388. Viking Mythology: Thor, Ragnarok, & Jesus Christ (Ep 6)

20:14Anita Anand:And it's not just us. Mary Beard is coming. Stanley Tucci's coming. You really couldn't ask for a better guest list, unless you were on it. If you want to join us, head to southbankcenter.co.uk for the full lineup and buy your tickets now. See you there. See you there.

20:36William Dalrymple:Welcome back. So Eleanor, when we were talking about Romans and the Druids, what they hated about the Druids, apart from everything, was this sort of shamanic trait that they had. And they kind of tried to stamp it out as much as possible. The Norse also had a shamanic tradition. So after having the Druids obliterated, you've got the Romans, you've got Christianity, And then what, do they bring the shamanic tradition back? How does that work? So when we're talking about Norse, we might think of them as shamanic traditions, communicating with other worlds, magical practices. We've got one word that we've got to remember, and that's Seder.

21:18And Seder is really interesting because it's one of those places where what we think of as Norse religious tradition does connect to a more general shamanic world that stretches all the way from Siberia to the Arctic, even across to North America.

21:37Anita Anand:Everyone that wants to get into this, read The Children of Ash and Elm by Neil Price, which he did all. He started with anthropology, looking at the Inuit Indians, which have another kind of version of this tradition, and reflecting that back onto the evidence of the Vikings, doesn't he? He's fabulous. Let's say he is the goat of Seyðr, which basically I think would make him Heyðrun, who is the Norse mythological goat. So Neil Price equals Heyðrun. He has really interesting things to say about this Seyðr practice. We have the figure of the Völva, who is the staff carrying Sirus. There's an amazing exhibition at the moment in Copenhagen about the Völiva.

22:22She is the, we think, is the primary practitioner of Sæðr in the human world and in the saga literature and in the Old Norse mythological poems. So the first poem in that Manic Codex Regis, the first poem of that poetic Edda is Völvspau. It's the Völiva's prophecy. It's the prophecy of the seeress. So she's a really important figure. Is she a witch? I mean, it depends on how we define which. The idea, I think, is that she can communicate with other worlds.

22:55William Dalrymple:So more like a Delphic oracle, you know, what we would recognise from the Greek tradition if somebody talks to the gods or reads the signs that the gods are sending back to man. Yes, I think there's definitely something in that. And there are points in the poems where, say, Odin goes to consult her and she really does seem to be a sort of oracle figure there. But then you have other versions that appear in the sagas where these vulva is sort of almost like a hedge witch, a very posh, highly respected hedge witch. She's travelling between communities and she's helping. So, for example, Erik Saga Reidha, the saga of Erik the Red, there's this horrible famine in one of the settlements in Greenland.

23:38And so they call for this vulva. She's called Thorbjörg Little Vulva because she's the youngest of many sisters. And it's this incredible description of her. She comes to the feast.

23:49Anita Anand:In a blue cloak trimmed with cat's hair. Brilliant. Cats and cats are important. I want to just, and I think even like gloves and the cats are really important because cats we think of as being sacred to the goddess Freyja. And Freyja, I think also gets an incredibly bad press in sort of modern ideas of Norse mythology because she's like this sexy, curvy goddess of love. No, she's completely badass. And she is the one that brings Seder as a practice into the Norse world. She teaches Odin the practice of Seyder. We also have the famous Åsaberg ship burial from Norway from, I think it's 834, two women buried in this and they are surrounded.

24:37It's sumptuous. It's so bling. They've got wagons that are carved with cat heads and they've got sledges, but they've also got a lot of what seemed to be magical equipment and I think hallucinogenic substances also there.

24:55Anita Anand:Are they murdered or is this them laying to rest? So certainly there's two. She's probably in her 80s, the older one. She looks like she's died. She's got quite a few health conditions. The younger one is in her 50s and not enough of her body survives that we can say for sure whether she died at the same time naturally or was possibly sacrificed to join her mistress in the next life because certainly there are examples of enslaved people being sacrificed. And in the Arabic texts also. Exactly. Ibn Afadlan. Yeah, exactly. She does have, the only bits of her body that survived, she does have a broken collarbone that had started to heal.

25:38So it's not killed her, but it maybe happened a few weeks before her death so we don't really know what's going on there's also a small chance it's hard to know how much dna survives but they did one test of her dna where it looks like she's got ancestors from around the black sea and so if that's true it's possible that she had traveled all that way maybe because she'd been enslaved maybe not but there's there's a much bigger story going on that we and the really coming back to saver the wonderful thing is they're also buried with this tapestry and on this tapestry there are hanging bodies human bodies hanging as sacrifices from the trees i mean that's horrifying but but also it's i mean

26:21William Dalrymple:taking hallucinogenics communing with the spirits sacrifice all of this is is very you know shamanic traditions wherever you go and you've got a really interesting observation about the the sami people of Siberia that there is a direct link, a line you can draw between the Vikings and the Sami all the way off in Siberia. Tell us how that works. So the interesting thing is that the Sami, who are the semi-nomadic peoples who traditionally occupied across the northern stretch of Scandinavia all the way, as you say, into what's now Russia, that whole area, Finno-Ugric peoples with very strong, what we would call shamanic traditions, but it's this idea of Noaidi practice.

27:10And the thing is that there are cultural links, strong cultural links between the Norse and the Saumi, who they call the Finnar. And when the Finnar crop up in old Norse sagas, they are often magical practitioners. There's a very, very strong link and they're able to send their spirits out of their bodies, go travelling far, predict the future, do all sorts of nasty things if people piss them off. And actually, the oldest written description of a Noaidi shamanic practice that we have comes from a Norwegian text, 12th century Norwegian text in Latin called Historia Noegiae, that describes how some Norse traders are up in Saumi territory and they witness their hostess dies.

27:59And so a Noaidi is called for and he goes into this trance and then he goes into the other world and he fights another Noaidi, a sort of shaman in the form, one of them's in a whale form, one of them's in the form of spikes and one of them, it's like battle of these sort of shamanic beings who are sort of inhabiting the other world and trying to get the spirit of the woman back. And that's all witnessed by the Norse traders there.

28:25Anita Anand:And they have their minds blown by this. This is all stuff that completely shocks them. Yeah, this is a huge, huge deal. And we have to think as well that although we associate the Sami as a people who are living in the kind of Arctic reaches of Scandinavia and across, actually there's plenty of evidence for them inhabiting sort of Uppsala, I think, Oslo. So we have to think, again, this is very culturally connected. We've talked about that in the sense of cultural connections with the British Isles and Ireland. But it's absolutely, if not more true, goes further back in time when we're looking at those Nordic homelands.

29:04Anita Anand:And just before we leave these shamans and before we return to Britain, we have to talk about horse penises. Obviously. Obviously. We do. We do. Okay, we do. All right, we do. There's a few examples of this. And again, we're talking about sagas, but in the poetry that is often embedded in the sagas, which is older than the sagas themselves. But this is from Scandinavia. And it's a point where someone witnesses this sort of this pagan ritual. They're worshipping or they appear to be worshipping this horse penis. And then there's all sorts of banter about what they're going to do with a horse penis later on.

29:45But the interesting thing there i mean so many what where to even go with that we might have to have a special bonus

29:51Anita Anand:episodes on horse penises i think with neil price yeah yeah you you leave neil price to that one

29:59William Dalrymple:that's his problem yeah say how thrilled he'll be that phone call neil we want you to talk neil neil hugely admire your work really love you love your work could you come and talk about If you look at the front cover of Embers of the Hands, have you clocked the little erect penis on there?

30:19Anita Anand:I haven't seen your penis, no. Where's Alan's penis? The interesting thing there is that is probably the god Freyr, who is the fertility god, hence why in some sources he's depicted as having an enormous erect phallus.

30:34William Dalrymple:Can I just say how very filthy it all is when you come on? I mean, incredibly filthy. but you know it's great and clearly we love it because we keep asking you back you said that was one story what is the other story is it cleaner what is the what is the other story the other story is it is and this is actually an important i'm trying to make a serious scholarly point here that gets me away from penises in all forms push through push through oh no wrong phrase wrong phrase abort carry on carry on yes you know these say that are practices that are often associated with women in the Norse mythological stories they are associated with the men as well and so there's this sense of again the edges blurring and of course the figure for that Odin yes and there's this little um oh gosh I think it was found at Lyra this little um silver figurine it's this this this humanoid form uh on a chair wearing what looks like a dress and this very elaborate beaded necklace but also has only one eye and has two ravens or two birds on either so the idea is this is odin sort of in the middle of practicing saver and of course the other character from norse mythology who shapeshifts in this sort of magical way is loki who can also transform himself you know into a into a female horse there's one story where he lures away a giant's horse while he is in the form of a sexy mare for a bit of sexy time in order to stop the giant from building a wall and therefore sort of winning a bet that the gods have had with him and the offspring of this union between loki the horse mummy and the giant's horse daddy is sleipnir that eight-legged horse famous of norse mythology who um you know odin is said to right.

32:25So there's a lot. I think it's a fascinating type of magic.

32:31William Dalrymple:Well, I mean, all of this sort of rich and smutty content that we have in Norse belief, how much of it gallops on its eight legs to Britain? I mean, what does Britain embrace and what does it reject? Right. So this is a really interesting thing because as far as I know, and I think this is true. I can't think of any obvious examples of Norse burials where we would see a sort of vulva or cirrus figure in a way that we do get from elsewhere. And usually they're buried, well, either like the Orsberg ship burial, which is very obviously something is going on there, but also you have somewhere they're buried with staffs.

33:07Anita Anand:It's your broomstick or your magic wand. Yeah. And it does sort of go into that later on. Exactly. In terms of Britain, There are some interesting things. So place names we can come back to again. Rosemary topping. Does not that sound like a dessert? A sort of creamy berry dessert, right? Mr. Kipling makes exceedingly good rosemary topping. So that's a really interesting one, because when that name first appears, I think it's the 11th century is the first recorded appearance of that. It's Odinsberg, so Odin's Hill or Odin's Rock, in the same way that if anyone's familiar with Denmark you have Odense, Odin's sort of holy place is the middle smaller island.

33:52So here we have Odin's Rock, Odin's Hill plus Topping which is just the name of the hill. I think it's very likely there were magical practitioners working within sort of Norse cultural contexts within Britain. There isn't a lot of evidence, but in the sagas, what's interesting is that the Hebrides in particular become associated with magical practitioners.

34:14Anita Anand:To this day, I've met people talking about the seven site and the Isle of Barra and all this sort of stuff. And it's absolutely common. People see funerals before they happen, all this sort of thing. Exactly. And the same is also true in Sami culture. There's still that magical connection. absolutely i have um a friend who's um of saomi heritage and she always says very proudly i knew you were pregnant before you did it's my saomi eye you know she knew she absolutely knew so it's there is there is this sense these traditions keep on traveling in the case of the hebrides leif the lucky very famous for being one of the first norse um sort of explorers to to reach the edge of the North American continent.

34:56There's a part in the saga of Eric the Red, which is also the one that has this amazing vulva figure, where he hooks up with a woman from the Hebrides, and she is a magical practitioner, and they have a baby together. And then we mentioned many moons ago, possibly in the last episode, Eric Bladax, ruler of York, his wife, Gunnhildr, and she, according to the saga tradition, is said to have learned her magical skills from Saami magicians up in the Arctic. That's where she's found.

35:26Anita Anand:This is a woman who's effectively the Queen of York, has learned her magic from Sami. That's so cool. That is so cool. It is very, very cool. And then when you have, because of course, this is a broad cultural diaspora. And so there's people from the British Isles and Ireland moving out, for example, to settle Iceland. And again, we've got a Hebridean family who've settled in Iceland, who are horrible magic makers. They do all sorts of nasty things. Lots of people get killed. And so these traditions are very far travelling.

35:59William Dalrymple:We started the episode looking at the Gospeth cross, you know, the one that has Christianity on one side and three sides of North tradition. It isn't the only cross though. Tell us what else have we got? Yeah, so we've got the Vale of Pickering ones and then Middleton cross very famously where it's, yes, a cross, but something else is going on. The most interesting example in a way is the Isle of Man. There's all these crosses where you can see almost the fullest extent of this kind of cultural syncretism. So you have crosses with runes, runic inscriptions. I think you've got a few with Ogham, not North, sort of more Irish and Welsh.

36:38Anita Anand:Celtic, yeah. Celtic, exactly. Those kind of scratches on the side. But you've got families commemorated on these stones that have very mixed Celtic language names and Norse language names, for example. But you've also got theological imagery that again suggests this difference. So the Andreas Cross, for example, has scenes from the Norse legend of Sigurdr, the hero who's sort of the dragon slayer. And it's that bit where he's roasting Fafnir, the dragon's heart. And they're still being found. This is the interesting thing. So at Jerby, and again, B, nice sort of Old Norse farm name there. It looks like what they've got there is possibly the figure of Heimdall, who's got the horn, and he's blowing it before that final battle to signal that Ragnarok is about to start.

37:26I love that particularly because, you know, back in the mists of time when we were looking at Lindisfarne, we remember there's the raider stone where you have the seven figures with their axes raised and their swords raised on one side. The other side of that stone depicts Judgment Day. You have the cross, the hands encircling, the figures praying at the cross. Here we have another version, but it seems to be incorporating Ragnarok instead.

37:50William Dalrymple:I'm just so thrilled with this synchronicity. Part of me thinks it's frightened people covering all their bases. The other part, which I hope is the right part, is that all of these things can live together. If the supernatural is different, mysterious, and slightly above our understanding, then why can't all these things be true altogether? Yes, and I think it depends on whose point of view we're looking at. Because from a Christian point of view, it's very much one God, everyone else out. Ecumenically speaking, you cannot be a Christian if you also have lots of other gods sitting on the bench behind.

38:25But from a Norse point of view, we're coming back to the Romans. Again, it's this idea of

38:30Anita Anand:Everyone's welcome. Everyone's welcome. Hence these wonderful stories of repeated baptism. Notca the Stammer is my favourite. This is now sort of Carolingian. But there's all these Danes lining up to be baptised and they're running out of baptismal robes because there's so many bloody Danes waiting to be baptised. And the missionaries are thinking, great, everyone is really into our Christianity. But the baptismal robes are getting scabbier and scabbier and dirtier and dirtier as they're trying to pull out anything. And finally, one of the Danes gets to the front and he's given this rubbish little piece of cloth for his baptismal robe.

39:04And he says, look, I've been baptised 20 times and I've always had a really nice...

39:08William Dalrymple:What is this piece of shit? What does this synchronicity mean for different communities coming from different religious traditions is quite tricky. And there's a really important point there as well, which I say religious traditions. The Norse don't actually have a word for religion. They have a word for tradition or custom, which is sidir. Not sidir, the magical practice, but sidir. But they don't have religion as a separate entity. So we have to remember this is where the limits of our knowledge start to blur because we'd have to be looking inside people's heads to understand what's actually going on here.

39:46Anita Anand:That's so wonderful. I love it. So let's come to the end of this period. By the 9th century, we've got these guys, the leaders, beginning to be baptized. They're beginning to get absorbed into the Christian world of England. How long does it take for Christianity to stamp this stuff out for the world of the gospel of the cross, where people have the death of Baldi or Odin, the death of Christ placed side by side? How long is it before that all disappears and we're back properly in a Christian world? or are we never quite completely free of it? That is a question because we don't know what we don't know is incredibly annoying.

40:27So I always think if you're leaving out offerings to the local spirits, a sorcerer of milk for the cat is not going to look any different from a sorcerer of milk to some supernatural entity. So it's not clear. And you say stamping out. Well, we have to remember those St Peter's coins from York from the early 10th century. They are literally stamping Thor's hammers onto Christian crosses. So who knows? But of course, we talked about the Vale of Pickering. And one of the wonderful places you sent me is also one of the ones that I close Embers of the Hands with. And it's that incredible...

41:03Anita Anand:Kirkdale? This is so special. This is this wonderful sundial. Tell us about it. Tell us. We've got the Bayeux Tapestry in London now opening at the British Museum. And one of the key figures in that story, Tostig, is the Earl in this sundial.

41:18William Dalrymple:Can you just end this visit with you, the way you started the whole series with us? We want to read with passion. Come on. OK, so now we're in Old English and that's crucial because we're looking at how someone who has a Norse name, who has a Norse dad, who is doing something that is extremely Christian and he is writing it in Old English. we're around the year 150 something like that it's a few years before battle of hastings isn't it this is the important thing this is sort of this is the sunset of what we might think of as the period we're looking at and it's this sundial and it's now in the porch isn't it so the sun can't actually shine on it which i was already i feel a bit sorry for it it's incredible and it says

42:08To broken and to fallen.

42:12Anita Anand:I love it.

42:20And I agree, to broken and to fallen has become a phrase we use in our household because we were a household of nerds, right? So it's Orm, and that's a very Norse word. Ormer literally means snake, right? Son of Gamal, again, very Norse word, means old, bought St. Gregory's Minster when it was completely ruined and collapsed to Brokkunun to Fallen. And he recently had it built from the ground for Christ and St. Gregory in the days of King Edward and in the days of Earl Tostig. And so there we have someone who's clearly of Norse heritage doing something that is so extraordinarily Christian. Utterly Christian.

43:05Anita Anand:And yet you're still getting it. Every time I go to Hay-on-Wye for the festival, I stop off at Kilpeg. And that is way after the Norman Conquest. That's early 12th century. And it's pure Viking. It's Urnest style. It's a church in Herefordshire. It's got a Schillenigig. It's got one of these sort of very sexy Celtic women showing up, all her bits. And it's got what looks like a Viking warrior entangled in a kind of dragon. And that's it, because the stories don't disappear. None of this. It's not just about belief. It's not just about ritual. There is something, when we're talking about religion, there is just something so much deeper.

43:47And so it's this idea that, you know, the gods of the north may retreat, but they don't disappear. Exactly as you say, they become the dragons on church fonts. You know, they keep going because all this stuff, it's too good to lose.

43:59William Dalrymple:Yeah, and you know what? You are too good, Eleanor Baraclough. We just absolutely adore having you. It's absolutely wonderful. Textured, gallop, rude, smutty, hilarious.

44:12Anita Anand:You are this podcast in one incarnation. Literally, yes, made flesh.

44:16William Dalrymple:Thank you very, very much. That is all from us. Till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnand. And goodbye from me, William Durrenpil.