The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway/Volume 1/Chapter 2
CHAP. II.
OF THE RELIGION OF THE NORTHMEN.
It must strike every reader of saga literature how very little we can gather from the sagas of the doctrines and usages of the paganism which existed among the Northmen down to a comparatively late period, and for five hundred years after the cognate Anglo-Saxon branch, both on the Continent and in England, had been entirely Christianised, and had been long under the full influence of the church and priesthood. The Anglo-Saxons landed in England about the year 450. They appear at that time to have had a religion cognate to, if not identical with, that of the Northmen who landed in England three hundred years afterwards, or about the year 787. Odin, Thor, Friggia, were among their deities; Yule and Easter were religious festivals; and the eating of horse-flesh was prohibited in a council held in Mercia in 785, as "not done by Christians in the East"—which implies that among the Anglo-Saxons also it was a pagan custom, derived from their ancestors. In about a century after the landing of the Saxons, viz. about 550, the Heptarchy was in existence; and in about another century, viz. about 640, Christianity was generally established among them. It was not till a century after their first expeditions, about 787, that the pagan Northmen made a complete and permanent conquest of the kingdom of Northumberland, which they held under independent Danish princes until 953, when independent earls, only nominally subject to the English crown, succeeded; and even at the compilation of Doomsday Book by William the Conqueror, the lands of Northumberland, Westmoreland, Cumberland, and part of Lancashire, are omitted, as not belonging to England. Of these Anglo-Northmen the conversion cannot well be fixed to a date, because they had no scruple apparently of nominally adopting Christianity when it suited their interests; and they appear to have had no desire to convert, or to be converted, in their predatory expeditions. As late, however, as the beginning of the 11th century, the Northmen and their chiefs were still pagans. Swein, indeed, and his son Canute, who in 1017 became sole monarch of England, were zealous Christians; but they and their contemporaries, Olaf Tryggvesson and Olaf the Saint, and the small kings in Norway, were born pagans; and their conversion, and the introduction of the Christian religion and religious institutions into Norway and its dependencies, cannot be dated higher than the first half of the 11th century. It seems surprising that we know so little of a pagan religion existing so near our times,—of this last remnant of paganism among the European people, existing in vigour almost five hundred years after Christianity and the Romish church establishment were diffused in every other country! What we know of it is from the Edda compiled by Sæmund the priest, a contemporary of Are who compiled the historical sagas. Sæmund was born in 1057, and had travelled and studied in Germany and France. He lived consequently in an age when many who had been bred in and understood the religion of their fore-fathers were still living, and in a country in which, if any where, its original doctrines and institutions would be preserved in purity.
If we may take the account of Tacitus as correct, this ancient religion of the Germanic race must have been eminently spiritual, and free from idolatry. He says, in chapter 35. "De Moribus Germanorum," that they held "regnator omnium Deus, cetera subjecta atque parentia;" and, in chapter 9., "ceterum nec cohibere parietibus Deos, neque in ullam humani oris speciem assimilare ex magnitudine cœlestium arbitrantur." The polytheism of the ancient Romans, and the saint worship of the Christian church of Rome, and probably the infirmity of the human mind and language requiring, in an uncultivated state, material forms to represent abstract ideas, had in the course of ten centuries, between Tacitus and Sæmund, undoubtedly mingled with and moulded the forms and ideas of the original religion of this race. Idolatry, in every shape and country, is the result of a struggle of the human mind to attain fixed ideas in religion. It is universal at a certain stage of the development of the intellectual powers of man, because that stage is as necessary to be passed through as infancy in the individual, or barbarism in a society of human beings. A love for religious certainty and truth is at the bottom even of the grossest idolatry, if we analyse it rightly. Idolatry is an attempt to individualise the conception of Almighty power, under a strong sense of its existence—to make it more possible, or more easy for the mind, in a certain stage of development, to dwell upon and entertain some present conception of that power. Idols should be considered by the Christian philosopher as the imperfect words of a much more pure religious sentiment than our churchmen generally suppose—words different, indeed, from spoken or written words, but intended to convey the same conception, and used with the same sentiment by the ignorant idolater as the most poetic imagery and most eloquent language of our pulpit orator. The most absurd idols of the Hindu or the South Sea islander, sent home to the museum of the Missionary Society as memorials of the spiritual blindness of the heathens at this day—idols with four or five arms and wings, griffin-footed, made up, in short, of emblems of all real or imaginary living beings known to the ignorant idolater,—are in reality words of which these absurdly combined parts are the syllables, or rather are the expression of a sentiment of which these are the words. We smile or shudder in holy horror at these uncouth representations, forgetting, in the pride of our philosophy and theology, that the sentiment is the same—viz. the innate feeling of divine power; and perhaps not less intensely felt in the mind which expresses it in these shapes, than in the mind which expresses it in the shapes of written or spoken language. It is but the way of expressing it, not what is intended to be expressed, that is different. Idol-language and word-language have the same object—namely, to express the impression or sentiment of almighty power and divine existence innate in the human mind; and who shall say that we approach nearer to the understanding and expressing of this almighty power and divine nature, "which passeth understanding," with our alphabet, or written or spoken words, than the ignorant idolater, without words in his language to express his ideas, in his carved and painted idol-language? Each means may be the best adapted for different states and stages of the development of the human mind. It has a stage in its development at which, in a highly civilised country, a little black stroke with a dot over it presents to the philosopher, and as he believes in the most clear and distinct manner, all that mind knows or can express of self-existence, of individuality—of I. A wooden idol, representing something like to but different from man, presents to the mind of the pagan all that it can conceive, or with its means express, of superhuman divine existence. Is not this a mere defect in the alphabet used? Is not the real inward sentiment in the mind of man, with regard to the Divinity, the same, precisely the same, whatever be the mode of expressing it? But the pagan, the idolater, the ignorant even of the Catholic church, worship these stocks and stones; and instead of regarding them as signs only shadowing forth what, in its intellectual state, the human mind cannot otherwise express of its religious sentiments, take the signs for the things they represent, and worship them as such. So do we, in all our pride of knowledge and intellectual development. We too worship our signs—our words. Let any man set himself to the task of examining the state of his knowledge on the most important subjects, divine or human, and he will find himself a mere word-worshipper; he will find words without ideas or meaning in his mind venerated, made idols of—idols different from those carved in wood or stone only by being stamped with printers' ink on white paper. This is perhaps the just view which the philosopher and the humble Christian should take, of all the natural forms of religion which have ever existed beyond the pale of the religion revealed to us in the Scriptures.
This necessity of man's expressing in his uncultivated mental condition, by the material visible means of idols, the innate sentiment of religion which he has no other language for, will, if it do not reconcile, render very unimportant the various speculations of antiquaries relative to Odin. Some find that Odin was a real personage, who, on the fall of Mithridates, migrated with his nation from the borders of the Tanais, to escape the Roman yoke, about seventy years before our era. This is the opinion of Snorro Sturleson; and, as far as regards the Asiatic origin of the Northmen, it is confirmed by all the traditions, mythological or historical, of the scalds. Torfæus, reckoning from scaldic genealogies, finds that there must have been an older Odin; and if we are to admit that the god called Odin was a real historical personage, it is impossible to fix, from the traditionary genealogies of those who claimed to be his descendants, at what period he lived. There are no fixed points in the history of the North before the middle of the 9th century, when, about 853 or 854, the birth of Harald Haarfager, who lived to 931, is determined from contemporary history. The scaldic genealogies make this king the twenty-eighth in descent from Odin. If we allow eleven years to each reign, which is the average length of the reigns in the Heptarchy, we must place Odin 550 years after the Christian era. If we take Sir Isaac Newton's computation of eighteen years as the average length of reigns, we bring Odin to the year 368 of our era. If we take lives instead of reigns, we must believe twenty-seven successive persons to have lived so long as to average thirty-five years each, in order to place this god called Odin seventy years before our era. When we turn to the Anglo-Saxon genealogies, we find it still more difficult to place Odin. King Alfred was born 849, or about four years before Harald Haarfager, and is only twenty-three generations from the Odin or Wodin of Hengist and Horsa. Offa, king of Mercia, who lived about 793, is only fifteen generations; Ida, king of Northumberland, who lived about 547, only nine generations; and Ella, king of Northumberland, who lived about 559, is eleven generations from Odin or Wodin. The reasonable view is that of Pinkerton, which has more recently been developed by Grimm and other German writers on Scandinavian mythology,—that Odin, Wodin, Godin, were names of the Supreme Divine Power among the Germanic race; and that Thor, Fryggia, &c. were merely impersonations of divine attributes; that none of these were ever human heroes, deified by their contemporaries or descendants. It may, indeed, be reasonably doubted whether, in any age or country, any such deification of mortals known to be human beings—any such hero-worship as classical schoolmen and antiquaries suppose, ever did take place among any portion of the human race; for it is contrary to the natural tendency and movement of the human mind. It is a trite observation, that no people have ever been discovered by the traveller in so rude and barbarous a state as to be without any sentiment of a Divinity; and that this universal sentiment is more distinctive of the species man even than his reasoning powers,—for in these the elephant, the dog, the beaver, the bee, partake, and almost vie with human beings in the lowest condition of humanity. The writers who make the most of this trite observation in support of natural religion overlook a powerful argument for the truth of revealed religion, in a sentiment equally innate, and as widely diffused among men in a natural state. No people have ever been discovered by the traveller or the antiquary without a strong and distinct impression of the incarnation, past, present, or to come, as well as the existence, of the Divinity. Our divines turn away from this argument in support of revealed religion. They assume that, in the dark ages of every nation, individuals have taken to themselves the attributes and honours of divinity—have imposed themselves upon their contemporaries as gods, or have been taken by their contemporaries or their posterity for gods; and in this schoolboy way great divines, historians, and philosophers think of, tell of, and account for, idolatry and paganism among rude uncivilised nations. But they do not apply to the subject two universally and permanently ruling principles of the human mind in every stage of development: first, that there is no deceiving a man's own consciousness; and, second, that if a man cannot deceive himself, he cannot deceive others. Alexander the Great, or Odin, or the Roman emperors, or the Roman pontiffs, may have placed themselves at the head of the priesthood or church, and may have allowed their flatterers to place their statues among those of the gods, and to append the title of Divus or Saint to their names; but in all this church trickery these men no more believed themselves gods, than their people believed them to be of divine nature. The human mind, in a state of sanity, never was discovered in so low a condition of the reasoning power as to approach to any such conclusions. As to a rude and ignorant people elevating their deceased leaders, kings, heroes, to a place among their deities, it is the last thing a rude and ignorant people would think of; for in a rude and ignorant state the natural movement of the human mind is to detract from, not to elevate, the merits of others; and the valued endowments of body or mind in such a state—strength, beauty, valour, or even wisdom in the narrow range of their public or private affairs—are more generally diffused than the intellectual attainments valued by men in a civilised state, and are neither so high nor so rare as to be deified, instead of being subjects of envy and detraction, or of emulation. In no state, barbarous or civilised, are men disposed to yield superiority, and allow divine honours and attributes to mortals who, as natural self-love or vanity will whisper to every one, are not much superior,—not divinely superior, to themselves. The natural movement and tendency of the human mind are equally opposed in every stage of development, in every state of society, to any such hero-worship. Divines overlook the weight of this argument for revealed religion drawn from natural religion—that it is not from man upwards, but from the Divinity downwards, that this universal sentiment of an incarnation proceeds; that the existence of a Supreme Being is not a sentiment more innate in the human mind, than that of the incarnation of the Supreme Being at some period, past, present, or future; that it is not Jupiter, Mars, or Odin who were men or heroes set up by their fellowmen as gods to be worshipped, but that it is the innate and universal sentiment of the human mind which has set them up. What the mind cannot grasp in one conception, or express in one expression, it necessarily divides; and thus groups of divine attributes have been impersonated as distinct deities, individualised, named, incarnated, by an irresistible instinct to find an incarnation of Divine Power; and these distinct individualisations produced in a rude state of the human mind by the poverty of language, have been made historical personages of. But, looking at the natural movement of the human mind it may be reasonably doubted whether any historical personage, who really lived as a mortal man, was ever made a god of by his fellow-men. The Christian philosopher, who considers the expected Messiah of the Jews, the incarnation of Jupiter, of Odin, and the living incarnation of a Lama among a great proportion of the present population of Asia, will not hesitate to place the accomplished advent of our Saviour upon the same innate sentiment of the human mind as the existence itself of Supreme Divine Power. Both are universal innate sentiments of the mind of man. The divines and Christian philosophers who are not content with resting the existence of a Supreme Divine Power upon the innate sentiment of the human mind, upon the same ground as the proof of our self-existence rests, but who seek to prove the existence of a Supreme Divine Power from the design, contrivance, and wisdom manifested in the material objects around us,—Paley, and the Bridgewater Bequest writers, who undertook, for a prize of two or three hundred pounds given by an English lord, to prove to all and sundry of God's creatures the existence of a God from the mechanism of the hand, the eye, the movements of the planetary bodies, and other natural objects without us, and not from that which is within us,—who seek to prove the spiritual from the material, and not from the spirituality existing and innate in every man's mind,—are not so immeasurably distant from gross paganism as they suppose. They and the pagan,—the Odin-worshipper, or Jupiter-worshipper, or whatever he may be,—proceed upon the very same material grounds, and the pagan appears the closer and stricter reasoner of the two. An ignorant and barbarous people may be wrong in the grounds from which they reason, but are seldom wrong in the reasoning process itself. Their conclusions are usually very correct, only drawn from false premises. They mark the thunder-bolt, and conclude there is a Supreme Divine Cause—a thunder-maker. They mark the ocean,—now calm and smiling, now shaking the earth with its fury,—and conclude there must be an ocean god. This is precisely the reasoning of the Paley and of the Bridgewater Bequest philosophy. The manifest design, contrivance, adaptation of means to an end in a watch, prove the existence of a watchmaker—of the hand, of a hand-maker—of the eye, of an eye-maker—of the world, of a world-maker. But from these material-world grounds these material philosophers cannot deduce, in strict reasoning, the unity of the Supreme Divine Power; still less the moral perfections of the Supreme Divine Power. The pagan proceeds upon exactly the same grounds in his religious belief; but reasons much more correctly and logically from the same material grounds, when he concludes there is a separate Divine Power for each separate class of material objects—a god of thunder, a Neptune, and so on; and concludes, from the material-world grounds, that the superiority of the intelligence that made it, above his which perceives it, is in degree and power, not in kind; and his material-world grounds give him no reason, in his strict reasoning process, to conclude that the divine intelligence, or intelligences, which he deduces from them, are exempt from the passions or frailties of the intelligences he is acquainted with. He attributes, therefore, to his gods, the passions and motives of men; and the Christian philosophers, who reason from the same grounds to prove the existence of the Deity, do not reason half so correctly as the pagan; for these grounds will carry human reason no farther than the pagan goes,—and there Paley, prize-essay divinity, and paganism stick together neck and neck. The material-world grounds prove the existence only of creative power. The goodness, mercy, omniscience, all the attributes of God, are in the innate sentiment of the human mind of an existence of Supreme Divine Power; and upon this innate sentiment or spirituality the material-world argument has to fall back, to rescue itself from mere paganism. The distinctive characteristics of paganism and Christianity are, that the former rests entirely on material-world grounds—and from these grounds reasons strictly and correctly, its conclusions being correctly drawn, but from imperfect premises; the latter rests on the spiritual evidence of the innate sentiment of a Divine Existence, of which every human mind is as conscious as of its own existence—and on Revelation. Paley, the Bridgewater Bequest philosophers, and all that school of Christian reasoners, have, in fact, done infinite mischief to religion, by throwing out of view the innate sense, the spirituality of the human mind, on which pure religion is founded; and by resting its evidences on material external objects, from which the deist, the polytheist, the Odin-worshipper, if such now existed, might draw conclusions in their own favour more strictly logical than this kind of Christian reasoner can; for divine power, and no other of the attributes of the Deity, can be deduced from the material world without a reference to the intellectual, to the human mind, and to the inspired writings. These philosophers have lowered the tone of religion by their evidences drawn from the material world; and their evidences do not, in strict reasoning, prove their conclusions.
Of the doctrine, institutions, and forms of the religion of Odin, we have but few memorials. There are two Eddas. The older Edda is that which was composed or compiled by Sæmund, and of it only three fragments are extant. The one is called the "Voluspa," or the Prophecy of Vola. In the Scotch words "spæ-wife," and in the English word "spy," we retain words derived from the same root, and with the same meaning, as the word "spa" of the Voluspa. The second fragment is called "Havamal," or the High Discourse; the third is the Magic, or Song of Odin. The Voluspa gives an account by the prophetess of the actions and operations of the gods; a description of chaos; of the formation of the world; of giants, men, dwarfs; of a final conflagration and dissolution of all things; and of the future happiness of the good, and punishment of the wicked. The Havamal is a collection of moral and economical precepts. The Song of Odin is a collection of stanzas in celebration of his magic powers. The younger Edda, composed 120 years after the older, by Snorro Sturleson, is a commentary upon the Voluspa; illustrating it in a dialogue between Gylfe, the supposed contemporary of Odin, under the assumed name of Ganglr, and three divinities,—Har (the High), Jafnhar (equal to the High), and Thriddi (the Third),—at Asgard (the abode of the gods, or the original Asiatic seat of Odin), to which Gylfe had gone to ascertain the cause of the superiority of the Asiatics. Both the Eddas appear to have been composed as hand-books to assist in understanding the names of the gods, and the allusions to them in the poetry of the scalds; not to illustrate the doctrine of the religion of Odin. The absurd and the rational are consequently mingled. Many sublime conceptions, and many apparently borrowed by Sæmund and Snorro from Christianity,—as for instance the Trinity with which Gangler converses,—are mixed with fictions almost as puerile as those of the classical mythology. The genius of Snorro Sturleson shines even in these fables. In the grave humour with which the most extravagantly gigantic feats of Thor at Utgaard are related and explained, Swift himself is not more happy; and one would almost believe that Swift had the adventures of Thor and the giant Utgaard Loke before him when he wrote of Brobdignac. The practical forms or modes of worship in the religion of Odin are not to be discovered from the Eddas, nor from the sagas which the two Eddas were intended to illustrate. It is probable that much has been altered to suit the ideas of the age in which they were committed to writing, and of the scribes who compiled them. Christianity in Scandinavia seems, in the 11th century, to have consisted merely in the ceremony of baptism, without any instruction in its doctrines. The wholesale conversion of whole districts by Olaf Tryggvesson, and King Olaf the Saint, was evidently the mere ceremony of baptism. On the eve of the battle of Stiklestad the mere acceptance and performance of that ceremony, without any instruction, was considered by Saint Olaf himself a sufficient Christianising of the pagan robbers, whose assistance he refused unless they would consent to be Christians. From the high importance attached to the mere ceremony without reference to its meaning, it is not improbable that the Christian transcribers, or relators of the historical sagas, may have thought it decent to make the ancestors of the kings or great personages they are treating of, although they had lived in pagan times, partake of the important Christian ceremony which of itself had, in the rude conception of the early Christian converts, a saving power; for we find on the birth of every child who is to become a king, and leave descendants, that "water was poured over the child, and a name given him;" that he was baptized, in short, although living in the Odin religion. Harald Haarfager is stated in his saga "to have had water poured over him, and a name given him," and his son Hakon also, who succeeded him; but we hear nothing of any such baptism of Eric Blodöxe, or of any other of his sons, nor of any whose descendants did not succeed to power as kings. It may reasonably be doubted if any such ceremony was used in the Odin religion on the birth of a child; because these pagans certainly exposed their children—a practice not consistent with dedicating them by a ceremony analogous to baptism to the service of their gods in any way; and if it had no meaning in their religion, it could not be practised, unless in imitation of the Christian ceremony. Marriage also appears not to have been celebrated with any religious form. Polygamy was as fully tolerated as in Asia. Harald Haarfager had nine wives, with several concubines. Saint Olaf had concubines besides his wife, and was succeeded by a natural son; for illegitimacy, where it is not founded on any religious element in the marriage tie, is not considered a natural or just disqualification from inheritance. Marriage appears with the Odin worshippers to have been altogether a civil tie, subject, consequently, to the disruptions which civil circumstances might produce or excuse.
The churches or temples of Odin appear to have had no consecrated order of men like a priesthood set apart for administering in religious rites. In the historical sagas, in the accounts of the direct collisions between Hakon Athelstan's foster-son, or Olaf the Saint, with the worshippers of Odin, in the temples at Mære, and in Gudbrandsdal, no mention is made of the presence of any priests. Bonders of eminence, great people, and even district kings, are mutilated or put to death—suffer martyrdom in the cause of Odinism; but no word is there to be found of any man in sacerdotal function. Three great religious festivals appear to have been held by the Odin worshippers. One, in honour of Thor, was held in midwinter, about the turn of the day; and from coinciding nearly with the Christmas of the Christian church, the name of Yule, derived from Yiolner, one of Odin's names, and the festivity and merry-making of the pagan celebration, were amalgamated with the Christian commemoration. The second, in honour of Friggia, was held at the first quarter of the second moon after the beginning of the year[1]; and the third, in honour of Odin, in the beginning of spring. The convenience of having snow to travel on, and the leisure and facility of travelling while snow covered the ground, have probably been the cause of all these pagan festivals being crowded together in the winter half-year, or between harvest and seed-time. They were not solely nor principally religious festivals, but assemblies of the people at which the regular Things were held, business transacted, and fairs kept for bartering, and buying, and merry-making. An hereditary priesthood descended from the twelve diars, or drottars, or godars, who accompanied Odin from Asia, and who originally were judges as well as priests in the Things held at these great religious festivals, existed at the colonisation of Iceland, and down to the time of Snorro Sturleson himself, who was one of those godars; but the sacerdotal function had become merged in the civil function of judge apparently long before the introduction of Christianity. The judicial functions and emoluments of judge descending by hereditary rights in certain families, as appertaining to their hereditary priesthood, could not be a popular institution, especially with no sacerdotal function to perform. True religion, as we see in Scotland and England, can scarcely maintain itself when it mixes up civil power or great wealth with the religious element in its establishment; and much less can a false religion. We may gather from the silence of the sagas on the point, that the godars had no sacerdotal or religious function in society; and did not, even in the earliest historical period, exist as priests, but as hereditary local judges only, each in his own godard or parish. At the Things at which Hakon Athelstan's foster-son, Olaf Tryggvesson, and Olaf the Saint, come in collision with the religion of Odin, and threaten and even put to death peasants and chiefs who adhere to Odinism, no priests or godars appear, or are spoken of. Their civil power, jurisdiction, and dues or emoluments, however, were derived from their hereditary succession to the priestly office in their respective godards; and it is not unreasonable to suppose that they, their supporters, and the religion on which they founded their rights, were not the popular side at the introduction of Christianity. Some indications may be perceived of its having been a political movement to adopt Christianity. The supporters of the old religion appear to have been the small kings, the rich bonders, and those who may reasonably be supposed to have been themselves godars, or connected with them. The support of Christianity, on the other hand, appears to have come from the people and the kings, and not from the kings alone. In Iceland, where the godars, with their civil powers, were transplanted from Norway by the first aristocratical settlers, and where Christianity had no royal supporters, the Thing of the people declared Christianity the lawful religion of the land. The institutions of Odinism, as well as its doctrines, were evidently become extinct as religion. The incompatible elements of civil power, wealth, and sacerdotal function, had lost all religious influence. The mixture is at this day as ineffective in its power over the human mind as it was in the 11th century, and in the Christian religion as it was in Odinism.
The only practices connected with religion mentioned in the sagas, at which a priesthood may have officiated, are sacrifices, at the three great festivals, of cattle, which were killed and feasted upon. The door-post, floor, and people are stated to have been sprinkled with the blood of the sacrifice by a brush; but even this may be a fiction of the saga-maker, taken from the similar sprinkling of holy water by a brush in the Romish church. The best established of the religious practices of the Odin worshippers was the partaking of horse-flesh at those festivals, as commemorative of their ancestors. This practice was transplanted even to Iceland by the pagan settlers, and it held its ground there long after Christianity was adopted. As food, the horse never could have been reared in Iceland; and a religious or popular superstition only must have kept up such a custom there. The eating of horse-flesh at those festivals appears to have been held as decisive a test of paganism, as baptism of Christianity; and was punished by death in the 11th century by Saint Olaf. Public business, however, in the Things, and the ordinary business and pleasures of great country fairs, appear to have occupied the people at those festivals much more than any religious observances. Public worship under any form, or private or household devotion in the Odin religion, cannot be distinctly traced in the sagas. It is to be remembered however, that it might not have been thought right or safe by the saga-relater or saga-scribe to go far into an account of pagan observances, customs, or doctrines; in case of being considered himself as a believer in them. This may have affected considerably the fidelity of delivery of subjects, both religious and political, in the sagas, when they were still in a traditionary, not a written state. To some cause of this kind we must ascribe the trifling amount of information concerning the Odin worship to be found in the sagas. Religion may have been very little regarded, and a priesthood to support its observances and doctrines may have become a class connected only with civil power and emolument in their godards, and not thought of as belonging to religious service; but still a very strong religious spirit, among some at least of the pagan population, may be inferred from various details in the sagas. We read of many individuals in the reigns of Hakon Athelstans foster-son, of Olaf Tryggvesson, and of Olaf the Saint, suffering the loss of fortune, mutilation, torture, and death, rather than give up their religion and submit to baptism. The religion of Odin had its martyrs in those days, and consequently must have had its doctrines, its devotions, its observances, its application to the mind of man in some way, its something to suffer for; but the sagas leave us in the dark with regard to the doctrines and observances of a religion for which men were willing to suffer. The machinery of the Odin mythology, the fables, allegories, meanings, and no-meanings of the Myths, however interesting, give us little or no information on the really important points,—the amount, quality, and social influence of the religion of the pagan Northmen immediately previous to their conversion to Christianity. The many names of places derived from Thor, and other names given to the Supreme Being in their religion, which are still to be recognised, not only in Scandinavia, but in the north of Scotland, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, show that the Northmen carried about with them some knowledge of their religion. The many allusions in the poems and songs of the scalds presuppose even a very intimate knowledge, on the part of the hearers, with a very complicated mythological nomenclature and system. Every one, from the lowest to the highest, must have been familiar with the names, functions, attributes, histories ascribed to these gods, or the scald would have been unintelligible. The great development of the intellectual powers among the Northmen, is indeed one of the most curious inferences to be drawn from the sagas. The descriptions of relative situations of countries, as East, West, North, or South, show generalised ideas and habits of thinking among their seafaring men; and the songs of the scalds, as those of the four who accompanied Saint Olaf at the battle of Stikleslad, seem to have been instantly seized and got by heart by the people,—the Biarkemal to have been instantly recognised, and thought applicable to their situation; and all the mythological, and to us obscure allusions, to have been understood generally in the halls in which the scalds recited or sung their compositions. Their religion must have been taught to them, although we find few traces of the religious establishment or social arrangements by which this was done.
The material remains of this religion of Odin are surprisingly few. We find in the North very few remains of temples;—no statues, emblems, images, symbols. Was it actually more spiritual than other systems of paganism, and therefore less material in its outward expression? If we consider the vast mounds raised in memory of the dead, and their high appreciation of their great men of former ages, we can scarcely doubt but that the Northmen had higher notions of a future state than that of drinking ale in Valhalla.
The temples of Odin appear to have been but thinly scattered. We hear but of the one at Mære, and one at Lade, in the Drontheim district. A mound of earth alone remains at Mære which was the principal temple in the north of Norway: houses or halls, constructed of wood, for receiving the people who came together to eat, drink, and transact their business, have probably been all the structures. The temple at Upsal, or Upsalr (the up-halls or great halls), should have left some traces of former magnificence; for it was the residence of Odin himself,—the head-quarters, the Rome of the Odin religion; and in part, at least, was constructed of stone. Adam of Bremen, who lived about the time Christianity was first introduced into Sweden, namely, about 1064, says, "Nobilissimum ilia gens templum habet quod Upsala dicitur, non longe positum a Sictona civitate vel Birka. In hoc templo, quod totum ex auro paratum est, statua trium deorum veneratur populus, ita ut potentissimus eorum Thor in medio solum habeat triclinium, hinc et inde locum possident Woden et Fricco." In this passage from a contemporary Christian writer, who, as canon in the cathedral of Bremen,—under the bishop of which all the northern bishops stood at first,—must have had the best opportunity of becoming acquainted with the paganism of the North, Thor is stated to be seated on the throne as the supreme deity, and Odin and Friggia on each side as the minor deities in this pagan trinity; and the temple is stated to have been most noble, and adorned with gold. This temple was converted into a Christian church by Olaf the Swede about 1026; and Severin, an Englishman, was the first bishop. It was plundered of all its wealth, pagan and Christian, by King Stenkil, the son of King Ingve, about the year 1085; and set fire to, and the stone walls only left. King Swerker I. restored it about 1139, and had it consecrated, and dedicated to Saint Laurence. This church appears to be the only building from which the extent at least, if not the magnificence of the temples of the pagan religion of the North, may be guessed at. It stands at Gamle Upsal (Old Upsal), about two miles north of the present town of Upsal, at the end of an extensive plain. Around Gamle Upsal—now consisting of this church, the minister's house, and two or three cottages—there are, according to Professor Verelius, in his notes on the Herverar Saga, tumuli to the number of six hundred and sixty-nine, besides many which have been levelled for cultivation. Reckoning the chain of such hillocks between the town of Upsal and Gamle Upsal, that, or even a greater number of those tumuli, may be conceded to the antiquary. Three of them, close to Gamle Upsal, are called Kongs-hogarne (the king's mounds); and one, oblong and flattened at the top, is Tings-hogen (the Thing's mound). The circumference of these mounds at the base is about three hundred and fifty paces, and the ascent on any side takes about seventy-five steps; so that the perpendicular height may be about ninety feet. It may also be conceded to the antiquary that these mounds are works of art, in so far that they have been reduced to regular shape by the hands of man, and have been used as places of interment, and still more as places for addressing a multitude from—the steep slopes close to each other admitting of great numbers sitting or standing within sight and hearing of a person addressing them. But whoever looks over this chain of sand-hills at the end of a plain which has been a lake or mire at no distant geological period, and with a mire or morass, now called Myrby Trask on the other side of it, will doubt whether these mounds be not originally of natural formation. He is struck at least with the conviction that not only in other countries, but in Sweden itself in particular, such formations of small ridges, and hillocks of gravel, sand, and rolled stones, upon a tongue of land which has originally divided two lakes, are of most frequent occurrence. Here, about Upsal, man has availed himself of a chain of mounds formed by nature; and, as a natural feature of ground, they account for the selection of Gamle Upsal in the earliest ages for the seat of government. With a lake or mire on each side, a narrow tongue of land dotted with small eminences behind each other gave the defenders a succession of strong posts to retire upon; and when missiles of very short range, and spear, sword, or battle-axe, and fighting hand to hand, were the only weapons and modes of fighting, the advantage of the higher ground was the great object in tactics. Gamle Upsal would be strong when the country was covered with wood, and the flat ground was a flooded morass. Of the old buildings, or town, no vestiges remain. Of the temple some of the walls are supposed to be included in the present church; and the old foundations have been traced by Rudbeck and Peringskiold. Its extreme length has not exceeded one hundred and twenty feet; and the rough unhewn small stones of such walls as may possibly have been parts of the old structure do not tell of much architectural magnificence. The arches, whether of the pagan structure, or of the re-edification in 1139, are the round Saxon arch; and the whole is less than an ordinary parish church in England. An exterior line is said by antiquaries to have surrounded the building, and to have been the golden ring, chain, or serpent surrounding the temple of Odin in scaldic poetry; but this has had no foundation but in their fancy. A wooden palisade may, no doubt, have surrounded the temple, with the tops of it painted or gilded; for the Northmen appear to have been profuse in gilding, from the descriptions of their war vessels with gilded sides and prows; and the scalds, in their symbolical inflated language, may have called this the serpent or dragon of Thor: but wood-work leaves no trace to posterity, and of stone-work no mark remains of any exterior circumvallation; and it must be confessed that no trace remains in this locality of magnificence belonging to the paganism of the North. The gold chains, bracelets, armlets, anklets—too small for men, and of exquisite workmanship—which have been found in the North, and are preserved in the museums of Copenhagen, Christiania, and Stockholm, if they really belonged to northern idols, and were not rather the hoarded plunder of vikings gathered in more civilised or refined lands, or of Væringer returned from Constantinople, give a much higher idea of the splendour of the pagan religion of Odin than any architectural remains in Scandinavia. The sites of Sigtuna and of Birca—now Old Sigtuna, mentioned by Adam of Bremen in the above extract—are at the head of the Mælare lake, and would well deserve the careful examination of the antiquarian traveller. Walls are still standing there which have at least the interest of being among the oldest architectural fragments of the North.
The most permanent remains of the Odin religion are to be found in the usages and language of the descendants of the Odin worshippers. All the descendants of the great Saxon race retain the names of three days of the week—Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday—from the Odin religion. Tuesday, perhaps, or Diss-day, on which the offerings to Fate were made, and the courts of justice held, may belong also to the number. Yule is a pagan festival kept in the pagan way, with merriment and good cheer, all over the Saxon world. Beltan is kept on Midsummer-day, all over the north of Europe, by lighting fires on the hills, and other festivities. It is but within these fifty years that trolls or sea-trows, and finmen and dwarfs, disappeared in the northern parts of Scotland. Mara (the nightmare) still rides the modern Saxon in his sleep, and under the same name nearly as she did the Yngling king Vanland; and the evil one in the Odin mythology, Nokke, keeps his ground, in the speech and invocations of our common people, as Old Nick, in spite of the Society for the Diffusion of Christian Knowledge. It is curious to observe how much more enduring ideas are than things—the intellectual than the material objects that mark the existence of the human species. Stone-work, and gold, and statues, and all material remains of this once general religion of the North, have disappeared from the face of the earth; yet words and ideas belonging to it remain.
It is remarkable that in the religion of Odin, as in that of Mahomet, women appear to have had no part in the future life. We find no allusion to any Valhalla for the female virtues. The Paradise of Mahomet and the Valhalla of Odin are the same; only the one offers sensual and the other warlike enjoyments to the happy. They both exclude females. This is not the only coincidence. Odin appears to have stood in the same relation to Thor in Odinism that Mahomet stands in to the Supreme Being in Mahometanism. The family of Mahomet, its semi-sacred character, and its rights, as successors to the prophet, to the throne and supremacy of temporal power over Mahometans, and with equal rights of succession in equal degrees of affinity to this sacred source, is in fact the Yngling dynasty of Odinism. If Mahomet had existed 400 years earlier, he would have been in modern history one of the Odins, perhaps the Odin, and the person or persons we call Odin would have merged in him. The coincidence between Odinism and Mahometanism in the ideas of a future state, in the exclusion of females from it, in the hereditary succession of a family to sacred and temporal power and function, show a coincidence in the ideas and elements of society among the people among whom the two religions flourished; and this coincidence is perhaps sufficiently strong to prove that the religion of Odin must have sprung up originally in the East among the same ideas and social elements as Mahometanism. The rapid conquest by Christianity over Odinism, about the beginning of the 11th century, proves that the latter was not indigenous, but imported, and belonged to different physical circumstances and a different social state. The exclusion of females from a future life, and their virtues from reward, was not suited to the physical circumstances under which men live in the North, although among a people living on horseback in the plains of Asia the female may hold no higher social estimation than the horse. Christianity, by including the female sex in its benefits, could not but prevail in the North over Odinism.
The Odin worship was not the only form of paganism in the north of Europe. We find in chapter 143. of the "Saga of Saint Olaf," an account of an expedition of Karl and Gunstein round the North Cape to Biarmaland, or the coast of the White Sea; and after trading for skins at the mouth of the Dwina, where Archangel now stands, of their proceeding, when the fair was over, to plunder the temple and idol of Jomala. They took a cup of silver coins that rested on his knee, a gold ornament that was round his neck, and treasure that was buried with the chiefs interred there, and retired to their ships. If this Jomala had been Thor or Odin, these vikings would not have plundered his temple, especially as one of them, Thorer Hund, was a zealous Odin worshipper, and a martyr at last to his faith. We find, on the Baltic side of the country, that the Slavonic tribe who inhabit Esthonia had a Jomala, according to Kohl's "Reise in der Deutch-Russisch Ostsee Provinzen," 1842; and the name of Jomsburg given to the fortress of that singular association the Jomsburg Vikings on the island of Wollin, off the coast of Esthonia, seems to have had the same origin. The Joms-Vikings were a military association of pirates inhabiting the castle of Jomsburg, professing celibacy and obedience to their chief, and very similar to the orders of knights—as the Teutonic order, and that of Rhodes and the Templars—which appeared in Europe a century or two later; but these pirate-knights do not appear to have been in any way connected with the religion of Odin, or of Jomala. The Laplanders and Finlanders appear to have worshipped Jomala[2] also; and he appears to have been altogether a Slavonic, not a Saxon god. From the account of the expedition to Biarmaland, the temple and idol of this worship must have been as rich, and the attendance of guards or priests on the temple much greater than in the Odin worship in Norway in that age, viz. the beginning of the 11th century.