WTF was going on with Norse mythology?

In My Humble Opinion
1

So I’m a big Norse mythology fan and also kinda into studying proto-indoeuropean language and religion. And it’s obvious, to me that is, that something weird was up with Norse mythology, at least in the form as its been passed down to us.

I want to make it clear right from the get-go that I KNOW the Norse myths were hardcore Hijacked By Jesus. Pretty much everything written about them was written during the Christian era, obviously that’s had an impact. But what I’m talking about can only be partially explained by Christianity, I think; it seems to me that the Norse religion was undergoing some major transformation about the time that Christianity moved in and fossilized it in an intermediate form, so to speak.

Odin/Frigg and Od/Freya: Let’s start here. So we have Odin, king of the gods, who’s something of a dark sorcerer and magificent bastard. Frigg is his wife and a wise, motherly type.

Then there’s the other couple of Od and Freya. Freya is a goddess of war and love and other badass things. Od is her husband and a rambling man. The similarities between Freya and Frigg are immediate: their names stem from the same root word (basically meaning “lady, wife”), they both had magic necklaces and magic cloaks, they were both the chief goddesses of their respective races (Frigg for the aesir, Freya for the vanir).

And whaddya know, Odin and Od’s names also come from the same root (meaning something between poetry and frenzy). They are both noted for going on long journeys. Something funny is going on here. It seems to me like Odin/Frigg and Od/Freya were one godly couple slowly splitting into two.

Loki and Utgarda-Loki: It gets weirder. So there’s this story in the Prose Edda where Loki and Thor encounter a Jotun named… Loki. He’s called Utgarda-Loki, after his castle, to distinguish him from the more famous trickster Loki. Anyway, Utgarda-Loki basically fucks with their heads for the whole story. He also pops up again in the Gesta Danorum, where he’s shown bound and stinking.

Aside from the obvious fact that they have the same name, Loki and Utgarda-Loki are both Jotuns. They are both portrayed as bound and fettered. I kinda wonder if the Utgarda-Loki story in the Prose Edda started out as original flavor Loki, but somewhere along the line someone got confused and split the Loki character into two.

Also, isn’t it a little weird that Loki the trickster god was basically unknown in Anglo-Saxon era England? The other Norse gods are worshipped, but there’s no places named after Loki (as there are for the other gods) nor have any artifacts been dug up featuring Loki, aside from one stone found depicting a man wearing fetters on his hands.

I’m sure there’s a lot more I’m forgetting!

2

I’d think naming something after a trickster God would be bad ju-ju? Are there Loki names in other countries. Googling, I can find a bunch in Scandanavia after Freyja but none after Loki. Hardly did an exhaustive search though.

In anycase, I seem to recall Loki’s position was played up post-Christianity to make him a Satan parallel.

3

Sirius, the dog star, was known to the Norse peoples as Lokabrenna, “Loki’s brand”.

4

Sorry, I should’ve said “place names”. I assume you wouldn’t want to name your town after Loki because he was whimsical and often malicious. Hence lack of such names in Anglo-Saxon England wouldn’t be unique, or particularly suggestive of there not having him in their pantheon. This not particularly authoritative site seems to suggest thats the case, that the lack of using Loki to name places was true in other Norse countries as well.

5

Read thuis book, and all will be made clear:

Norse Mythiology, according to my Uncle Einar by Jane Sibley

6

Well, to be fair to Loki, several other Norse gods didn’t have places named after them: Sif and Heimdall come to mind.

7

Nor the Warriors Three.

8

I’ve heard this before. It seems like the the Norse mythology had to be mapped into the Roman/Greek mythology and modern religion under the idea that all mythology/religion follows a common pattern.

I have to say a lot of the stories don’t make sense as they’ve been related, but I’ve never taken a good look at the source material. I assume there’s a lot of room for misinterpretation in there.

9

Great book, I was popping in to recommend it. She has an interesting take on the legends =)

10

I’m too rusty to add much here. I’ve always been curious about the Æsir–Vanir conflict. It’s certainly not the only mythology to have multiple pantheons. Lots of theories about fusion or takeover between IE and pre-IE religions out there, although I don’t know enough to evaluate them.

11

:smiley:

12

I need that book.

13

No kidding! I read the Look Inside and had to add it to my Wish List.

14

Well, a lot of sections of Genesis are the same story, told twice, but differently. It might be that two oral texts divereged and then merged in collection and writing.

15

In one story, Odin is (a father of “King of Huns”?) from Central Asia who is welcomed by the Scandinavian King Gylfi. Gylfi happily splits his Kingdom with Odin but is then tricked into switching to Odin’s religion.

This story can lead to interesting conjecture.

16

Wrong on at least the last one. Cite. Regarding Sif/Siv, that’s a very common first name in Norway (usually spelled with a “v”). It’d be like, you know, calling a place “Alice” or something like that :wink:

17

Even for someone from that part of the world, it’s difficult get a coherent picture of Norse mythology. We weren’t particularly literate at the time people believed that stuff, and most of the written sources were made some years after the church had taken over the scene. The written sources were based on the rather flowery oral tradition of the skalds, and they surely knew what creative treatment of original material was. They’re hardly matched even by today’s Hollywood scriptwriters :stuck_out_tongue:

As in all other parts of the world, kings and such needed to enforce their position by claiming some kind of god-connection, and if you read Heimskringla, you’ll learn that the kings of the Uppsala region of Sweden descended from Yngve, who also was called Frøy (Frey). Add the poetry and tales invented by the skalds, and you get a pretty inconsistent material.

If you really want to go to the sources, try finding translations of the Eddur. But even there you won’t find a consistent and coherent picture of things.

18

Yes, that seems likely. Another indication of info that’s been lost is Ull or Ullr, a pretty minor god in the stories we have, but there are lots of place names based on his name, and he’s mentioned in the context “Ullr and his gods”, so he has probably been a major god earlier.

Another example is Balder, who’s described as some kind of meek and mild Christ figure by Snorre, but an aggressive bad guy by Saxo (Danish historian ~1200).

By the way, Frøya and Frigg don’t have the same source: Frøya is from “frue” (wife, lady), but Frigg is from “frjá”, meaning “love”. (Source: Vera Henriksen: “Verdenstreet”).

19

Yeah. I met her at Arisia a couple of years ago, and we’ve been trading mythology notes ever since. I have to get to her Mithraic festival one of these years – I really want to, but had trouble getting away.