Lord of frenzy

I'm sure most of you have heard of the Norse god Odin, at least from his appearance in the Marvel universe.  My first exposure to this bit of mythology came from my near-obsession with the book D'Aulaire's Book of Norse Myths, which I checked out from my elementary school library approximately 538 times.  This, in fact, is why to this day when I think of the trickster god Loki, I picture this:

And not this:

Be that as it may, the Norse pantheon is a fascinating bunch, and unusual amongst the gods of myth and legend in being mortal.  In fact, one of the most famous parts of the mythos is the tale of Ragnarök -- literally, "the doom of the gods" -- in which Loki unleashes chaos and destruction by causing the death of Baldr, the beloved god of light and joy.  The whole thing is described in brilliant detail in the Prose Edda and Poetic Edda of the thirteenth-century Icelandic scholar Snorri Sturluson, to whom we owe much of what we know about the beliefs of pre-Christian Scandinavia.

Odin (or Wōden, as he was called in Saxon England; this form of his name is the origin of the word Wednesday), the "All-Father," was one of the principal figures in the Germanic pantheon.  His name comes from a reconstructed Proto-Germanic root *Wōðanaz, which means "lord of frenzy."  There are dozens of curious stories about him -- that he hanged himself from Yggdrasil, the "World Tree," in order to gain the knowledge of the runes and writing; that he created the first man and woman from an ash and a birch tree, respectively; that he gave one of his eyes in order to drink from the well of wisdom; and that he rode upon an eight-legged horse called Sleipnir, that was the offspring of the stallion Svaðilfari and Loki, who had taken the form of a mare.

Odin on Sleipnir (from Den ældre Eddas Gudesange by Lorenz Frølich, 1895) [Image is in the Public Domain]

What I didn't know, though, was that the earliest actual attestation of Odin from any written record is comparatively recent.  A friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link about a study of a gold disk from Denmark that contains the first certain reference to Odin, and I was surprised to see that it dates to only the fifth century C.E.  The disk is called the Vindelev bracteate -- it was found near the town of Vindelev, and a bracteate is a flat pendant.  It states, in runic lettering, "He is Odin's man," presumably referring to some unknown chieftain or leader.

Given the complexity of the legends surrounding Odin and the other Norse gods, presumably their worship goes a lot further back; but I honestly didn't realize how much less we have in the way of early attestations of the Norse pantheon as compared to (for example) the Greek, Roman, Babylonian, Indian, and Chinese assemblages of deities.  Just about everything we know comes from the eighth century and later, the point at which the Vikings kind of exploded out of Scandinavia and did their best to take over all of northern Europe.  They did a damn good job; not only was all of eastern England under Danish control for a time, so were the Hebrides and Orkneys, Normandy (the name itself means "northman-land"), and a good part of what is now western Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus.  (Perhaps you know that the name Russia itself comes from the Rus, a group of Norse traders who ruled the entire region for a while, with their capital at Kyiv.)

So the dating of the Vindelev bracteate to the fifth century certainly doesn't mean that's when the worship of Odin began, only that this is the first certain example of anyone writing about it.  His influence on the beliefs of the pre-Christian Germanic world is immense.  As an Old English runic poem from the ninth century put it:

Wōden is the origin of all language
wisdom's foundation and wise man's comfort
and to every hero blessing and hope.

Perhaps the All-Father would not be upset that this is the way he's remembered, that his association with frenzy and battle was superseded by wisdom and hope, just as the people who once worshiped him settled down to become some of the most peaceful, progressive, and prosperous nations in the world. 

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Captain Odin of the spaceship Valhalla

Last night, I was working out at the gym, and one of the televisions was showing a program about a subject I know and love: Vikings.

My MA is in Scandinavian historical linguistics (yes, I know I teach biology.  It's a long story).  As part of my thesis research I read a good many of the sagas, some in the original Old Norse, the culmination of a passion for the subject I've had since I first found D'Aulaire's Book of Norse Myths when I was in elementary school.

"Odhin," by Johannes Gehrts (1901) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So I was tickled when I saw the program being aired, even though I had a chill run up my spine when I noticed that it was on the History channel.  Given the name, you'd think that the History channel would show programs related to history.  You'd be wrong, although I guess the more accurate name of The Woo-Woo Bullshit channel wouldn't attract sponsors very well.

So I watched the program for a while.  And it turned out to be an episode of...

... Ancient Aliens.

I'm not making this up.  My first thought was that the contention of the show was that the Vikings were aliens, but it turns out that no, they're not saying that.  That would be ridiculous.

They're saying that the Vikings were helped by aliens.

The show featured a couple of legitimate scholars, Kirsten Wolf of the University of Wisconsin - Madison's Department of Scandinavian Studies (which, coincidentally, is where I took my courses in the Old Norse language) and Timothy Tangherlini of UCLA.  Both made coherent and academically relevant statements regarding the history and culture of the ancient Norse, which were (of course) immediately misinterpreted by the wackos who wrote the narrator's script.

"The Vikings were enormously sophisticated in terms of technology: ship-building, bridge-building, fortress-building," Wolf said, which is true, but then the narrator jumped in with, "But many researchers remain baffled at how the Vikings became so socially, politically and technologically advanced, especially while living in the cold, harsh environment of the North...  Just how were the Norse Vikings able to manage such technological and geographical feats?  Are their fortresses and journeys to unknown continents evidence that the Vikings had access to extraterrestrial knowledge?  Ancient astronaut theorists say yes, and believe the proof can be found by examining the religious beliefs of this mysterious people."

Yup.  Those poor ol' scholars, always "baffled" at how "mysterious" everything is.  Good thing we have raving wingnuts like Phillip Coppens and David Hatcher Childress to weigh in on the situation and rescue us from our ignorance with conclusions such as Thor's hammer being a "kinetic weapon," Odin's ravens Huginn and Muninn being "spy drones," and Odin's seat up on Hlidskjalf being "the captain's seat on a spacecraft."

I wonder if it's aerobic exercise to pound your head repeatedly into the wall, because that's what I ended up doing, watching this show.

At least that's better than what Drs. Wolf and Tangherlini most likely felt like doing.  After realizing what idiocy their names had been associated with, publicly, I'm guessing they probably both wanted to commit seppuku.

I kept watching, though, in the fashion of a person witnessing a slow-motion train wreck.  A couple of times, I actually laughed out loud, so it's probably a good thing that the gym was otherwise empty.  One of the best points came when Phillip Coppens explained that the dwarves, mentioned many times in myth collections like the Eddas, were actually...

... the "Grays."  Yup, the same alien creatures we see in such historical documentaries as The X Files and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  Here's what he said, verbatim, or near as I can recall:

Are they real dwarfs, or somehow more mythical, or whether the label “dwarf” actually stuck to them because they were somehow smaller?  And of course today, we often describe the gray alien archetype as dwarfish as well, simply because they are smaller.

Of course, Philip.  Whatever that means.  And along the same lines, I'm guessing that the trolls were the Vikings' way of describing the "Rancor" from Star Wars, and the elves were invented because J. R. R. Tolkien was a time traveling ultra-intelligent extraterrestrial being who went back to the 9th century and told the ancient Norse about Legolas et al.

But watching this show wouldn't have been the complete experience it was without a commentary from Giorgio Tsoukalos, he of the amazing hair, so I was positively tickled when he showed up.  Tsoukalos had this to say about Valhalla:

Valhalla was not a figment of our ancestors’ imaginations, but it might have been some type of an orbiting space station.  The reason why I’m saying this is because we have a description of Valhalla: it is an incredible description of a place that has weird attributes.

Which is such an amazing feat of logical deduction that I can hardly think of a response, other than to say that my classroom has some "weird attributes" and it is not, so far as I can tell, an "orbiting space station."

At that point, I kind of gave up, stopped staring at the television with my mouth hanging open, and went over to use the weight machines, figuring that even if my brain had been turned to cream-of-wheat, at least I could work on my biceps.

So this, my dear readers, is why I don't watch television, except for when I'm at the gym.  I should have changed the channel, really.  Next time I will -- I'll try to find something more sensible and intellectually stimulating than what the History channel has to offer.

Reruns of Gilligan's Island should fit the bill.