Considerable has been said on this subject in the preceding pages, and the interpretation which will be adhered to in this volume has been clearly indicated. We propose now to give a general synopsis of the more prominent methods of interpreting Norse mythology.
In one thing all undoubtedly agree, namely, that all mythologies embody religious faith. As we, to this day, each in his own way, seek to find God by philosophical speculation (natural theology), by our emotions, by good deeds, or by all these at one time; and as we, when we have found him, rest upon his breast, although we do not fully agree as to our conception of him, each one of us having his own God as each has his own rainbow; thus our forefathers sought God everywhere—in the rocks, in the babbling stream, in the heavy ear of grain, in the star-strewn sky of night, and in the splendor of the sun. It was revelations of divinity that they looked for. The fundamental element in their mythology was a religious one, and this fact must never be lost sight of. To interpret a myth, then, is not only to give its source, but also its aim and object, together with the thoughts and feelings that it awakens in the human breast.
Some writers (William and Mary Howitt and others) maintain that the Norse mythology is a degradation of, or aberration from, the true religion, which was revealed to man in the earliest period of the history of the human race and is found pure and undefiled in the Bible; that it presents sparkling waters from the original fountain of tradition. They point with seriousness to it as something that bears us on toward the primal period of one tongue and one religion. In reference to the Elder Edda, they say that it descended through vast ages, growing, like all traditions, continually darker, and accumulating lower matter and more divergent and more pagan doctrines, as the walls of old castles become covered with mosses and lichens, till it finally assumed the form it which it was collected from the mouths of the people, and put in a permanent written form. These interpreters claim that through all mythologies there run certain great lines, which converge toward one common center and point to an original source of a religious faith, which has grown dimmer and more disfigured, the further it has gone. The geographical center, they say, from which all these systems of heathen belief have proceeded is the same—Central Asia; they point to the eastern origin of the Norseman; they assert, with full confidence, that the religious creed of the Norseman is the faith of Persia, India, Greece, and every other country, transferred to the snow-capped mountains of Norway and jokuls of Iceland, having only been modified there, so as to give it an air of originality without destroying its primeval features. They argue that Loke of the Norsemen, Pluto of the Greeks, Ahriman of the Persians, Siva of the Hindoos, etc., are all originally the devil of the Bible, who has changed his name and more or less his personal form and characteristics. The biblical Trinity is degenerated into the threefold trinity of Odin, Vile, and Ve; Odin, Hœner, and Loder; and Odin, Thor, and Balder. They find in the Norse cosmogony, in a somewhat mutilated and interpolated condition, the Scripture theory of the creation, preservation, destruction and regeneration of the world. Ygdrasil is the tree of life in the garden of Eden; Ask and Embla, the first human pair, are Adam and Eve; the blood of the slain giant Ymer, in which the whole race of frost-giants was drowned, (excepting one pair, who were saved, and from whom a new giant race descended,) is the flood of Noah, the deluge; the citadel called Midgard is the tower of Babel; in the death of Balder, by Hoder, who was instigated by Loke, they find the crucifixion of Christ by Judas, instigated by the devil, etc.; displaying a vast amount of erudition, profoundness and ingenuity, that might have been applied to some good purpose. We refrain from giving more of the results of their learned and erudite investigations, from fear of seducing ourselves or our readers into the adoption of their absurdities.
Other scholars (Snorre Sturleson, Saxo Grammaticus, Suhm, Rask, and others,) give us what is called an historical interpretation, asserting that Odin, Thor, Balder, and the other deities that figure in the Norse mythology, are veritable ancestors of the Norsemen,—men and women who have lived in the remote past; and as distance lends enchantment to the view, so the ordinary kings and priests of pre-historic times have been magnified into gods. Odin and the other divinities are in Snorre Sturleson’s Heimskringla represented as having come to Norseland from the great Svithiod, a country lying between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. According to the historical interpretation the mythical worlds are real countries that can be pointed out on the map. This was the prevailing view taken during the last two centuries, and even that sagacious scholar of the earlier part of this century, Professor Rasmus Rask, adheres almost exclusively to the historical interpretation.
It is curious to read these old authors and observe how sincerely they have looked upon Odin as an extraordinary and enterprising person who formerly ruled in the North and inaugurated great changes in the government, customs and religion of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. They speak of the great authority which he enjoyed, and how he even had divine honors paid to him. They ingeniously connect Odin with the Roman Commonwealth, with Mithridates and Pompey (see p. [232]). This historical sketch of Odin will be given in connection with the Odinic myth; suffice it here to say that the king of Pontus and all his barbarian allies were obliged to yield to the genius of Pompey. And here it is said that Odin was one of the number defeated by Pompey. He was obliged to withdraw himself by flight from the vengeance of the Romans! Odin came to Norway by way of Holstein and Jutland. On his way through Denmark he founded the city Odinse, and placed his son Skjold upon the Danish throne. How profound! What erudition! How much like the enthusiastic work of the Swede Rudbeck, who makes out the Atlantis of Plato to be Sweden, and shows that Japhet, son of Noah, came there and settled with his family! What profound learning (gelahrtheit) these men must have possessed! We are amazed and confounded at the vast amount of mental force that has been brought into activity, at the untiring zeal and the marvelous ingenuity, with which these theories have been set up; but we cannot witness all this without a feeling of deep regret that so much erudition and ingenuity, so much mental strength, was so fruitlessly thrown away. They were generally profound Latin scholars, and wrote the most of their books in Latin; but those ponderous tomes make their authors fools in folios in the light of modern historical knowledge. They studied by that kind of lamp that illuminates a small spot on the table, but leaves the whole room dark. A more careful and enlightened study of our early literature has of course given the death-blow to so prosaic an interpretation of the Norse mythology as the purely historical one is.
Then we are met by the so-called ethical interpretation of mythology, seeking its origin in man’s peculiar nature, especially in a moral point of view. The advocates of this theory claim that mythology is a mere fiction created to satisfy man’s spiritual, moral, and emotional nature. The gods according to this interpretation represent man’s virtues and vices, emotions, faculties of mind and muscle, etc., personified. Odin, they say, is wisdom; Balder is goodness; Thor is strength; Heimdal is grace, etc. Again: Thor is the impersonation of strength and courage; the giants represent impotent sloth and arrogance; the conflicts between Thor and the giants are a struggle going on in the human breast. And again: the mischief-maker Loke instigated the blind Hoder to kill the good Balder; Nanna, Balder’s wife, took her husband’s death so much to heart, that she died of grief; Hoder is afterwards slain by Odin’s son Vale; all nature weeps for Balder, but still he is not released from Hel (hell). That is, physical strength with its blind earthly desires (Hoder), guided by sin (Loke), unconsciously kills innocence, (Balder). Love (Nanna) dies broken-hearted; reflection (Vale) is aroused and subdues physical strength (Hoder); but innocence (Balder) has vanished from the world to remain in Hel’s regions until the earth is regenerated, after Ragnarok. The ethical interpretation makes the gods the faculties of the spirit, and the giants the faculties of the body, in man; and between the two, soul and body, there is a constant struggle for supremacy. This interpretation is very good, because it is very poetic, but it has more to do with the application of the myths than with their primary source.
Finally, an interpretation, that has frequently been alluded to in the preceding pages of this introduction, is the physical, or interpretation from nature,—impersonation of the visible workings of nature. The divinities are the forces and phenomena of nature personified; and evidence of the correctness of this view can be abundantly presented by defining etymologically names of the several divinities, their attributes, dwellings and achievements, and by showing how faithfully the works of the gods correspond with the events and scenes of the outward world. There is no doubt that this is the true interpretation of all mythologies; and that it is, so to speak, the key to the Norse mythology, it is hoped will be sufficiently demonstrated in the second part of this book in connection with the myths themselves; but the ethical, or perhaps better the spiritual, interpretation must by all means be added. The spiritual or ethical and the physical interpretation must be combined. In other words, we can scarcely make the interpretation too anthropomorphic. The phenomena and forces of nature have been personified by our forefathers into deities, but the myths have been elaborated to suit and correspond with the moral, intellectual and emotional nature,—the inner life of man. The deities have been conceived in a human form, with human attributes and affections. The ancient Norsemen have made their mythology reflect human nature, and have clothed the gods with their own faculties of mind and body in respect to good and evil, virtue and vice, right and wrong. As Rudolf Keyser beautifully expresses himself:
The gods are the ordaining powers of nature clothed in personality. They direct the world, which they created; but beside them stand the mighty goddesses of fate and time, the great norns, who sustain the world-structure, the all-embraceing tree of the world (Ygdrasil). The life of the world is a struggle between the good and light gods on the one side, and the offspring of chaotic matter, the giants, nature’s disturbing forces, on the other. This struggle extends also into man’s being: the spirit proceeds from the gods, the body belongs to the world of the giants; they struggle with each other for the supremacy. If the spirit conquers by virtue and bravery, man goes to heaven after death, to fight in concert with the gods against the evil powers; but if the body conquers and links the spirit to itself by weakness and low desires, then man sinks after death to the world of the giants in the lower regions, and joins himself with the evil powers in the warfare against the gods.
Nature is the mother at whose breast we all are nourished. In ancient times she was the object of childlike contemplation, nay, adoration. Nature and men were in close communion with each other, much closer than we are now. They had a more delicate perception of, and more sympathy for, suffering nature; and it were well if some of the purity of this thought could be breathed down to us, their prosaic descendants, who have abandoned the offerings to give place to avarice (die Habsucht nahm zu, als die Opfer aufhörten.—Grimm).
It was a beautiful custom, which is still preserved in some parts of Norway, to fasten a bundle of grain to a long pole, which on Christmas eve was erected somewhere in the yard, or on the top of the house or barn, for the wild birds to feed upon early on Christmas-day morning,—(our heathen ancestors also had the Christmas or Yule-tide festival). In our degenerate times we think of chickens and geese and turkeys, but who thinks of the innocent and a suffering little birds? Nay, our ancestors lay nearer to nature’s breast. Have we had our hearts hardened by the iron yoke of civilized government? We certainly need to ask ourselves that question.