fallen such heroes as were worthy to accompany him to Valhalla, the Hall of Bliss.[79] Long after the worship of Christ had overturned that of the Æsir,[80] this, the most familiar and popular aspect of Odin’s nature, lived on in the thoughts of men. In the Middle Ages the wind reappears in the legend of the Phantom Army, a strange apparition of two hosts of men seen to join battle in midair. The peasant of the Jura or the Alps could tell how, when alone upon the mountain-side, he had beheld the awful vision. Sometimes all the details of the fight were visible, but as though the combatants were riding in the air; sometimes the sounds of battle only came from the empty space above, till at the end a shower of blood gave the fearful witness a proof that he was not the dupe of his imagination only.[81] In other places, especially, for example, in the Harz mountains, the Phantom Army gave place to the Wild Huntsman. This phantom hunt has many different names in the different countries of Europe. With us it is known best under the name of Herne the Hunter or of Arthur’s Chase. In Brittany this last name is also used. In the Harz and in other places in Germany the huntsman was called Hackelbärend or Hackelberg; and the story went how he had been chief huntsman to the Duke of Brunswick, but for impiety or for some dreadful oath, like that which had brought vengeance on the famous Van der Decken, had been condemned to hunt for ever through the clouds—for ever, that is, until the Day of Judgment.[82] All the year through he pursues his way alone, and the peasants hear his holloa, mingled with the baying of his two dogs.[83] But for twelve nights—between Christmas and the Twelfth-night—he hunts on the earth; and if any door is left open during the night, and one of the two hounds runs in, he will bring misfortune upon that house.
Besides this wilder aspect of his character, Odin appears as the heaven-god—all-embracing—the father of gods and men, like Zeus. ‘All-father Odin’ he is called, and his seat was on Air-throne; thither every day he ascended and looked over Glad-home, the home of the gods, and over the homes of men, and far out beyond the great earth-girding sea, to the dim frost-bound giant-land on earth’s border. And whatever he saw of wrong-doing and of wickedness upon the earth, that he set to rights; and he kept watch against the coming of the giants over seas to invade the abode of man and the citadel of the gods. Only these last—the race of giants—he could not utterly subdue and exterminate; for Fate, which was stronger than all, had decreed that they should remain until the end, and only be overthrown at the Twilight of the Gods themselves. But of this myth, which was half-Christian, we have not space to speak at length here.
In this picture of Odin we surely see a fellow-portrait to that of the ‘wide-seeing’ Zeus. ‘The eye of Zeus, which sees all things and knows all,’ says one poet; or again, as another says, ‘Zeus is the earth, Zeus is the sky, Zeus is all, and that which is over all.’
Tyr, Thor,
and Balder.
Behind Odin stands Tyr—of whom we have already spoken—and Thor and Balder, who are, or originally were, two different embodiments of the sun; Thor being also a god of thunder. He is in character very closely allied to Heracles. He is the mighty champion, the strongest and most warlike of all the gods. But he is the friend of man and patron of agriculture,[84] and as such the enemy of the giant-race, which represents not only cold and darkness, but the barren, rugged, uncultivated regions of earth. Like Heracles, Thor is never idle, constantly with some work on hand, ‘faring eastward to fight Trolls (giants),’ as the Eddas often tell us. In one of these expeditions he performs three labours, which may be paralleled from the labours of Heracles. He nearly drains the sea dry by drinking from a horn; this is the sun ‘sucking up the clouds’ from the sea, as people still speak of him as doing. It corresponds to the turning the course of the Alpheus and Peneus, which Heracles performs. Then he tries to lift (as he thinks) a large cat from the ground, but in reality he has been lifting the great mid-earth serpent (notice the fact that we have the sun at war with a serpent once more) which encircles the whole earth, and he has by his strength shaken the very foundations of the world. This is the same as the feat of Heracles in bringing up Cerberus from the underworld. And lastly, he wrestles, as he thinks, with an old woman, and is worsted; but in reality he has been wrestling with Old Age or Death, from whom no one ever came off the victor. So we read in Homer that Heracles once wounded Hades himself, and ‘brought grief into the land of shades,’ and in Euripides’ beautiful play, Alcestis, we see Heracles struggling, but this time victoriously, with Thanatos, Death himself. In these labours the Norse hero, though striving manfully, fails; but the Greek is always victorious. Herein lies a difference belonging to the character of the two creeds.
Balder the Beautiful—the fair, mild Balder—represents the sun more truly than Thor does: the sun in his gentle aspect, as he would naturally appear to a Norseman. His house is Breidablik, ‘Wide-glance,’ that is to say, the bright upper air, the sun’s home. He is like the son of Lêtô seen in his benignant aspect, the best beloved among gods, the brightener of their warlike life, beloved, too, by all things on earth, living and inanimate, and lamented as only the sun could be—the chief nourisher at life’s feast. For, when Balder died, everything in heaven and earth, ‘both all living things and trees and stones and all metals,’ wept to bring him back again, ‘as thou hast no doubt seen these things weep when they are brought from a cold place into a hot one.’ A modern poet has very happily expressed the character of Balder, the sun-god, the great quickener of life upon earth. Balder is supposed to leave heaven to tread the ways of men, and his coming is the signal for the new birth, as of spring-time, in the sleeping world.
‘There is some divine trouble
On earth and in air;
Trees tremble, brooks bubble,
Ants loosen the sod,
Warm footsteps awaken
Whatever is fair,
Sweet dewdrops are shaken
To quicken each clod.
The wild rainbows o’er him
Are melted and fade,
The light runs before him
Through meadow and glade.
Green branches close round him,
Their leaves whisper clear—
He is ours, we have found him,
Bright Baldur is here.’[85]
Frigg,
Freyja,
Frey.