It’s an unfortunate fact that nearly all of the Germanic and Celtic mythology that we have was written by Christians centuries after paganism died out. That’s like if the only Greek mythology we have was one of the Homeric epics and Ovid’s Metamorphoses… as written by Christians hundreds of years later. It’s truly tragic the amount of literature that has been lost to time, and quite a blessing that we have as much as we have. But that means we have to be discerning when it comes to how we interpret the Eddas.
For example, pretty much no one takes Snorri’s origin story for the Germanic gods seriously. He claims that they’re exiles from Troy (medieval people really wanted to claim ancestral or cultural descent from Troy, and therefore Rome) who settled in Germania and were so impressive to the local barbarians that they were worshipped as gods:
Odin had the gift of prophecy, as his wife also did, and through this learning he became aware that his name would become renowned in the northern part of the world and honoured more than other kings. For this reason he was eager to set off from Turkey, and he took with him on his journey a large following of people, young and old, men and women. […] Wherever they went on their travels, tales of their splendour were told, making them seem more like gods than men. —Snorri Sturluson, The Poetic Edda.
You don’t need to be a scholar of Old Norse to know that pagans didn’t actually believe that. Snorri is just writing in a convenient justification for pagan gods within a Christian metaphysical and cultural framework, and such a justification exists in other sources. But then that raises the question — what else is a Christian interpolation?
We’ll probably never know the complete answer to that, but we can make some guesses. Stuff like this…
All men who are righteous shall live and be with him [Odin] in that place called Gimle or Vingolf. But evil men go to Hel and from there into Niflhel, which is below in the ninth world.
That strict division of the dead into righteous and unrighteous, with the righteous living with the gods and the unrighteous going to the underworld, sounds quite Christian. It also doesn’t hold up throughout the rest of the Eddas, even in Snorri’s own work. When the god Baldur dies, he goes to Hel:
Then Hermod rode up to the hall [of Hel]. He dismounted and went inside. He saw that his brother Baldr was sitting in the seat of honour.
If Hel is the place where bad people go, then why is Baldur there? Baldur is unambiguously one of the best entities in the world, to the point where everyone but one giantess (who’s probably Loki) wept for him. I guess one could argue that one of the Æsir wouldn’t go to a place of the dead that’s still in Asgard, but honestly, nothing about his presence in Hel makes sense unless Hel is simply the place where the majority of the dead go, without any further judgement.
We might never know exactly which bits of the Prose Edda are influenced by Christianity and which ones aren’t (apart from the Trojan War stuff, which is just plainly ridiculous). The Poetic Edda is a bit of help here, because it is is older than the Prose Edda. The manuscript that we have of it was written around the same time, but we know that the poems themselves are older. For one thing, Snorri frequently quotes the Poetic Edda; it’s one of his sources. For another, I recently learned that its meter suggests an older form of the language. So, it’s more likely to be authentic pagan mythology, or at least closer to it. It is more obtuse, though; there are a lot of stories that it vaguely references but doesn’t give the full context of, which Snorri tells more straightforwardly. Other tales in the Poetic Edda go into more detail about things that Snorri only summarizes. Some stories in the Poetic Edda aren’t mentioned in the Prose Edda at all (like, for example, Þrymskviða, which is about how Thor dressed in drag to get his hammer back from a giant).
What about Ragnarok? Ragnarok is suspiciously like Armageddon. Not a lot of pagan religions have a true Doomsday end-of-the-world that’s supposed to happen sometime in the future. Mythologies usually aren’t a consistent narrative with a beginning and an end — they just bleed into the present, a present in which people actually worship the gods and call themselves descendents of the gods. It’s also convenient that Ragnarok ends the reign of the old gods, so that they can be replaced by the new one, i.e. Jesus. The threat of Ragnarok is intrinsic to many of the stories that Snorri tells, but Ragnarok is explicitly mentioned only once in the Prose Edda:
Are these just delusions, that I think I can see dead men riding, or is it Ragnarok?
That’s it, that’s the only direct mention of Ragnarok — it’s an event at which the dead come back to life. The events of Ragnarok are alluded to elsewhere, though, like for example, Fenrir destroying the Sun is mentioned in Vaþruðnismal, and the whole Voluspa is a prophecy of Ragnarok:
Brother will fight brother and be his slayer, sister’s sons will violate the kinship-bond; hard it is in the world, whoredom abounds, axe-age, sword-age, shields are cleft asunder, wind-age, wolf-age, before the world plunges headlong no man will spare another.
(If you’re familiar with The Witcher, “the time of the sword and axe is nigh” is a reference to this.)
[…] I see further ahead to the mighty Doom of the Gods, of the victory-gods. […] Then Frigg’s second sorrow comes about when Odin advances to fight against the wolf and Beli’s bright slayer against Surt then Frigg’s dear-beloved must fall. Then comes Victory-father’s strong son, Vidar, to the Beast of Slaughter; With his hand he sends to Loki’s son’s heart his sword to stab: then his father is avenged. Then comes Hlodyn’s glorious boy: Odin’s son advances to fight the serpent, he strikes in wrath Midgard’s-protector, all men must abandon their homesteads; nine steps Fiorgyn’s child takes, exhausted, from the serpent which fears no shame. The sun turns black, land sinks into the sea, the bright stars vanish from the sky; steam rises up in the conflagration, hot flame plays high against heaven itself. […] Without sowing the fields will grow, all evil will be healed, Baldr will come; Hod and Baldr will settle down in Hropt’s victory-homesteads, the slaughter-gods are well — do you want to know more: and what? —Voluspa
It’s Ragnarok, right? But are we to take Snorri’s word for it regarding the larger context? And the Voluspa itself was likely influenced by Christianity to some extent (though to what extent is hotly debated). Maybe Christians looked at an older version of the Ragnarok story, thought it sounded a lot like Armageddon, and interpreted it through that lens, while also making the gods look more unsympathetic so that they could be more easily rejected. Maybe Ragnarok was originally meant to be interpreted differently. We can’t really know.
Christian influence is always sort of lurking in the background wherever Germanic literature is concerned. Paganism has to be very carefully teased out, and then double-triple-checked against all available evidence to curtail wishful thinking. I’m doing this right now; I’ve decided that I’m going to reopen the question of whether Beowulf has anything pagan in it. I haven’t found any modern scholarship on this matter, meaning that it’s basically an open-and-shut case — Beowulf is not pagan. I intend to argue that it’s syncretic, and that there are pagan undercurrents still in it. To do that, I need to compare Beowulf to the Old Norse literature that’s more explicitly pagan, but the Eddas were written three hundred years after it. Unlike the Eddas, Beowulf exists practically in a vacuum — it survives in only one manuscript, and it is not quoted or referenced by nearly anything else. So, what is it, what is it based on, why was it told, and how am I supposed to say anything new about it?
It’s certainly better to have these imperfect sources than to not have them at all. While Norse pagans don’t have as much to work with as Hellenic pagans do, there’s just enough for them to reconstruct bits and pieces. For example, Snorri helpfully provides long lists of poetic epithets for each god at the end of the Prose Edda, which I wasn’t expecting. One of the poems in the Poetic Edda is a long list of moral precepts and advice attributed to Odin, a valuable philosophical resource. The Christian influence is there, but it’s not so overpowering that the pagan stuff gets lost.
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