A Brief History of the Vikings (7 page)

Perhaps the greatest transformer of all is another of the Norse gods, all the more mysterious for not having any particular area of influence. Loki is a divine trickster, an unwelcome interloper in the hall of the gods, the instigator of childlike mischief that may have endeared him to younger audience members, even if his comedic misdeeds were later punished by the gods
in loco parentis
. Unlike other gods, Loki does not live on in place names in Scandinavia or Iceland. He is as unpredictable as fire (an element with which he is sometimes associated), and like Thor is the offspring of a union between an Aesir (one of Us) and a Jotnar (one of Them); his mother Fárbauti was a giantess. He may also be cognate with Louhi, the Finno-Ugric goddess of the underworld, whose sacred island lay at the south-westernmost tip of Finland, on the Viking trade route with Russia.

By the time Snorri compiled his sources, Loki had perhaps been influenced by several centuries of Christian lore, and was
now seen as a far more devilish figure than he may originally have been. But even in his original tales, he appears to have been cunning. Loki works his way into many of the stories of the Vikings, appearing in cameo roles in tales of Odin, Thor and many other gods. But ultimately, it is he who is the cause of many of the gods’ troubles. If something goes missing or is stolen in Asgard, it is Loki who gets the blame, and usually with justification. Loki is the jester of Odin’s court, a figure of chaos in opposition to Odin’s law, constantly taunting the other gods and meddling in their schemes with schemes of his own.

Loki was a great shape-shifter, although his transformations often brought him even more strife. When he wished to interfere with the building of the halls of Asgard, he transformed himself into a mare in order to distract the builder’s stallion. The offspring of that union was Sleipnir, Odin’s eight-legged steed. It is Loki who can transform into a fly to distract dwarven smiths, or a flea in an attempt to divest the goddess Freya of her precious necklace. He evades pursuit by transforming into a salmon, and even ‘borrows’ a bird-form from Freya (the sagas report this as if he is simply taking her car for a spin). Loki is the progenitor of all disasters, and the father of both the fearsome Fenris wolf, and Hel, the ruler of the underworld.

There are two disasters for which Loki is most famed. One is better known to Western civilization through its modern retellings. While wandering with Odin by a riverbank, Loki sees an otter eating a salmon, and flings a rock at it, hoping thereby to obtain two kills with one stone. Later, they discover that the otter was the shape-shifted form of their host’s son, and that Loki has accidentally instigated a blood feud between the gods and the otter’s brothers, Fafnir and Regin. There are elements here, perhaps, of ownership and hunting rituals – an animist
need to somehow gain permission from a higher authority before hunting in the forests. Viking culture recognized that feuds and vendettas might arise, but also that the injured parties might be bought off with ransom or
manngjöld
– ‘man-gold’ or blood money. Hreidmar, father of the deceased, determines that the otter skin should be filled with gold, and then piled with further gold, until it is completely covered. Already in this tale we see history shining through the cracks – how might a skin be filled with gold? For the tale to make logistic sense, the gold would need to be in a readily usable form, anachronistic coins perhaps.

True to Viking form, Loki agrees to pay the
manngjöld
, and then sets off to steal it. Why? Surely he is a god, can’t he do what he likes? Not if he is a ‘god’ in a story by an Icelander who would expect social retribution for misdeeds. Just as Loki seems peculiarly shifty for a divinity, he is also suspiciously poor. It would seem that the Viking gods might be able to transform themselves into animal figures, but lack any alchemical abilities to make wealth. As gods they seem rather impoverished, but this again may be a feature of the late telling of the tale. By the time of Snorri’s compilation, the Norse gods had already been relegated to secondary status in the eyes of Christians. Although they may have been mighty in the eyes of their surviving followers, to the majority of the Icelandic audience their powers were in doubt.
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Loki realizes that the only way to gain that much gold is to steal it from the dwarf Andvari. Here, perhaps, we see a shaky justification for the persecution of a nearby rival tribe – necessity dictates that the gods, Our people, must appropriate resources from the dwarves, Their people. Andvari himself is able to change shape, and almost manages to hide from Loki by transforming himself into a fish. But Loki finally catches him, and pries every last piece of gold from him, including a
golden ring to which Andvari clings desperately. The ring, says Andvari is the most precious artefact of all, for with it comes the power to gain a new hoard of treasure. Loki will hear none of it, which is fortunate, for when the skin of the otter is filled and covered as Hreidmar dictates, a single whisker can be seen poking through the top of the pile. Andvari’s ring is vital to plug the final gap, and the ransom is paid.

The ring, however, is cursed, and Hreidmar’s family eventually squabble over the hoard. Hreidmar is killed by his sons, and Fafnir transforms into a dragon to guard the gold. In what may be another reference to sibling rivalries over power in the Scandinavian region, Fafnir’s brother Regin enlists the help of the young hero Sigurd, who kills the dragon, but steals the cursed ring for himself, ushering in another cycle of betrayal and revenge.

Thanks to the operas of Richard Wagner, the story of Andvari’s ring is the most familiar to contemporary audiences, albeit in altered form. At the time of Snorri, however, greater resonance would have been felt among his audience for another tale of Loki – that of his greatest misdeed. As with many Viking myths, the story of Loki’s betrayal of the god Balder presents an intriguing mess. There are elements of the story of Christ, and of Achilles, both tales that would have been known to the Icelandic audience, that would have muddied the original tale, whatever it may have been. It may even have had its origins as little more than a historical accident, for which a trickster god got the blame –
Beowulf
mentions a prince Herebeald, accidentally shot and killed by his brother Haethcyn.
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The story also exists in two forms, one from Snorri and a partly contradictory one by Saxo, serving to remind us just how much of the rest of our knowledge of Viking lore issues from the pen of a single, uncontested writer.

Balder is an enigmatic god among the Vikings – if he had
tribal worshippers at any time, they must have died out, perhaps in a genocidal massacre of which his mythological death is a dim recollection. His name is cognate with ‘Bright Day’, leading some to believe that he was a sun- or sky-god after the fashion of Tiwaz, once highly regarded in Scandinavia, but supplanted by Odin- and Thor-worshippers before the commencement of the Viking Age. In both variants of the tale, Balder’s story is one of supposed invincibility laid low. Snorri claims Balder to be Odin’s most cherished son (shades here of the Biblical Joseph story) – unlike the bastard Thor, he is a child of Odin’s true wife Frigg, who secures a promise from all birds, beasts and plants not to harm him. He is therefore invulnerable to all weapons, save mistletoe, a parasitic growth that escaped Frigg’s notice. Consequently, Loki is able to find a loophole, fashioning a dart from the forgotten plant and enlisting the unwitting aid of Hoder, a blind god, whose functions in the saga seems solely to play Loki’s patsy on this fateful occasion.
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Hoder hurls the dart at Balder, who proves to be not so invulnerable after all, and is sent to the underworld, where further intrigues by Loki keep him.

The Saxo story is palpably different, and gives a much more prosaic interpretation. Saxo still spins a yarn, but one that seems much closer to the allegorical tribal feuds that inform so many other Norse tales. In Saxo’s version, Balder is a warrior, raised by a race of amazons not named as valkyries
per se
, but with equivalent powers to choose the slain. He is rendered invulnerable by a peculiar diet of food drenched in snake poison, building a gradual immunity both to that and other sorts of danger. Balder is a god, hence one of Us, and keen to win the hand of the fair maiden Nanna. She, however, is also desired by Hoder, a human warrior (one of Them). Hoder realizes that he must fight Balder in order to gain Nanna, but to defeat him he will require a magic sword, guarded by the
satyr Mimingus.
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Saxo describes several battles between the forces of Balder and those of Hoder (suddenly, armies and fleets are involved, inflating the tale from simple argument to some sort of war). At the end of the prolonged conflict, Balder lies dying, wounded by the charmed sword. Hoder marries Nanna, but is later slain by Boe, a child of Odin conceived with the deliberate purpose of avenging Balder’s death.

Both versions of the story also include a section in which a god (Odin in Snorri, Hermod in Saxo) must journey into the underworld, accounts whose origins could be anything from outright steals from the
Odyssey
or
Aeneid
, to allegories of spirit-trances, to poetic allusions to mundane hostage-taking and negotiations. Saxo’s account is most notable for its lodging of the Balder myth firmly in the real world. Although elements of the tale are undeniably fantastical, Saxo includes details of Balder’s tomb, and even the account of one Harald, a tomb-robber who broke into the burial mound in the twelfth century, only to be thwarted in his quest for treasure by subterranean floodwater.
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While slightly more believeable and rooted in reality, Saxo’s tale lacks the big pay-off of Snorri’s, for Snorri’s version holds that the death of Balder will ultimately lead to the end of all things. Loki was held responsible both for Balder’s death and for the technicalities that kept him in the underworld – Loki, it is assumed, transformed himself into a woman of the Jotnar who refused to weep for Balder, perhaps a reference to botched funereal rites. Rightly fearful of the fate that lay in store for him, Loki transformed himself into a salmon. Inventing the net in order to catch him (an idea the gods appear to have while staring drunkenly at the crossed charcoal twigs in the remains of a fire), the gods tie him to flat stones in the entrails of one of his sons. In an echo of the legend of Prometheus, he is left bound, beneath the mouth of a snake that drops poison on to
his face. His wife holds a bowl to catch the poison, but each time she goes to empty it, Loki is left unprotected for a few moments, and his agonized writhing causes earthquakes.

While such an imprisonment represents the end of the road for Loki’s troublemaking, it also marks his expulsion from Asgard and his feeling a new hatred for the gods that have treated him so. Next time he appears in Viking myth, it is in the apocalypse, as an agent of the enemies of the gods.

By the time a written record was made of the myths of Viking End Times, it is possible that the mythology had been seeded with ideas and concepts from Christian stories of the apocalypse. But the Viking world-view seems curiously terminal, with many elements aimed not at avoiding disaster, but at meeting it head-on. This may partly relate to a cycle of death and rebirth, a wheel of the seasons repeated on an annual basis. It may also have certain roots in climactic conditions in the Middle Ages. As the long summer of the Little Climactic Optimum began to tail off, the descendants of the Vikings lived amid palpable signs of declining temperature. Particularly in Iceland, where Snorri compiled his sagas, the seas were filling with pack ice at earlier times each year, and to a greater extent. This, then, might have had some influence on Snorri’s concept of the
fimbulvetr
, a long period of great cold, in which the world inexorably became locked in ice – if this is the case, then his elaborate apocalypse owes more to his time than that of the Vikings whose myths he hoped to record.

As the climate cooled, the sagas claimed, there would be other signs of the End Times. Three cocks crow, one at the place of execution, another in the halls of the dead, a third in hell – the similarities with St Peter’s infamous denial of Christ are too obvious. The world is engulfed in far-ranging wars, brother fights brother and rapes sister. The Fenris wolf either breaks free of its chains or is set free by an evildoer, and
rampages through the earth and sky, eventually eating the sun. All chained beasts and monsters somehow escape their cages, and
Naglfar
, a ship made of the nails of corpses, puts out to sea, crewed by angry Jotnar, and helmed by Loki himself, the trickster god finally showing his true colours and defecting to the enemy. Other giants charge across the rainbow bridge of Bifrost, overwhelming Heimdall the faithful watchman, although he is able to blow his horn in warning – there are shades here of Gabriel’s trumpet, or the
Song of Roland
, which would have entered popular consciousness a generation before Snorri compiled his
Edda
, but not necessarily of actual Viking myth. The weight of the fire giants causes the rainbow to collapse, and they fall to Earth, ready to join their ice giant cousins in a final battle on Vigrid, the plain of ice.

This, then, is
Ragnarok
, the doom of the gods to which Snorri claimed Norse mythology would strive, as each god meets his diametric opposite in a fight to the death. Odin, the Lord of Hosts, leads his undead warriors out of Valhalla – this is where the Vikings saw themselves on that fateful day, charging towards the hordes of giants with their fellow warriors at their side, amid an unearthly army of screaming Valkyries. Heimdall fights Loki (so much for the ship, and Heimdall’s post at Bifrost). Thor fights his nemesis, the mighty World Serpent, smiting it with his hammer but drowning in its poison. Tyr faces Garm, the hound of hell he once bound. Or was it Fenris? No, it cannot be, because Fenris is fighting Odin himself. The wolf kills and eats the ruler of the gods, but Odin’s son Vidar has a magical iron shoe, with which he stamps on Fenris’s jaw, lifting up with all his strength to tear the wolf asunder. Frey fights Surt, the lord of the fire giants, and seems easily bested by him. But at the end, after the battle to end all battles, only Surt stands, flinging flames to all quarters, consuming the world in a terrible fire, itself only
quenched when everything that was once the world of men is engulfed by the sea.