Nordic Tales: Understanding The Norse Afterlife | Myths & Monsters

The tales have been told since man first gathered around the fires of prehistory. Tales of the strange and wondrous things hidden in the vast unknown shadows of the world. Tales of creatures divine and beasts demonic, of gods and kings, of myths and monsters. From dark forests to the lands of ice, from desert wastes to the storm's thrashed seas, every corner of the earth has its legends to tell. Stories of heroes and the villains they encounter, of the wilderness and the dangers within. Stories of battles, of love, of order, and of chaos. But what are the roots of these fantastic tales and why have they endured so long? In this series we'll explore the history behind these legends and reveal the hidden influences that shaped them. War and disease, religious and social upheavals, the untamable ferocity of the natural world, and above all the monsters lurking within ourselves. All things come to an end. Mighty trees wither, monuments crumble, and even the brightest star in the night sky will one day lose its luster. We too must face our mortality. Universal though death is, every culture varies in the rituals and beliefs that surround it. How death is dealt with tells us far more about the living than it does about the dead. What a culture thinks death is, is in many ways less a statement about death than a picture of the inside of a collective mind. We tend to imagine the moment of death as a moment of summation, a moment that clearly tells us what we've been. It can tell us about what is considered a good death and a bad death and what that then tells us about broader social values. A culture's beliefs about death reflected their attitudes towards life. In their hopes for the hereafter, in their stories of resurrection and their visions of the end of the world, societies revealed what is most important to them. It was an age of the axe and the sword, of the wind and the wolf. The kingdoms of the earth had fallen into chaos. Survivors sought what shelter they could find. For a mother and her child, the shattered remnants of an abandoned village offered comfort in these times. But starvation and despair had made monsters of men. The whole world groaned beneath them. A storm, the likes of which you'd never seen, scorched the sky. Ragnarok was upon them, the twilight of the gods. Death is a test of what being human means. It probes our responsibilities to family and the community and it asks what value we place on our links to the past. The afterlife in Norse mythology was not a single place. The best and bravest went to Valhalla, but most were not so lucky. A darker place awaited them. Through a sunless valley they had to walk, along a path carved deep by the dead. There lay a land draped in fog, glimmering with misery. Even the most beloved of gods was one day trapped there. Baldr was the son of the gods Odin and Frigg. He was fair and wise and admired by all. Baldr is one of the most interesting gods in the Norse pantheon. He is beautiful, he is literally shining, he is in a sense the best of the gods. As a result, like all people who are loved and admired and who seem intrinsically good, he's kind of doomed. There's a prophecy that he's going to die. Baldr dreamt of his death. So did his mother, the goddess Frigg. So she traveled all around the cosmos, extracting a promise not to hurt Baldr from every pebble, plant, bird and beast. But she had made a mistake in her oath gathering. There was one thing she had missed. She doesn't ask the mistletoe. Now, we're not sure why the mistletoe was excluded. It was clearly a sacred plant of some kind, possibly because it whines around something else. It said that this was a very weak plant, so she didn't bother asking it. For whatever reason, there's this one seemingly harmless thing in the entire world, which does not promise that it will not injure Baldr. Meanwhile, the gods had invented a new pastime, using Baldr for target practice. They hurled rocks at him, trees at him, and anything else they could find. No matter how mighty the throw, or how sharp the missile, Baldr was unharmed. But one god knew more than the others. Loki, the mischief maker, had heard of Frigg's mistake with the mistletoe. He thought of a better game. Loki is determined to bring about the death, and so he coaxes the mistletoe into growing bigger and bigger, and then eventually crafts it into a which he hands to Baldr's blind brother, Hod. Hod threw this missile at his brother, but instead of bouncing off, the dart of mistletoe pierced Baldr's heart. The horrified gods could only watch as the best and most beloved of them fell down dead. This version of Baldr's death was not of the Viking era. It was among the stories compiled at least a century later by an Icelandic poet named Snorri Sturluson. He was a poet, he was a lawyer, he was a politician, he was a historian, and he wrote down many of the Norse myths. Now, what's interesting, the way Snorri writes them, he kind of writes them as a complete narrative. He kind of makes all of the bits match up with one another, so you can sort of see him selecting bits, probably making up a few bits as well, so that you get this whole history, this whole coherent history of the Norse gods, rather than fragmented myths, and rather than sort of variants of fragmented myths, which is actually the normal way that you would find mythology. Earlier versions of the tragedy depicted Baldr as an aggressive warrior, but in Snorri's telling, he is mild and joyful. It's only the treachery of the wicked that leads to his death. It's one of those stories where many critics have suggested that we can detect the influence of Christianity. The whole of the Eddas were written by Christian people, and that's one of the tales that most scholars believe is influenced by Christianity. Snorri is not Christianizing things in the sense that he's kind of repressing paganism. It's much more that he's harmonizing the stories. Baldr is beautiful, and he's good, and yet he's doomed to die, and he does die, but he's also resurrected, so it does have a Christological feel to it. It's a myth which I think also allows you to see how cultures are able to bridge a pagan world and a Christian world in a very creative sort of way. In Snorri's telling, a near-Christian perception of good and evil was introduced to the old tale. Loki is wicked and devil-like. Baldr is guiltless, near-perfect. Even the most perfect of us cannot cheat death, however. Like the Norse gods and their games, we may amuse ourselves to forget that there's no getting away from reality. Death is inescapable, but as the myths and countless traditions tell us, it may not be the end. The enemy were on the march, monsters and demons, giants and world-breakers. They were coming for the gods. Odin, chief among the gods, sought no counsel but his own. Long had he awaited this day. The gods gathered in their feasting hall. The rafters shook to rumor and discord. The world tree had shuddered. The Gjallarhorn had sounded. Their doom had come. We will not shrink from this battle. Odin silenced them all. We will face them. We will fight. We will fight together one last time. The gates of Valhalla, sealed so long, swung open. The mighty warriors of ages past marched forth to war. An eternity had they readied themselves for this. The final battle was about to begin. Valhalla was Odin's domain. The majestic hall, thatched in golden shields, was home to the bravest of Norse warriors who fell in battle. No such paradise was in prospect for the warriors of ancient Greece, however. Great heroes and lowly servants alike descended into the vast darkness of the underworld. A river stood before them there. Only those who'd been properly buried with a coin beneath their tongue could pay the ferryman to take them across. Nowhere is the question of proper burial more pressing, or the consequences of getting it wrong more tragic, than in the story of Antigone. Two brothers had fought for the crown of Thebes. Polyneices had raised an army to unseat his brother Aetocles. In the mighty battle that followed, each had fallen to the other's sword. Their mourning sister Antigone was left to bury their bodies. But a new king had taken the throne. Creon was his name. He decreed that traitors should not receive burial. He refused Antigone permission to bury Polyneices. Defying the laws of the gods, he ordered that the rebel be left to rot on the battlefield. Burial was insanely important to the ancient Greeks. The essential Greek idea of what happens to the dead meant that unless you were properly buried and properly mourned, you couldn't make the transition from life into death, and instead were kind of trapped between life and death in a miserable, dissatisfied state. The ritual itself took three stages. There was the preparing of the body, the carrying out of the body, the procession of the body, and then the actual internment or the cremation. You had to do the ritual right to mean they could go and be at peace in the underworld, as it were. Because it's so important, it therefore follows that for someone to be unburied struck the Greeks as horrific. All societies have rituals surrounding burial. They convey the dead from this world to the next, but they serve a function for the living as well. Funerals tell an individual's life story from the perspective of the community. It emphasises what the community sees as being valuable in the individual's life. By having a funeral, it's a way of saying, well, our society, the group to which I belong, will continue. It's also a ceremony in which the dead are sort of escorted to whatever is going to happen to them after they die, and are in a sense made to stay there. They're ritually a really important moment for passing the dead person into whatever happens next, and then allowing the family of the dead person to come back out of a phase of being polluted by association with a dead body, being reintegrated into society. In 6th century Athens, the rich and powerful commemorated themselves with grand monuments. By the following century, however, fashions had shifted. More modest grave markers were the norm. Something had changed, but what? In the 440s, Athens was beginning to empire build. It had been at the head of the Delian League, which had been a group of Greek cities gathered together to throw off the Persians, stop them invading Greece, that had kept banded together, but was becoming less and less a group of cooperative people, and more and more an empire by proxy with Athens at the head. The Athenians come into money. They decide to spend it on huge cultural projects. That's why they build the Parthenon, so that everyone sees Athens as the most beautiful city they've ever seen. But if Athens could flaunt those new riches, its citizens had to be more restrained. Few individuals dared build more than the most modest of tombs. They were eclipsed by the thrusting imperial state. If you die on the battlefield, we start to see a way in which, rather than individual burial, people are brought back to Athens, they are separated into their tribes, and you are put into a tribal team. It foregrounds the way in which epitaphs and what gets written on your grave become more and more of a public matter, and a moment in which the public contribution of an individual is stressed, which seeks to incorporate the military dead into the life of the city itself, saying that the city exists because of them, and therefore owns them, owns their lives and the sacrifice that they've made. They no longer belong to themselves or to their families. They now belong to Athens. Antigone too was caught between the needs of the nation and those of the individual. She could obey Creon's edict and leave her brother to the scavenging birds, or follow the law of the gods, bury Polyneices, and free his soul to enter the underworld. She chose to defy the king. It was just a sprinkling of soil, but that was all that was needed to satisfy the gods. Creon was furious. How dare this girl defy him? She had to be punished. So the king ordered Antigone to be entombed alive, sealed up in a mountain cave. The rule of law Creon so prized would come with a mighty cost, however. First his heir, Antigone's fiancé, killed himself from grief. Then his wife took her own life as well. Although written almost two and a half thousand years ago, the tragedy of Antigone exposes tensions in society that we debate to this very day. The words of Athenian playwright Sophocles speak to us still. Antigone captures a really compelling moral tension about whether what Antigone did in defying Creon's order was right. The reason that carries on being so compelling is the battleground of what right is keeps on shifting. For the ancient Greeks, it was sort of very much about respect for the gods, about piety, and Antigone saying, well, your rule, your law does not override the law of the gods. At what point do you have to act? When must you do something in complete defiance of the law? When does it actually override everything, including your own self-preservation instinct? So the question of was Antigone right is one that every generation and every society comes to with its own sense about what right does and doesn't look like. Ancient Greeks did not believe death was the end. Their souls would wander the sad fields of the underworld for eternity. This seemingly dismal fate offered one comfort at least to those left behind. They had little reason to fear the dead. The spirits of ancient Greece could be irritable if dishonored. They could be unpleasant, but they were not dangerous. That was not a belief shared by all cultures. Centuries later, Europe would be stalked by fears of unhappy spirits seeking revenge and of the undead who feasted on blood and flesh. The sky was rent asunder. The great battle of the gods had begun. The dread wolf Fenrir, that beast of slaughter, strained to join the fight. Odin stood fast with his dwarf-forged spear and helm of shining gold. The Midgard serpent, immense and writhing, dripped venom foul and deadly. Facing him was mighty Thor, brave warder of the earth. He summoned up his strength and all the power of his hammer. More lethal still was the fire giant Surtr with his body of riven flames. It was Freyr the Bright and his boar steed Golden Mane who joined battle with this demon. The earth convulsed as the fighting raged. In the cataclysmic events of Ragnarok it is giant snakes and wolves that run amok. Yet perhaps more frightening and more fascinating are the monsters closer to humans. The ones that walk amongst us. The ones who look like us. The ones who were us. The river streaked plains of Serbia. Once a borderland between east and west, its soil was little troubled by the plow. Few hunters roamed its trackless forest and the strongest trade between its few villages was rumor and superstition. In 1725 the tiny hamlet of Kilisova became the talk of Europe. For nine people had died within a week with no sign of sickness and no sign of plague. It seemed impossible. In fearful whispers the rumors spread. A nightwalker was stalking the village. It throttled men in their sleep some said. But others insisted on a different explanation. The nightwalker they said ate human flesh and drained its victims of their blood. Tales of demons who consume the flesh and blood of the living are nothing new. They've been found throughout history in nearly every culture around the globe. The belief in the undead coming back to nourish themselves in some parasitical inimical way on the bodies of the living is very widespread in human cultures. The consistent things about societies is that once the dead are dead we really want them to stay dead. There is an almost universal fear that if the dead return they will somehow damage the living. As soon as an imperial official from Vienna had arrived in the village as witness they began digging. But just before the nightwalker had claimed its first victim an old man had died in Kilisova. This was the grave the villagers opened. What was found within stunned the imperial official. The old man's body was pink and fat. His hair and fingernails had grown and his mouth was wet with the blood of his victims. A typical person would say oh no no hang on this is natural decomposition. This is the gases in the corpse. This is the pooling of blood. This is the fact that hair and nails don't really grow afterward. It's the corpse is shrinking. This can be explained. It's medicine. It's perfectly natural. Well that's fine but it isn't necessarily going to address the anxieties and the fears. The villagers of Kilisova removed the old man from his grave. They drove a metal stake through his heart and burned the body on a fire. For the villagers were convinced the old man was a vampire. It's essentially a revenant. A dead person coming back. They're wrapped in their shrouds. Often they're bloated, slavering and they cause death more by contagion. They're not bloodsuckers to start with. Of course it is fascinating that a third category arises between the world of the living and the world of the dead. It's inexplicable and it's possibly threatening, possibly liberating. The story of the A vampire panic was spreading across Europe. Inevitably it left its mark on wider culture. In 1816 a group of authors and poets held a ghost story competition. Famously it led to Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein. Another contribution came from Lord Byron. He started a novel about the foul feeders of eastern legend. He never finished it but his friend John Polidori was inspired. He wrote a short story based on it. He called it The Vampire. These are writers who are products of the enlightenment. They're not a religious persons but they are persons who no longer believe in the Christian story. They are therefore looking for alternate stories to tell about the world of death. The Vampire of course offers that crossover figure. The vampire story in the 19th century develops in a very different way from the folklore vampire. You get this very very popular figure of this elegant nightwalker, this handsome man in evening clothes who is you death to anyone around him. And you get these extremely attractive very very dangerous men and then slightly later women as well who represent both a sexual threat as well as a sexual attraction. No vampire is more alluring or dangerous than the one created by Bram Stoker in 1897. His creation, an ancient nobleman called Dracula, comes from the east to infiltrate Victorian Britain. Dracula who wants nothing more than to dress up in English clothes and to come to London with its teeming millions is in fact a story of reverse colonialization. Instead of Great Britain colonizing eastern nations we have a representative of an eastern nation who is about to colonize Great Britain. He's an outsider. He's an element of pollution. He's an element of destruction who is both attractive and repulsive at the same time. Stoker himself was an Irishman. I mean he knew what exclusion and conflict was like. So suddenly the vampire story in terms of literary story has emerged into something where you can really really critique the world. It seems to me that the issues in Stoker's Dracula are issues which are still anything but resolved in today's culture and I think that's why we keep coming back to them. More recent entries in the genre have seen vampires terrorize the suburbs of Stockholm, the post-apocalyptic wilds of Los Angeles and most frighteningly of all American high schools. Our fascination with vampires it seems is as endless as the demon's own thirst for blood. Battle was over. One by one the greatest of gods had fallen. Odin, Thor, Freyr and all the warriors of Valhalla with them. It was the end of the gods and it was the end of the world. It's no surprise the story ends in this way. Floods are one of the most common motifs in mythology. The best known of course is the story of Noah in the Bible. Displeased with the corruption and violence he saw on earth, God decided to start afresh. He flooded the earth allowing only Noah and his family to survive alongside remnants of all the animals. A similar story is found in Assyrian texts dating back to 2000 BC, in ancient Egyptian tomb inscriptions and in ancient Greek mythology. Phrygia was a harsh land. Cold in the winters, hot in the summers and arid all year round. From northern steppes to southern hills, the stony earth bore neither fruit tree nor olive. But among its coarse plains and exposed ridgetops, there was once a village. Its houses were fine, its citizens worthy. Two wandering peasants came to this village. They're in search of a warm welcome and a warm bed. But those fine houses and worthy citizens turned them away one after another. Finally the two peasants reached the end of the village. Here they found a humble cottage thatched with stem and reed. It was home to an old couple named Balkis and Philemon. Poor though they were, they opened their doors to the strangers. The old woman coaxed the ashes of their fire back to life. They offered their guests the finest food and drink in the house and the most comfortable of their chairs. Balkis and Philemon were about to kill their one and only goose in honor of their guests when the strangers revealed the truth. They were gods, none other than Mercury and Jupiter himself, chief among the Roman deities. They promised the old couple a just reward for their hospitality. The fable of Balkis and Philemon was written by the Roman poet Ovid. He lived during the first century AD. It was a time of great change in Roman life when Augustus, the first emperor, was cementing his power. Ovid is writing in a period of increasing stability. It was a much more settled time for Roman society as a whole that was thinking about coming out of this period of great disturbance. One of Augustus's great claims about restoring the republic was piety. He claims on his funerary monument that in just one year he restored 28 temples. So Balkis and Philemon fits into that kind of narrative because you have this idea of piety being rewarded, of showing piety that other people aren't showing. The gods had promised the old couple a reward for their generosity. They had told Balkis and Philemon to leave their cottage and accompany them to the heights of a nearby mountain. They heaved their aged bodies up the slope. But when they finally reached the summit, the gods told them to look back on their village. A flood had washed every home and street away. All except their tiny hut. That Jupiter transformed into a magnificent temple. Their whole village has been overrun by a flood and the whole world has been drowned. But they've been saved and they're on a mountainside. This was the punishment for not giving hospitality to strangers that was due. It just illustrates the insane importance, which you sometimes can get in the Mediterranean world, of being decent to strangers. You have to invite them in and if you invite them in you have to feed them. As a reward for their piety, Jupiter granted Balkis and Philemon a wish. Anything they desired would be theirs. But the elderly couple had a simple request. They asked to be the keepers of that fine temple. To share every day with the other and never be separated, even in the moment of death. After years of service to the gods, the day fated for their deaths came. As Balkis and Philemon died, they were transformed. They became trees of oak and linden. Entwined in root and leaf, they grew together for years to come. From destruction, the story tells us, there is creation. From death, there is new life. The gods were gone, consumed by Ragnarok. Water shrouded the earth, a vast ocean, still, silent and unchanging. But all things come to an end. Life returned to the earth. So the cycle of life begins again. And with new life, there come new stories. For human beings have always been storytellers. In the myths and legends we remember, and those we choose to pass on, we are links in a chain, stretching back millennia. Part of an eternal dialogue between our past, our present, and our future. The fact that a myth might be completely incomprehensible, completely nonsensical, on a rational level, doesn't matter. Because it can still tell us about what our society is like and what our culture is like. A myth tells us what we believe to be the case. It also offers us, in those terms, means of resolving ethical, social, cultural conflicts. If one thinks of it as a narrative, a way of encapsulating the things that are important in society, and not always the positive things, they are really telling us about the dynamics in the society in which they're told. I think it's very important that people sort of go on probing things with myth. An awful lot of our lives and our decisions are actually not about reason and not about planning. They're about emotions. Mythology is a guide to that. It's a way of understanding the way we feel, not the way we think. Many myths can seem bizarre or cruel to modern eyes. Yet for all mythology's variety and infinite strangeness, there is a common thread that links us to even the most ancient of stories. Whether it was on the streets of Athens or the frozen seas of the North, the dark woods of England or the distant mountains of the East, the same thoughts have been uttered in a thousand tongues. Who are we? Where have we come from? Why is the world the way it is? And what will we find beyond? They are questions that define human existence, no matter when or where it is found.