Gone Medieval - How Norse Myths Shape The Way We Think

Episode Date: March 21, 2023

Thanks to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the legends of Thor, Odin and Asgard are familiar to millions today. Yet the histories of these myths are far richer than modern popular culture often implies. From Yggdrasil to Ragnarok, the seemingly unending tales of heroism, betrayal and intrigue found within the Norse Sagas have captivated audiences for centuries.In today’s episode of Gone Medieval, Dr. Cat Jarman talks to Prof Carolyne Larrington to dig into these histories and explore how Norse Myths have shaped the way we think. Together they discuss why Norse mythology seems to be having a ‘moment’, how it has been used to legitimise political violence, and most importantly, why everyone loves Loki?This episode was edited by Joseph Knight and produced by Elena Guthrie and Rob Weinberg.If you’re enjoying this podcast and are looking for more fascinating Medieval content then subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android or Apple store Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world,

to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello and welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval from History Hit. I'm Dr Kat Jarman. Gods like Thor, Odin, Freya and Locke are some of the key figures in Norse mythology. And Norse heroes and villains such of these have intrigued and entertained us for centuries, not just in history books, than in arts, on film and TV, and throughout, popular culture. But what do the sources actually say about them? And how have these God's stories been told and retold over the years? And why exactly do the Norse myths still speak to us today?

All of this is the topic of a brand new book called The Norse myths that shape the way we think by Caroline Larrington. Caroline is a professor of medieval European literature at the University of Oxford, and a tutor and fellow at Sir John's College. And I'm really delighted to have Caroline here with me today to talk about her new book. In fact, I should say to have her back on the podcast, because she's already been on going with the awards before to talk to me about Thor. So welcome back, Caroline. It's wonderful to be back again, Kat. Thanks for asking me a second time. And a huge congratulations on your book, which is absolutely brilliant, really enjoying it. I'm very pleased with the way it's turned out, I have to say, and I should say with

99 illustrations, which even if you don't need to read it all that closely, you can just look at the pictures. Yes, absolutely. I've seen some beautiful pictures, actually. I'm really pleased that you have written this book because it's almost surprising that there's not really another book already out there on this, both giving a lot of the basics on Norse mythology, but also just how it's been used over the years. So was that why you wanted to write it? Did you see a bit of a gap there? Kind of. It's part of a series, and the predecessors are the Celtic myths that shape the way we think. Maybe the slight problem there is, do the Celtic myth shape the way we think?

That's a bit arguable. The second book's the Greek and Roman myths that shape the way we think, and there's no doubt about that. And so mine is the third book. And at first I was a bit doubtful about whether we could really claim that the myth shaped the way we think. But actually, is I began to write it. At first I thought I'll cut down the number of myths because the original plan was to have 10. And so I decided to go with seven. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought actually these myths and legends, these stories, these concepts are so live in our culture that actually there are 10 that I can cover here. And I don't feel quite so embarrassed about claiming they shape the way we think. Because I think in many ways they do, and increasingly so maybe over the

last 25 years. Yeah, that's such an interesting point. And actually, there was something I wanted to ask you, because I know that obviously this has been a big part of your research and also, especially in recent years, you've been working a lot on popular culture on various films and TV and how these medieval or north smiths and legends are represented. But to me, some of it seems quite recent, all the Marvel universe and things like Vikings TV shows seem quite recent. Have you seen throughout your career a sort of change in how? interested people have been in this mythology and how it's been received over that time that you've been working on it? Yeah, absolutely. And it's interesting, I think, because back in the day,

I suppose maybe about 15 years ago when I started working more seriously on the reception of Old Norsemith and legend, journalists would say, why are they having a moment now? And I would say, oh, they've been having a moment for 300 years. But actually, now they really are having a moment, I think. And it was the case when I was publishing my first translation of the Poetic Edda, which came out in 1996, that the kinds of things that you put on the cover to attract the casual reader were these poems with the inspiration for William Morris, Wagner, J.R. Tolkien. In the 1990s, it would have been a bit more difficult to add anything because even though the Marvel comic universe was in existence, I don't think the actual comic. had so much impact in the UK. It was the movies that really broke the character of Thor, I think, through to modern popular culture. So there has been something that's gone on,

I think probably since the year 2000, that has somehow brought these myths to the forefront of people's imaginations again. And that means writers, people who are writing young adult fiction, obviously movie directors, opera producers and composers and composers,

art of various sorts, and feeding into popular TV shows as well. So it's sort of all over the place in a way that's not easy to account for in an off-the-cuff way. Yeah, absolutely right. It does seem to be so prevalent. I talk about Vikings a lot. I go to schools and things,

and you have very young children who are all very familiar, some of the imagery and some of the gods, and especially the Thorshammer, but it's not from necessarily the actual myths themselves, but it is through popular culture. So it's clearly something that's very, very prevalent. So we're going to be talking a little bit more towards the end as well on the sort of impact that it's got and why. But I wanted to do what I quite often like to do, which is to go a little bit back to the sources,

because you talk about this in the book as well as for reception, the actual myths themselves. So just for those who might not be quite so familiar with it, if we are going to go to actually what we know or what sources we have of these myths, what are they? Well, for written sources, and we have to remember that if something is written down, It's been written down by somebody who is a Christian, essentially, because writing in the Roman alphabet in a manuscript vellum is Christian technology. And so there we have two main sources. We have a collection of poems called The Poetic Edda,

and there are 11 mythological poems, and depending on where you segment the other material, somewhere between 20 or so heroic poems, giving stories from Old Norse heroic legend. We also have a prose account to the myths, which has been put together as a kind of introduction to explaining the poetics of Old Norse traditional poetry. And that's been very much more systematized.

It starts from before the world is created. It goes on to the end of the world. And it tells various stories of the gods, the dwarves, the giants, as it goes along. And it's clear that the author of that collaboration, which is called the Prose Edda, knew the poems in the poetic edda. But he doesn't draw on all of them. This is probably the great scholar and politician Snorri Sturtleson, who died in 1241. He was in Icelander very much involved in the politics and the Norwegian court. And he'd been educated in one of the

top learning centres in 13th century Iceland. So he knew all kinds of things. And so if it's in snorry, we feel that it's probably something that is authentic, but at the same time, because he likes to systematize things. And I suspect he's also a bit nervous about things which look a little bit too close to Christianity. I think, for example, he may leave out the story of Othin, Odin hanging himself on the world tree to gain the knowledge of the ruins, because that looks a little bit too much like the crucifixion of Christ. And I can see exactly why he might edit that out. And he also sticks a flood in for no particularly good reason, rather like Noah's flood, but there's no evidence for this and any of the other sources. So those are our main

mythological sources, but we also have some pseudo-histories. We have Saxo-Gramaticus, who was writing around 1,200 in Denmark, although he wrote in Latin. And he's giving what he claims is the earliest history of the Danes. And that contains a lot of mythological material as well. And we also have some sagas, in particular the saga of the full songs, which tells us quite a lot about the figure of Sigurd the Dragon Slayer and his descendants. And one or two other little bits and pieces in various other bits of pseudo-historical writing. And some of these, especially some of the characters also appear on art, don't they, and our psychological objects and so on. So there's quite a lot that can sort of be backed up, I suppose,

in various forms from sort of physical material as well? Yes, and there are certainly archaeological objects that range from the tiniest little metal statuette that's been excavated from a bog somewhere in Norway to the huge picture stones that you find on the island of Gotland. And these can be very helpful in terms of confirming, particularly sometimes the age of the myths, because what we can say about the written sources

is that they exist in the 13th century. And we can say that because allusions to some of these myths can be found in earlier poetry that was orally composed back in the 10th century, we can certainly trace the myths back that far. But some of the picture stones in Gotland, for example, are much older than that, centuries older. But the problem is that nobody ever helpfully labels the scenes on the picture stones, and they don't tend to label the statuettes either. So when they're dug up out of the ground, it's very easy to look at somebody who is wearing a pointed hat and seems to have an enormous phallus and go, hmm, who's the fertility gods? This must be a statue of Frere. And we do have some evidence in some of the historical sources that he was sometimes depicted in this way. But one of the examples I talk about in the book is on one of the runestones where there's a figure looking as if he's been tied up in a sort of square enclosure. And there are snakes, serpent surround him, and there's a woman who seems to be coming towards the enclosure.

And at first sight, we might go, ah, that must be loki at the point that he's been captured by the gods. And the goddess Skhadi, as revenge for his part in her father's death, hangs a serpent over his face. But she hasn't got a serpent in her hand. So maybe it's not that story. Maybe it's the story of the hero Gunnar in the snake pit, where he's thrown by his brother-in-law an enemy to die. And perhaps that is Gornard, except in the story Gonaire has a harp which he plays to quiet the snakes until his enemy's mother changes herself into a snake and bites him. She's unmoved by any harp music. But this figure doesn't have a harp. So maybe it's Ragnar Lothbrok in the snake pit instead. But then who's the woman? And so we get these kinds of questions coming up

with the archaeological material all the time. And what we really need is a kind of fingerprint that is a little detail that says that must be this story because nobody else has it. And one great example of that is the story of how Thor goes on a fishing expedition with a giant companion. The giant doesn't want to row too far out to go fishing because of the danger of the Mithgard serpent, but Thor is completely up for a confrontation with the monster. And he rose so hard and so fast out to the edges of the ocean that he puts his foot through the bottom of the boat. And so when we see a boat with a figure with his foot through it and a line coming out of the boat, then we can say, oh yeah, that's Thor's myth, all right. That's the fishing of the Midgar's serpent.

Excellent. So yeah, so more of those would be good one to find, definitely. But one thing I'm interested in, so obviously these sources are medieval, really, and we have all this interest in it now in the 21st century. But when did we become interested in the North Smiths again? Well, I guess it depends who we mean by people in a way. Towards the beginning of what we were called the early modern period in the 17th century, manuscripts started getting out of Iceland and into the court in Copenhagen. And scholars poured over them. They couldn't necessarily understand the Old Norse very well,

even though it was an older form of their own language. but once they managed to decode them with the help of Icelanders and crucially translate them into Latin, which is the international language of Europe, then the stories started getting into circulation and various countries, Sweden for example, pounced on some of the stories to say, ah, this is the prehistory of our nation. And now we can incorporate some of these myths, some of the information that we have into what we'll now call history instead of a kind of mythology about where we originated. And those Latin translations get to England as well quite early in the 17th century,

but they're mostly being kind of cherry-picked for facts. So scholars in the 17th century notice that the names of the Norse gods are similar to those of the Anglo-Saxon gods. These names are still preserved in the days of the week, for example, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Not obviously Sunday and Monday, and not Saturday either, since that's a Roman god. But it's really the 18th century when people start being inspired to create new things instead of just noting facts about the old Norse myth.

And it's partly to do with that romantic moment, around the birth of the Gothic, if you like, where people were looking for new material. It was partly to do with ideas about our ancestors of having been primitive, passionate, brave and daring, and that they had these wonderful stories which you could draw upon, which were different, and I think this is very important, different from the classical stories, which everybody knew already, which have been retold over years and years and years. So everybody knows the story of Troy or they know the story of the labours of Hercules and so on. And these are also myths that belong to the south of Europe in a sense.

were perhaps not so relatable to, since people in Britain didn't go strolling around in togas or kytoms in olive groves and gazing at the Mediterranean. So there was something about the kind of northern appeal of these myths, with mountains and forests and fields that you had to cross, which I think spoke to the British at the time, along with these stories which were passionate and sometimes rather grim. And that also appealed to that gothic taste, that we feel superior to these people because we don't drink out of the skulls of our enemies. Of course, that's a complete mistranslation. And so it fed in exactly to this kind of proto-romantic desire for stories which horrified

and inspired and made one think that one's ancestors were incredibly brave, courageous and feared nobody. And that had a particular political appeal at that point, too. It's around the time of the French Revolution. And of course, although we didn't have a comparable revolution in England, nevertheless this idea that the North stood for freedom became an extremely potent one across Europe. And of course, that political aspect is an interesting one, isn't it? As we move a bit further forward to time and into the 20th century,

and if we think about Nazi Germany, for example, because actually the North myths and some of these legends became quite crucial, didn't they, to the Nazi ideology? Yes, and we can trace that back in a way to the beginning of the 19th century and to the beginnings of German nationalism, because of course we have to remember that Germany was at the beginning of the 19th century, just a very disparate set of some Protestant, some Catholic statelets. And it was the move towards creating a greater Germany that called upon legends which had been originally Scandinavian, but were being read by people like the Grim Brothers as simply recording

myths which had always been German, but simply hadn't been recorded in Germany because Germany became Christian too early. And so what were essentially Scandinavian myths recorded in Scandinavia could then be claimed as the German heritage. And that became very potent in the years leading up to the rise of Nazism, because exactly they could be harnessed for propaganda purposes. You could claim that Hitler, for example, was Sieg-free. who's awakening Germany, who's the sleeping Valkyrii, Brunhilde. And he would be the greatest hero of the Third Reich, the greatest hero that the world had ever seen.

Now, I think it stretches the imagination to compare Hitler to Siegfried in all kinds of ways. Even at one point in Nazi Germany, there was a movement by some extremist to put aside Catholicism or Christianity, but mostly Catholicism, as an official religion, and to try to revive the worship of Othen again. But it was only complete nutters, essentially, who really advocated this.

Heinrich Himmler was a great fan of this kind of thinking. But Hitler apparently always tried to shut him down whenever he started talking about it. But that association of the Norse myths with Nazism did quite some damage, I think, to their reputation in the years after the war. And we can see where retellings of those myths, for children, for example, were hugely popular in England from the mid-19th century onwards. There's a sudden drop-off in anybody doing new versions of those for probably about 10 to 15 years after 1945. And then gradually, in the wake of retellings of the Greek heroes and the Irish heroes,

or hero tales, the North gods start coming back in as well, probably around 1960 or so. I want to get back to this a little bit later on, but obviously there's, in some. some parts, certainly in Scandinavia, there's also move back with the neo-Nazi movements, another right-wing extremist going back towards it, but we can get back to that a little bit later on. I do want to delve into some of the mythology as well, and I'd love to go to the entire book with you, but we'd be here for hours, so we can have to just cherry-pick a little bit, I think, from a few of the chapters, and then people can go out and get the book for themselves and read the rest of them. But one of the ones I would to start with is where you begin,

which is really what the entire world centres around in this mythology, which is the world tree. I wondered if you could start with just telling us a little bit about that and how that functions and what we know about that world tree. The wall tree is very mysterious as an element of Norsemith. It is absolutely central. It's the pillar, if you like, that runs up between all of the worlds and up into whatever lies beyond. it has three roots or nine roots, this isn't very clear, and beneath the roots are different worlds as well, and different poems or Sonori Sturtleson has systematized them differently. And it's hard to see really quite how the vertical plane of worlds around the trunk and a kind of horizontal plane of a ground level where the trunk comes out of the earth and then there are different realms on a horizontal going away from the tree.

it's too difficult to integrate all this different information into a really kind of systematic world picture. But the tree itself operates as a kind of model of a holistic, organic, natural being. With these roots that go down into the earth, its branches going up to the heavens, it has animals living on it. It has four deer that nibble on its branches. It has a squirrel called Ratatotosco, which is lovely. kind of evocation of a squirrel chattering, who runs up and down the tree, taking information apparently from the serpent who are gnawing at the tree's roots below the ground, and the dragon

Nithogar who lurks down there as well. And Ratatoskar is taking information up to an eagle, which lives at the very top of the tree. And this eagle, peculiarly enough, has a hawk sitting between its eyes. So what we have in the beginning is a sense of a beautifully integrated, self-sustaining organism that runs through the centre of the universe. It's kind of perfect picture of nature. One of the roots, there's a pond where the fates, the norns, sit, carving the wooden fates of men on little wooden ships. And we also have the information that a kind of white shining mud cascades down the tree. And this seems to be very sort of fructifying and makes fertile everything that it meets. But at the same time, the tree exists in time. And so we can't forget about those serpents

that are gnawing away at the tree. We learn in one poem it's decaying on one side. Those deer are nibbling away at it is. At the same time, the branches continue to grow. And we also know that Oathen's Great Hall of Valhalla is situated just below the. the tree. So the tree is a living being that's also decaying. It's also subject to the ravages of time. And when the end of the world comes, the tree groans and it suffers, just as humans and all other living creatures feel pain and fear as the world is destroyed around them. But what we're never told is that the world tree is actually destroyed at the end of the world. And the stories that we have coming from after that in the new beginning suggests that something like the tree is

still there, it's survived and has maybe sheltered some of the humans who will start the human race again. And so it's a kind of fascinating green picture of nature left to its own devices, but it's a nature which has cruelty and has pain, suffering and loss in it as well, but it also has regrowth. And it works, I think, as a way of thinking about the natural world more generally for the peoples who imagined it, and perhaps for us as well. And is this something that we've seen other cultures and mythologies as well? Or is this sort of central tree? Is that something that's quite unique to Norse mythology?

I think it's something that is obviously important in Germanic religion because we have information about sacred poles, sacred pillars in cult sites, both in Germany as well as in parts of Scandinavia, where it seems that a tree or a pillar was really part of the architecture of a temple or a sacred site, if you like. We also have these pillars in pan-arctic cultures, the Sami, for example, the lapses, as they're perhaps more often called, in the northern part of Scandinavia, and really across Russia in those places, those parts of Arctic Russia, where you have trees, where you have the tiger forests, there seems to be a prevailing sense that this tree, or pillar links the earth to the heavens. And in some stories, it's the pole star that's the

nail that secures the top of the pole. And it just operates as a kind of pathway for shamans to travel upwards to the spirit world. I'm not sure we can talk about a lot of shamanism in Old Norsemith, but it certainly does seem to be something that belongs to the northern half of Europe. How much of a tyrant really was Julius Caesar? And it's very interesting to think about why it's Caesar in particular, when there have been many political assassinations in the past millennia, why Caesar's has been the one that is brought up again and again. Would we have ever stood a chance against the first dinosaurs? In the Jurassic, you see dinosaurs get bigger, and you see meat-eating dinosaurs grow into things

like the size of buses. And did Helen of Troy really have the power to launch a thousand ships? She is always derided as this sort of terrible adulterish, but at least, you know, least as old as Homer, at least the 8th century BC, is a counter tradition in which Helen doesn't go to Troy. She's never Helen of Troy. She's Helen of Egypt. Well, you can expect all of this and more from the ancients on History Hit. Join us twice a week, every week, as we explore some of the greatest moments of our ancient past. Subscribe to the ancients wherever you get your podcasts. You already mentioned what I wanted to move on to next, which is probably one of the best-known

features, I think, that people tend to get quite obsessed with. And that's Valhalla, the Hall of Oden. What is Valhalla really? How should we actually pronounce it, I should ask, as well, because that's a sort of simplified name, isn't it, really? Well, in Old Norse, it's Valhurtl. Valhutl or Valhol is, I think, more difficult to say, if you're trying to keep to an old Norse or a modern Icelandic pronunciation. But Valhalla is the place which Othin identifies is his own particular hall in the middle of his territory. Each of the gods has a hall where they live and which they rule over. And this is Othen's most important one.

It's the hall where the heroic dead go after death. And there they live a rather pleasant post-mortem existence. They fight all day and then in the evening, those who have been killed get up, ready to fight again the next day. And they drink lots of mead and they feast on boar, which is cooked for them in a certain cauldron. There's clearly something that revives the bore every day, so you can have boiled pork every evening if that's what you fancy.

And the Valkyries will bring you precious drinks to drink. And it seems to be very much an example of the way in which people construct afterlives almost in the image of what they like best in this life. And so, for example, in Anglo-Saxon England, heaven looks very much like a big mead hole in the sky where you can go and feast. and your Lord is Jesus instead of some earthly Lord. And instead of the poets singing your praises for a few generations, because you've been so heroic,

the angels will sing your praises forever. And so there's something about constructing the idea of an afterlife where the heroic dead have a wonderful time carrying on being heroic, which seems to be quite important to the ideology of a militaristic society like that of pre-Christian Scandinavia. And a sharp distinction is made between those who go to Valhalla, to Valhurt, who have died in battle, and women, children, and those who died not in battle, died of illness, died of old age, who all go off to the halls of hell,

which is fine. It seems to be not a bad place. The meat is brewed there, there are benches, it's just another hall. But it doesn't have the kudos that Valhalla has. And so there's something perhaps quite clever about evolving this model of the afterlife to, if you like, appeal to young men who realize every day when they go into battle if you're part of a war band, this day might be your loss. And the idea that the next life will nevertheless be great. And so it eases that transition, if you like, or it eases your thinking about death to be able to say,

are, but this evening I will be feasting with Othin. There's something rhetorically quite comforting about that. Yeah, I can see that being quite necessary really to actually convince people to come with you. And what I think that's quite interesting is that Valhalla actually also turns up in a few other places. And if I get this right, the memorial poems for Eric Bloodax and also Hawkins who's the foster son of Athelstan of England. I think in both of those, it's referred to going to Valhalla. Yeah. And in Hawkon Amal, it's called the moment. Royal poem for Hawkins, which is the older at the two probably. It's clear that the king who has died in battle and who is now being led by the Valkyries in kind of triumphs to Valhalla is actually

not best pleased about the situation because however great Valhalla might be, you probably still prefer to be alive and on this earth and celebrating victory in your own hall. And so Hocon, This poem questions the Valkyrie rather fiercely about why has Othing given me death? And the Valkyrie more or less says that's how things turn out. Your army did pretty well, but hey, you're going to Valhalla. And still as Hawcon enters the hall and the heroes are coming forward to meet him and he's invited to put his weapons down because now we're going to feast. And he says, no, I don't think so.

I'm not going to. It's a bad idea to step too far away from your weapons. I want to keep them within reach. And then the poet cuts off to say he was a great prince and we will never see his like again. But it's very interesting to see how that comforting ideology can break down in practice when you're memorialising somebody who maybe looks like he's died before his time or who was such a good king. We don't want to lose him, even if we comfort ourselves by he's having a great time with all the other heroes in Valhalla.

I do think Valhalla is really very notorious now in our public understanding of this mythology. But how did that come about, if we look back in the last few centuries, how did it become such an important part of that knowledge? It's interesting, isn't it? I think we can put it partly down to Wagner, where the building of Valhalla is what happens in the first part of his opera cycle, the ring cycle. And in Daschengalt, we're told how Othin, in a sense, perjures himself

and corrupts the gods. And he wants to get his hands on the ring, which gives control over everything in the world, a kind of ring of power. And he needs that in order to pay the giants who have built Valhalla for him. So it's an enormous cost for this swaggering home of the gods. And despite all of the machinations that go into the events in Rheingold, the gods process very grandly over the rainbow bridge into it at the end of the opera. But things are going to go downhill hill from there. And by the end of the opera cycling, Gertademarong, Valhalla goes up in flames, along with the World Tree and pretty well everything else. But I think before that, there was the building of Valhalla as a kind of temple for German heroes on the shores of the Danube

in southern Germany in the 1830s. And this was part also of this German romanticism, nationalism, and the drive for unification being driven here by one of the kings of Bavaria. And I think it's that idea of the Hall of Fame, which has really caught on, even if people don't talk about Valhalla so much, except maybe in certain TV shows when people are dying and saying, well, I'm going off to Valhalla. But the idea of the baseball Hall of Fame, the Hollywood Hall of Fame, why do we call them halls? Why are they not just museums or buildings, but they're halls because of Valhalla, I think. as is an incredibly potent idea that there's a space where your heroism in whatever field it is is commemorated.

I think we can put that down to a myth that's shaped the way we think. Such an interesting point and actually one I'd never really thought about. Now, when we talk about Valhalla, we do, I think, have to go into something else I've discussed, which is the Valkyries, so some of the more famous inhabitants of Valhalla. What do we know about the Valkyries? Well, the Valkyries appear across the poetry and to some extent in the prose sagas as well, in two different roles. And one is Othin's Wish Girls. And they're sent by Othin to bring victory or defeat on the battlefield.

And this is what we see in the case of Hawkins, that this particular Valkyrie called Gundal has gone to the battlefield, hovered above it, brought about defeat and is now riding through the story. sky with Hawkins following her leading him back. So there they operate as kinds of fate goddesses. They bring about victory or defeat, not necessarily on their own accounts, but because they're following the plan that Othin has set out for them in advance. And then in the hall of Valhalla itself, and this always makes them sound like glorified waitresses. So I think this has to be quite carefully nuanced. They bring drink to the heroes. But what's very important, about this drink-bringing role in Germanic societies is that the order in which drink is served

is absolutely indicative of status. So it's simply not a question of sitting there and hoping that the Valkyrie is going to bring you a horn of mead sooner or later. She's going round the hall in a very particular order. She's obviously going to bring the mead to Othim first, but then to the next most heroic person, then to the next most heroic. So they're kind of performing. or actualizing a league table of heroism within the hall itself. So that's one kind of valkyrie. But then we also have valkyries that are imagined as human women or semi-human, who are also fighters, their shield maidens, and they take up the role of fighting,

but also having the supernatural ability to fly as well and also to affect the outcome of battle. And because they're semi-human at some level, they're still subject to. to the kind of patriarchal wishes of their fathers and brothers. So in one very recurrent story, the Valkyrie turns up to greet a hero, who's just proved how heroic he is, and says, I've fallen in love with you. My family want me to marry this lesser king.

I don't like the look of at all. I need you to go and kill him, so I don't have to marry him. And the hero exceeds of this call, falls in love with the Valkyry, of course, and goes off and kills the rival. king. But this always leads to complications with her family, with endless feud, and the hero himself will probably die sooner rather than later because of this, though not without gaining the love of the Valkyre in the first place. And so those figures are the ones, I think, that the popular imagination most recently has really seized on, because it overlaps with archaeological discoveries

like the Birka grave, where there seems to be some evidence, or at least it has been interpreted in that light, of a woman who has been buried with weapons and perhaps speaking to a status as a fighting woman in life, who knows, these are complex matters. But also in popular fantasy series, like Vikings, for example, and to some extent the last kingdom as well, but particularly in Vikings, the epic fantasy really needs big roles for women. if it's going to be popular. And if we think back to kind of what we had in Lord of the Rings, which was a couple of elvish princesses hanging around,

otherwise the whole world is incredibly masculine, one shield maiden, but otherwise really no parts for women. And what the producers of the History Channel's Vikings, Game of Thrones, as well as scenes, is that you want women who fight. And so the shield women in Vikings have got really great fighting skills, also incredibly complicated lives as well. They have pregnancy, they have rape, they have childbirth, they have trying to raise their kids, they take various lovers, they have same-sex relationships.

They're quite like modern women, and they're having to balance all of this with their careers at the same time. So that particular archetype has really come into its own in the last 10 years or so, because it does give an entree for women into the epic fantasy world. taking it out of simply being the prerogative of young men from 18 to 25 who won't see a lot of fighting. It's become much more psychologically because of the presence of these women. And do you think that's problematic in terms of us understanding what the mythologies actually saying? Do you think we get a bit confused because we watch all of these things, we get these images and these ideas of kind of what we would like the past have looked like

and then taking in some elements from the mythology? I think it's a little bit problematic because there's a kind of throughput, I think, from the more fantastic elements of the literature into popular culture and a popular culture that then doesn't really distinguish between hard historical evidence and what was perhaps medieval fantasy in many ways. And the moment that you start saying there were definitely these shield maidens and they definitely fought, as opposed to, as you know, from your own work, there were women who went with the Great Viking Army who were doing all kinds of things, bearing children, cooking, cleaning, selling cheese, all the things that a kind of mobile community has women

involved in, probably not necessarily fighting. But it's interesting from what I heard recently that this shield maiden stereotype from shows like Vikings is now feeding back. into the reenactment community. And whereas female reenactors were sometimes having to be slave women, highly problematic in all kinds of ways, or they were wandering around being healers or they were being profiteurs because these are quite well attested high status roles, much better than being a slave woman, suddenly now you can be a shield maiden because this is now true in a sense, but only because popular culture is endorsing it rather than really solid archaeological.

evidence. If you're using reenactment to tell people this is how the past really was and to make claims for authenticity, I think you need a kind of health warning. If on the other hand, everybody's clear that this is fantasy role-playing with some historical elements, then that's a slightly different matter, I think. No, I think you're absolutely right there. And it's been really interesting to really observe this in the last 10 years or so, hasn't it, how that's gone to sort of a slight extreme and how the different sides have affected each other and led back into academic research as well, because with this sort of popular interest in it, there's more of an interest in actually looking at the evidence as well. So it's all going in quite interesting directions. But I think you absolutely right,

we have to be quite careful with what we know us, the truth and the sort of reality as it were, if we can ever get anywhere near that. Now, I would have loved to go through so many of these chapters. You've got a brilliant chapter on Odin. My favourite God. Is it? Yeah, I can see that. And then you've got thought. Now, I have to say that we have got a previous episode that we talked about Thor before so people can go back over the archives to look at that. Also, Loki, who's very, very popular, of course, and you talk quite a lot about him, and also you've got a section there, which is called Why Everyone Loves Loki, which I thought was great. Can you sort of explain quickly, why do people love Loki? Well, originally that was

called Why All the Ladies Love Loki. Ah. And then I thought that's maybe a bit provocative. I'm going to take that. But I think what people really like about Loki is that he's the one with the brains. And he watches, he thinks, he plans, he pulls things off. Sometimes he doesn't pull them off quite, they go wrong and then he has to think on his feet to get the gods out of the situation. Sometimes he's caused the disaster that they're having to deal with. Sometimes, to be fair, he hasn't, but he's the go-to person to solve some kind of issue. And A.S. Bayett in particular, has a wonderful low-key figure who's talking to his daughter, the Midgard Serpent, and he says, I study. The other gods, they don't study, but I study and I know. And I think that makes him

particularly appealing to writers, of course, who are the ones who are studying and who aren't whacking people with hammers or going out and fighting. They're thinking, oh, no, he's the smart guy. He's the one who's like me. But what I also think is really interesting in some of the adaptations of Loki's story, in particular Joanne Harris, is the way that this slightly fraught relationship between Loken and the other gods escalates so that there's one more act of bad faith, and then Loki gets a bit more alienated, and so he does something a little bit more destructive, and then the gods respond to that.

Then they chain up his children, obviously, the monstrous brood. And then he begins to think, if they can chain up my children, throw my daughter down to be the goddess of hell, chain up my wolf son, Fenry. They're going to be chaining me up sooner or later. And you can see how this all escalates in a way which is incredibly true to kind of modern politics, these provocations, these over-responses. And in the end, we always know that Loki is going to be coming on the side of the giants at Ragnarok. and we can kind of see why in a way that in the myths, because they're slightly more disparate, you just think, oh, that's Loki being evil or it's Loki being a trickster. But in the modern retellings, you get a really quite well-psychologised motivation for Loki

and his relationship with the other gods, which the Marvell universe brings that pretty well, I have to say. We talked a bit about politics and things earlier on, and just to bring it back to that a little bit. One of the things that you write about is on Vineland and the colonization or the settlement in the Americas. And that one that's been quite interesting. So, I mean, first of all, could you sort of give us summarise? I mean, how does Vineland feature in the myths? Finland, of course, the idea that it was Vikings, Scandinavians, in fact, people from Iceland and Greenland, who were the first Europeans to sail to the North American continent, was regarded as a myth in the sense of something.

that wasn't true for a very long period of time. We have a couple of sagas that describe the expeditions from Eric the Red's home in Greenland that go and discover, set up a kind of temporary base somewhere which looks from the sagas if it's somewhere in Canada, somewhere on the eastern seaboard, maybe a bit further south than that. And the moment that the two sagas, Eric the Red saga and the Sagina, the Saga the Greenlanders got translated, got into circulation, People in North America began to become very interested in the idea that the original European discoverers were not, in fact, Christopher Columbus and his Mediterranean, if you like, dark-haired Catholic, Spanish-speaking cohort, but actually blonde, probably blue-eyed Scandinavians

who were more like Protestants, perhaps proto-protestants with a work ethic and a of adventure. And they, of course, were much more easily assimilated to the Anglo-Saxon, white Anglo-Saxon majority in the US in particular, but also in Canada, than Columbus and his like, who looked too much, perhaps, in the 19th century, like the waves of migration that were coming into America at that point from Mediterranean countries. And so the idea that you could claim America, not just for white people, but for tall, blonde, white people was something that was very appealing. In the 19th century, we have quite a lot of forgeries, quite a lot of mysterious identifications of various places as being the ones where the Scandinavian settled or didn't

settle. And then in the 1960s, we have the Norwegian husband and wife team of archaeologists, the Ingstads who actually find Viking settlement remains at Lancy Meadows on Newfoundland. And suddenly the myth becomes real. And although there have been various attempts to excavate other sites at a place like Rose Point and attempts to find evidence of further settlement, we don't seem to have got those. But what we do have is increasing evidence of trade going backwards and forwards between Greenland and perhaps Iceland as well, but particularly from Greenland to northern Canada between Inuit peoples and the Scandinavian settlers there. Some fascinating new tree evidence that's come out in the last

couple of weeks, too late for me to get in the book about people continuing to go backwards and forwards. And so all of a sudden, in the 1960s, what had been a myth suddenly became an archaeologically verifiable fact. And I think this combined with, pre-existing tendencies to want to make those white supremacist claims about Scandinavian settlement in North America has had an important effect on the American old right. And that's not just to do with what has come to be known as Ausatru, the revived worship of the Scandinavian gods, which we find quite widespread in Europe, in Iceland, in parts of Scandinavia, in Germany, in particular, a kind of, if you like, new age religious possibility,

which sometimes does encode quite racist principles, but which sometimes just assimilates those gods to other sorts of principles of nature or of earth goddesses or of powerful sky gods. But particularly some of the symbols like Igrisitt of the World Tree itself, the Valknoot, these interlocking triangles, that we find on some of the Gotlandic picture stones, the sun symbol, which is even older than Scandinavian culture, which is really an Indo-European symbol, have been appropriated by outright figures. And an example I talk about in the book is the very famous figure of the

QAnon self-styled shaman, Jake Angele, who notoriously paraded through the capital with his buffalo skin hat with buffalo horns protruding from it and with a naked chest that had these Norse symbols tattooed on it. And although he hasn't, I think, made explicit any particular connection to Otham worship or anything like that in what he's had to say, it's clear that those symbols are kind of rallying cry for people who subscribe to the Q&ONN conspiracy to think that this is all part of the resistance to the powers which are somehow keeping down right-wing, white, masculinist, supremacist people who would otherwise be in their rightful positions of power. Do you think we have some work to do to sort of reappropriate some parts of the North mythology

to avoid this link in this reference? Yeah, I hope this is one of the things that the book sets out to do is to show how contingent the myths have always been, that people have ever since they were rediscovered in the 17th century, have interpreted them for their own purposes, and that there is really no imminent meaning in the myths, that the people who first originated the myths, if we can even talk about an idea of originating them, was so radically different and strange from us. It's very hard for us to imagine what they might have been thinking about. about when they were thinking about Othen?

Were they thinking of him as the Orrather, which is what Snorri calls him? Was he a kindly paternal figure? Or was he the warrior god who was the patron of frenzy killing? Or did he have other functions? He's the god of poetry, but nobody really wants to talk about that very much. And so I think it's really crucial for that work that we all do in different ways to reinterpret the Scandinavian past, whether it's the mythological past, the historical past, the archaeological past,

to interpret it in ways which make it relevant to the era that we're living in now, but also to remind everybody that the kinds of interpretations that popular culture are putting on this material are simply one of a whole range of interpretations, and there may be other more rational, more historically valid ways of talking about

those particular tales, those particular objects, particular ideas that maybe we should always be keeping in mind as well. Well, I would say that your book does all of this extremely well actually and it was so nice to see that combination of the real facts behind it all and all of that history. So I would definitely recommend our listeners if you've got any interest in any of this or Norse mythology at all, go and look up Caroline's book. It's called The Norse Myths That Shape the Way We Think by Caroline Larrington. Caroline, that's been a complete brilliant whistlestop tore through it.

We could easily be here for another few hours, I think, to talk about it. But we're coming to the end. So thank you so much for joining me again. It was a great pleasure. And yes, let's come back and talk about Ragnar and a couple of other heroes at some other point. Thank you all very much for listening to this. This has been an episode of Gone Medieval from History Hit. Don't forget that if you need an extra hit between podcasts,

you can sign up to our newsletter, Medieval Mondays. just find out how to subscribe in the notes below this podcast. And please give us a comment wherever you listen and follow, including on Spotify, because it really helps other people find the podcast. My co-host Matt Lewis will be here again with the next episode. This has been Gone Medieval from History Hit. Have a great week until we meet again.