This myth about Odin as the god of war, about Valhal and the valkyries, exercised a great influence upon the mind and character of our ancestors. The dying hero knows that the valkyries have been sent after him to invite him home to Odin’s hall, and he receives their message with joy and gladness. That the brave were to be taken after death to Valhal was one of the fundamental points, if not the soul, of the Norse religion.[[54]] The Norsemen felt in their hearts that it was absolutely necessary to be brave. Odin would not care for them, but despise and thrust them away from him, if they were not brave. And is there not some truth in this doctrine? Is it not still a preëminent duty to be brave? Is it not the first duty of man to subdue fear? What can we accomplish until we have got rid of fear? A man is a slave, a coward, his very thoughts are false, until he has got fear under his feet. Thus we find that the Odinic doctrine, if we disentangle the real kernel and essence of it, is true even in our times. A man must be valiant—he must march forward and acquit himself like a man. How much of a man he is will be determined in most cases by the completeness of his victory over fear. Their views of Odin, Valhal and the valkyries made the Norsemen think it a shame and misery not to die in battle; and if natural death seemed to be coming on, they would cut wounds in their flesh, that Odin might receive them as warriors slain. Old kings, about to die, had their bodies laid in a ship; the ship was sent forth with sails set, and a slow fire burning it, so that once out at sea it might blaze up in flame, and in such manner bury worthily the hero both in the sky and in the ocean. The Norse viking fought with an indomitable, rugged energy. He stood in the prow of his ship, silent, with closed lips, defying the wild ocean with its monsters, and all men and things. No Homer sang of these Norse warriors and sea-kings, but their heroic deeds and wild deaths are the ever-recurring theme of the skalds.
The death of the Norse viking is beautifully described in the following strophe from Professor Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen’s poem, entitled Odin’s Ravens:
In the prow with head uplifted
Stood the chief like wrathful Thor;
Through his locks the snow-flakes drifted
Bleached their hue from gold to hoar.
Mid the crash of mast and rafter
Norsemen leaped through death with laughter
Up through Valhal’s wide-flung door.
Regner Lodbrok thus ends his famous song, the Krákumál: