In Our Time - The Norse Gods

Episode Date: March 11, 2004

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Vikings’ myths. Thor’s huge hammer, the wailing Valkyrie, howling wolves and fierce elemental giants give a rowdy impression of the Norse myths. But at the centre of their cosmos stands a gnarled old Ash tree, from which all distances are measured and under which Valhalla lies. In the first poem of The Poetic Edda, where the stories of the Norse Gods are laid down in verse, the Seeress describes it in her prophesy: “I know that an ash-tree stands called Yggdrasil,a high tree soaked with shining loamfrom there come the dews which fall in the valley, ever green, it stands over the well of fate.” It is from this tree that the father of the Gods, Odin, will ultimately hang himself: an image of divine sacrifice so problematic for thirteenth century Christians that they left it out when they wrote the myths down.What was the theology that inspired the Vikings and what role did their myths and religion play in their daily lives?With Carolyne Larrington, Tutor in Medieval English at St John’s College, Oxford; Heather O’Donoghue, Vigfusson Rausing Reader in Ancient Icelandic Literature in the Department of English at Oxford University; John Hines, Professor of Archaeology at Cardiff University.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. Thor's huge hammer, the wailing valky, howling wolves and fierce elemental giants give a violent impression of the Norse myths. But at the centre of their cosmos stands a gnarled in ancient ashtree, from which all distances are measured and under which Valhalla lies. In the first poem of the poetic edicts, where the stories of the Norse gods are laid down in verse, the seeress describes it in her prophecy. I know that an ash tree stands called Igresil,

a high tree soaked with shining loam. From there come the Jews which fall in the valley. Evergreen, it stands over the well of fate. It's from this tree that the father of the gods Odin will ultimately hang himself, an image of divine sacrifice so problematic for 13th century Christians that they left it out when they wrote the myths down. Who were the gods that inspired the Vikings And what role did their myths and religion

play in their daily lives? With me to discuss the Norse gods are Caroline Larrington, tutor in medieval English at St. John's College, Oxford. John Hines, Professor of Archaeology at Cardiff University, and Heather O'Donohue, reader in ancient Icelandic literature and the Department of English at Oxford University. Caroline Larrington, you've just translated the poetic edda, and it starts with the Sirius' prophecy

and she foresees the end of the gods at the Battle of a Ragnarok, but also the beginning of the world of humans. Can you outline their creation myth for us, please? Well, there are multiple versions of the creation myth, but probably the simplest one to uncover is the one which you find in the poem in the Seris prophecy, where the earth simply rises up out of the sea and the giants appear,

and the gods who are descended from, and the giants eventually kill the primordial giant and form the earth as we know it out of his body. So his blood becomes the sea, his bones become the rocks. And rather interestingly, his eyelashes become the central fence that surrounds the world of the gods. And that suggests an idea of creation coming out of destruction and perhaps a central image of violence

at the heart of the Old Norse cosmos, which motivates the feud between the gods and the giants, which persists all the way through to the final days of Ragnarok. We know that creation myths and looking for the origin of things is one of the persisting factors, in fact the most persisting factor in civilisations. Is this the body disintegrating into the world? Is this matched anywhere else? We find it in Sumerian myth,

where the gods destroy the body of the mother goddess, who is a large, a monstrous fish-like creature. She's been complaining about the noise that they've been making because they live inside her and they're a sort of unruly bunch of adolescents and she complains once too often they tear her apart. So in Sumerian it's killing the mother

which is the kind of basis of the creation whereas here the gods kill the giant who is certainly an other and regarded as an enemy. Is there any, well reasons maybe the wrong word to bring the back here, but why do the giants come before the gods? This is something I think the gods

would very much like to know. I don't think we can really account for it, but we certainly find the gods going to the giants to ask them questions because the giants have more knowledge they can remember before the world existed. And the giants have husband that knowledge and eke it out quite carefully and see themselves as being in some sense is superior to the gods because they are later, or they are earlier rather than the gods have come later. Can you know much more about the giants? Not very much more. I suppose we think of the giants as, we think of giants as enormous creatures of stomping.

across the landscape. And although the some of the giants are huge, some of the female giants are I think probably the same size of the gods. I'm not sure how tall that is exactly. How tall was a god we can send that?

Well, you know, six foot four probably I would expect. Certainly reasonable size. And the giantesses, some of the giantesses are extremely attractive and the goddesses the gods are keen to perhaps marry them in some cases or at least have sexual relationships with them but some giantesses are extremely ugly and ride around on wolves

which is an unattractive feature. Why do the gods want to attack the giants? Quite often because the giants have something, some precious cultural item which the gods would like to have. Usually it's not so much hands-on attacking except in the case of Thor as sneakily stealing from the giants. And the giants themselves are also interested in stealing things back from the gods.

But Thor is the son of Othin, who carries a mighty hammer. It seems to be charged with a kind of population control mission. He has to patrol the lands of the east and keep the giants in check. And when his hammer is stolen on one occasion, he says, well, if I don't get it back, the giants will be moving into the homes of the gods

and settling down. So I need to get it back urgently. It's the only thing that keeps them undergar. control. Heather O'Donogh, can you tell us what the main literary sources are for the Northletology which Caroline has been giving us in such a succinct overview way from steeped in the edda poem which she is translated? Yes. Well, I think that the main source of the myths is the work of a 13th century Icelandic mythographer and historian, a great literary figure called Snorri, Snorri Stuttlusson. And he produced a kind of treatise about

the poetry and the mythology of his own traditions. And it's to him that we now as later readers know most about Old Norse mythology. What he does is he tells the stories of the North mythology

and he quotes great chunks of the Edda poems that Caroline's translated and the other kind of verse which embodies mythological reference, Skalwick verse. And he also tells a lot of stories

that we don't know the source what source he had for. So he's writing in the 13th century. What sources do we know that he'd draw in which we can call authentic? How far back does it go, in fact, that we can track properly? That's very difficult.

Scaldic verse, which was extremely cryptic and had a very, very difficult metre, certainly was being composed in the pre-Christian period. So if we... Sorry, pre-Christian for Northern Europe or pre-Christian, pre-Christian?

Pre-Christian for Northern Europe So we're talking about the 6th, 7th, 8th century? 9th century, yes. Iceland had a kind of official and legislative conversion in the year 1,000 AD. To Christianity? To Christianity. So we better stick to centuries because pre-Christian means a very specific thing for most people, doesn't it? It means before Christ.

Yes, yes. So sorry, right. So we're talking about 8 to 9th centuries, getting it from. Yes. So where does it come from to get there? I mean, are they in the air? do you have any idea of an oral tradition? Well, before the Scandinavian countries were Christianised,

literature was simply transmitted orally. So it all goes back to an oral tradition eventually. But because of the metre of Skaldic verse that I was talking about, it seems quite likely that verses that were composed before the conversion would have survived in oral transmission without much change. So you might talk about those as being authentic sources,

but they only talk about mythology elusively by and large. So there are rather difficult cryptic allusions to mythology, which Snorri and we as kind of later interpreters have tried to put together. We're still talking about Snorri in the poetic Edda and the prose edda,

his prophetic edda and the prose edd in the 13th century. Now he was a Christian. Yes, that's right. And therefore he was writing as a Christian. Yes. How far did he Christianize it? And how far can we just get it? I mean, let's base it.

How far can we trust him to have got it, if this word has any meaning in this sort of God, she had to got it right? Yes, different people have different views about that. I mean, I've just been working myself on. You mentioned that some of the mythological images were so disturbing that they weren't included in accounts by Christians. And I've just been looking at how some elements, which would take the place of the nasty bits that were missed out,

might have been brought in by snorry from actually Christian Latin sources. and not from later. Well, this is an interesting example. It was an introduction where Odin or Athenio hangs himself from a tree. There's a spear in his side. Now, the connection with the tree, Judas hang from a tree, the spear in the side, Christ, Christ. Now, is that snorri, Christianising what he receives,

or is he receiving something which is like, which would be far more interesting in a way, like various aspects of the origins, as we see it, of Christianity? I think that perhaps what's happened there, is that the poem on which Snorri is drawing for his account of what happens to Othin is itself a late pagan production, which was perhaps, its author was his poet, was perhaps responding to Christianity and perhaps integrating elements from Christianity into his pagan response.

How does a God die? He's bringing in elements from Christianity. So as far as we know, they started Britain down about the 9th century, gathered together in the 13th century, all the tradition before the 9th century, up in northern Europe, John Hines, where we're north of Europe which was largely un-Romanized, or maybe entirely un-Romanized, and unchristianized. And there has been a thought, or it has been proposed,

that was proposed much later, that the Greeks, as it were, or Greek ideas of God leapt over, that central European Christianised Romanised block and did a great vault over to the north and sort of fertilised the north gods. Yes, these suggestions have been made rather than it being a late event in a form of influence

in the period when the Greeks were dominant in southern Europe and into the closer parts of Asia. The most common theory has been that just as the languages of the Germanic peoples in Northern Europe and indeed most of the peoples of Europe are related as part of an Indo-European family of languages, that there were also aspects of culture that went along with those languages and that a mythology, a pantheon of different gods, it's certainly true that we can identify certain of the Norse and the, Germanic gods with gods in the Roman and Greek pantheons,

that those were all inherited from a very distant period of what would have to be prehistory indeed and that this really explains the parallels that we do get between the traditions of the two areas. Do you go along with it? I go along with it to a certain degree. There are certain connections which are absolutely undeniable. For instance, the relationship in the names of the,

Greek Zeus and the Norse god tier, Tew in Old English, which gives us the name of Tuesday. There are certain facts of that kind that are undeniable. My own view is that the idea that at one time there was some unified uniform group who were the Indo-Europeans with an Indo-European language, an Indo-European culture and an Indo-European religion that has seen. simply split and degenerated in some ways or diverged as the centuries have rolled on is probably a little bit too simplistic and we have to allow for more influence and interaction between traditions. Yeah, well, they've got to come from somewhere and what we've got so far is that they appeared, we know they appeared in printish or print in about the 9th century.

and they seem to have arrived fully formed and quite complicated when you read the edit poem I mean I've read a lot of it in Caroline's in your translation and so and so forth there's lots of them and they have conversations and they do all sorts of things so where did they come from before that

I mean I'm not trying to sort of pin you to the wall I'd just like a sort of rough and ready idea you can say it and disclaim it and so on and so forth but just fill it in a bit what happened till the 9th century I mean there were people up there so where did they get their gods from well in the 9th

century, they got them from the past. They had undoubtedly been there for a long time before then. We have various pieces of evidence for this both historical, that is, in the form of textual evidence and archaeological too, which show that there are traditions that are emerging in scoldic poetry, as Heather has said, of the 9th and 10th centuries, and subsequently in the prose, the Christian transmitted prose, of the 13th century, where there are specific motifs, specific images of the gods that we can trace back archaeologically to the 5th and the 6th century, in some cases perhaps several centuries before them. One of the interesting problems that we have to deal with is that because we have

common elements over a period of maybe a thousand years in this way, we can't, of course, assume that they meant the same all the way through. An area of great controversy at the moment is, for instance, a degree to which this principal one of the gods, you can almost call him the king of the gods or the chief god, Ovin, as he appears in the Viking period, whether he was or was not already the principal deity of the Germanic peoples as early as the 5th and 6th centuries, which is when the Anglo-Saxons were first coming into Britain and establishing English culture. are there. It's a very important

question. Because there is a sense, I've always had the impression that in the 5th and 6th century, the Anglo-Sexans who came in did bring their own gods with them. And Bid tells us about that, and those gods were very like the little bits from Bob Zainer, the gods that are being talked about

with such amplitude by usury and we've talked about. So we've got them back to there. But it's absolutely fascinating. If they really weren't properly touched by Christianity, if the Greeks didn't hop over, I'm still quite puzzled as to how they got even to the fifth century. I'm hammering away too much, you better move on.

Unless it's like, sorry, yes. Well, I think one of the key answers, one would... She's the Gospher's cross, you see. You've got the Gospeth Cross. Well, they're on the Gossforth Cross. They are indeed, yes, yes. Just to go to the Jordan, where did they come from? You're asking a question of what was the function of this mythology?

What was the function of their religious beliefs? And particularly when we look at the mythology, we can see very clearly that it's, served to explain the world, and not just the world, the universe, the cosmos to them. There were a series of characters here that represented forces that were very important in their lives. One way of explaining perhaps the giants is that they, and the violence of creation is that these are elemental forces. This is fire, this is water, this is air coming together and mixing together, and to represent it as an anthropomorphic battle is a way of explaining that these elements come together

and from that and from the violence of their interaction, creation takes place. So I would look into that sort of psychology to say, where did they come from? They came from inside people's minds in that way. And of course you will then borrow names and you will borrow stories from around the place. But that doesn't mean that the entire religion

and the entire religious impulse as a package has got to be imported in that. I agree with that. Absolutely just what you said. But it's interesting that the myths don't exactly explain. What you really do is you use the myths to air the problems that you can't explain. So where you have the absence of a scientific explanation, well, a supposed explanation, things like creation, which we appropriately began with,

it's not that the creation myths explain creation, but they give you ways of looking at creation of appropriations, They stimulate thought and they stimulate an active readership by being mystifying. Yes. You know, there are certain things. There's one bit where the giant is created by being licked out of a block of ice by a cow. Where does the cow come from? It's just left as a mystery.

It is there to puzzle you, to force you to think. Let's get to grips with these gods then, Caroline. Thor figures mightily. Thor with his hammer. sometimes it's presented in quite a humorous way. Can you tell us why he thinks he's so central and significant? I think his importance is within the framework of the myths themselves as opposed to making an argument for how many people worshipped him in particular

as against worshipping the other gods. His importance is really, I think, as the guarantor of the gods' security. He's the one who stands between the gods and the giants. And at the end of the world, he'll fall fighting the mighty Midgarde serpent who lives in the external ocean. He's also a powerful signifier of masculinity. He has a beautiful wife with long golden hair. He has a couple of children who have names like force and power. He has a daughter whom he protects and is very alarmed when he discovers she's been betrothed to a dwarf while he was away.

and I think in some ways he has a fertility function as well, human fertility. One of the most interesting stories involving Thor is when he discovers that his hammer has been stolen by the giants and he has to dress up as a woman to go to recover the hammer because the giants have demanded the goddess Freya in exchange for the hammer. Freya is unwilling to go for obvious reasons. Nobody wants to be made to marry a frost giant. and so Thor gets dressed up and goes off to Giant Land with his friend Loki to do the talking about.

Much diminished in size Thor because he's lost his hammer there for his masculinity. It's a sort of Samson thing as well. It's a very worrying situation. Yes, he doesn't. He's lost his fallas, essentially. That's even more worrying than losing her hair. Possibly, yes. And so he has to go to recover it.

And he's wearing a veil and he's dressed up in a, female accoutrements. The giants are still slightly suspicious because he eats an enormous amount of food at the bridal feast. And when asked why this is the case, he says, Lorky says he couldn't eat for days before, she, of course, couldn't eat for days before coming. She was so excited

about getting married. Why do the bride's eyes roll so fiercely? She couldn't sleep for days. She was so excited about getting married. And then Fools Hammer is brought back in to sanctify the wedding and placed on his lap, so he gets his fallace back in the sense. And that's the moment

at which he picks it up, strikes all the giant's dead, and everybody goes home again. So there's something fundamental about masculinity, I think, which Thor embodies, and which seems to have been important to people who carried images of Thor. Is there anything got as fundamental about femininity, Helenity, Heller? I think Caroline should answer that.

I think Caroline's really the expert on... Is Freya fundamental... Is that the notion of femininity, a fertility goddess, who sleeps with everybody because that's her job as a fertility goddess? I think that's something which possibly before the conversion of Norway, Freya's behaviour as a promiscuous goddess, apparently, who's accused of sleeping with every god in the room where the accusation is made, including her own brother and with the elves as well. I think perhaps there's an understanding that divine women can behave in ways which are forbidden to mortal women and that in some senses to be continually in the state of sexual arousal is important. as if you're going to be a signifier of fertility.

But I think probably many of the myths which must have existed about goddesses have been lost. And perhaps the most important role that we see, at least talked about by Snorri, is the role that Freak, the wife of Othin and the mother of many of the gods, plays when her son is in danger of being killed. And she certainly shows herself to be a devoted mother rushing around to try and find ways of circumventing his fate, getting everything in the universe to swear not to harm him, except for the mistletoe, which is a fatal omission.

And I think probably people would have responded to her more positively than they did to Freya. Heather, Caroline straying into the societies it was, as well as the society of the gods. Are we talking about the gods that have been talked about by Caroline and about John and yourself? Representing, or do you think of them as representing, To a great extent, the mores of the society at the time,

the pre-10th century societies in Northern Europe. Well, again, we come back to the problem of the literary representation of the myths after the time, whenever that was, however far back in time we go, after the time that the myths were originally developing. And so it's quite hard to talk about which time we're relating to. Well, let's just take a leap at it. Let's call it what we know is the Dark Ages. in the dark ages, did you have that sort of masculinity,

that sort of rather ambiguous, ambivalent a sense of femininity, that sort of warrior warfare? Are they reflecting that fairly accurately, or is this a sublimation? Yeah, the trouble is that it's really from the evidence of the myths that we infer things about the society, so you're ending up with kind of circular arguments. Certainly in the Icelandic sagas, which were probably 13th century,

recreations like historical novels by 13th century Icelanders about the period before Christianity in Iceland, about the period before the era of thousand and just after the year a thousand, it seems that issues of masculinity and femininity were extremely important in society. And the worst insult you could offer to a man was to impugn his masculinity. And there are various examples of...

That lasted a long time in Northern. Well, yes, it is lasting on time, possibly. Yes, yes, that's right. That's right. Can I ask you, John Hines, in what way were these gods, as far as we know, and Heather's quite right to keep stressing the narrowness of the evidence space,

and I'm rushing ahead, I'm rushing outside that too often as I realize, but never... In what were these gods regarded? Were they worshipped, as the Christian god and the Christian saints were worshipped? You devote your life. Were they, did they interfere with you? Were they mischievous interfere?

with humans like the Greek gods did. If you were a common or garden, um, uh, uh, uh, who was prepared, because as I understand it from my right,

um, some of them didn't want much to do with the gods. They believed in their own resources rather than that. But how would you regard the gods? What would, what could you do for them and what did they do for you? Well, I think this is something that we,

we can in fact answer and this is where archaeology becomes particularly useful because, um, Perhaps just turning back one step before this, we've been talking a great deal about mythology, and we've used the term religion as well. Of course, mythology and religion are not quite the same thing. Mythology is a series of stories. It is a body of literature.

It's a body of art. Religion is what practically you do in your day-to-day life to conduct your relationships with a spirit world, a world of powers that you perceive as existing. around you. And it is from precisely from the practical day-to-day life that people had that we can see

them showing that they did indeed believe in these gods and that they did conduct special relationships with them in certain ways. Perhaps the strongest evidence that we've got from this and certainly the most widespread

evidence we've got comes in the form of little pendants, symbolic pendants that people wore on their dress and from what we can tell is the dress that they would be wearing very, very regularly, by no means just a Sunday best or anything like that or whatever the particular feast stays would have been, yes, yes, or whichever God it was you were following. We learn about these principally because in the Viking age, many people were buried fully clothed and fully clothed, and so we see them in their clothing lying in the grave.

There are quite a large number of small model Thor's hammers that were worn around the neck. There are also small female figures. It's much disputed as to whether these represent the Valkyries who are sort of semi-divine, certainly supernatural, but not actually goddesses but female figures, or perhaps the goddess Freya herself. On the gender issue, what is particularly interesting is the fact that although we have a majority of these pendants are coming up in women's graves, they're by no means restricted to women's graves.

We have them both in men's graves and in women's graves. And so with the gender divide that there unquestionably was within the society, extremely important issues, your identity as a man and woman with something really quite different from one another, despite that we don't see. see a separate women's religion from men's religion. The two sexes are, from what we can see, brought together in this. They are both pursuing and culting the same gods in that way. Would you like to follow that up? The interaction between the myths and the religion? Caroline.

One thing which I think perhaps is striking from what we see in the sagas in these later prose and possibly somewhat fictionalised accounts of the way that religion was imagined to have been practiced in pre-Christian Iceland is the ways in which particular saga characters latch on, as it were, to one god. And he is the god for them. And I think we can contrast it perhaps with Hinduism, where there are different gods with different functions, and you visit a particular god's temple for a particular purpose.

But what we find in the sagas seems to be a sort of default position, if you like, for most Icelanders, of generally worshipping Thor. And the people who decide to differentiate themselves are perhaps chieftains who may have an ancestral allegiance from home from Norway to Freyer, or may have a particular interest in fertility, perhaps, and having a very successful farm by worshipping Frere. Or characters who are accomplished and practiced poets

ascribe that to their worship of Odin. And they're very conscious of. of Othin giving but also Othin taking away. He gives them the gift of poetry, but he may ask them to pay other prices for it. And one of the greatest poems probably of the pre-Christian period is a poem called Sonatorek, the loss of sons, in which the poet Eid laments the fact that two of his children

have been taken from him by the gods in death. And he blames Othin to some extent for not having protected them, though this is not entirely Othin's job. But he also says, Othen has given me compensation for this. He's given me the gift of poetry that I can make an elegy for my sons. And so there we see, I think, quite a complex understanding of the ways in which gods give and the gods take away. John? You asked about the matter of, was there worship in this period in the same way as we're familiar with from Christian and, of course, other contemporary religions.

And I think it's very useful to get the idea that, The relationship between human society and the gods, so far as we can tell, was very closely modelled on hierarchical relationships within human society. So that your tutelary god, or goddess, the one that you chose as being your lucky deity, the one who would look after you, was something perhaps rather more like a patron. You expected, as Caroline said there, you expected, protection and gifts from this figure in the same time as you expected to have to provide things in the form of respect, of loyalty, of worship, and most importantly of all, in physical

form, in the form of sacrifice to that particular deity in order to maintain. We sacrifice of all sorts of different things. We know from the vicarious. period. In fact, we know most of all of sacrificial feasts, so that when animals were slaughtered, for instance, at the end, sometime in November, the onset of winter, you cut your stock down to the smallest practical levels, simply because it's very expensive to try and feed them over the winter. You would have this, this slaughtering period, but you would then associate with that a great feast, a meat-eating feast, and this would be dedicated to a, particular god as a mark of respect to then.

Heather Anandhu, the end of the gods is foreseen in the same verse that lays down the creation myth, and it ends at a great battle of Ragnarok. Can you tell us about Ragnarok? Yes, its original meaning is the sort of final end or fate, or often translated as doom of the gods. The notion of the twilight of the gods is a sort of separate issue, a different, version of the word which then got into the later traditions. So it's envisaged as a kind of phantasmagoric battle between the gods and the giants.

And the giants are not only in kind of standard giant form, whatever that was, but also figured as wolves and the forces of chaos and huge, extraordinary things happen. Heaven splits open and... The wolf swallows the sun and another wolf swallows the moon. And Olin fights a wolf and Thor fights the mighty world serpent who might have been envisaged as the kind of belt or horizon that holds the whole world together. So these great sort of cosmic forces come together

in a battle in which basically both sides are killed. Is this a battle between good and evil? It's not exactly, no, because it seems that, well, this may be part of the Christianisation that we've been talking about. but it may be that the gods were regarded as having deserved this final conflagration, that it was a sort of moral end to their affairs, oath-breaking. As a battle between order and chaos. Again, I think this moral scale of good at one end and bad at the other is not appropriate.

Who's order? From what we've been talking about, they seem to be a fairly turbulent lot on both sides, the gods and the giants. Who's on the order's side in this? Well, the gods are on the old-the-side, yes. They try to build things. They tried to, when the wall of their out-scarthur, their home was destroyed, they tried to get it rebuilt, but unfortunately they fell out with the builders, i.e. the giants.

But there is an attempt in Vilasbao in this poem about creation and Ragnarok to figure the gods as creators of things, as creating wealth and order. And there's a trickle-down effect of humans, too. which is important. The gods make the cultural objects, they steal from the giants, they make them available to humans. Yes. I was going to say one of the particularly dignified images that you do get of the gods in the Sybil's prophecy, this poem that you mentioned, the one that does give us our most detailed account of Ragnarok, which is as the gods face a crisis, they have a meeting, they go into Parliament, they go into council.

And you get the same phrases used of this every time, I see a Rau al-hingi. And it does have a great dignity about it. So you can see them. Yes, you know, you see the gods as weak as not being transcendental, all-powerful. They are fallible figures, but they are trying. They are doing their best.

How did this mythology, how long did it last play in Europe, after Iceland officially Christianised itself in 999 or 1000 and Christianity spread further north and so on. How did the North mythology and the things it stood for well let's not talk about the 19th century and Varga and all that stuff yet if we've got time, we'll see if we can with it. How did it just play through?

Does it keep reappearing? Is it in people's lives? It's in people's minds, I think. Firstly, when Iceland converts all on one day, Of course, we have to ask ourselves how seriously that was taken. It's enacted in the law that you can carry on sacrificing as long as you do it in secret. But this is rescinded fairly quickly. And although there seems to be a period after the conversion

where it was difficult to compose overtly pagan poetry, by the time Snorri is writing in the early 13th century, I think the myths have become harmless and decontaminated. I don't think he would be retelling them if he thought there's any danger. of people rushing off to worship Othin to see if it worked better than worshipping the Christian God. And of course you have to remember that it's really only after the conversion

that this stuff gets written down. Because there is a resurrection after Ragnarov, isn't it? Baudra is reborn, having been killed by a shot of Middletoe. He's reborn and there's a sort of Christ-like feeling about resurrection now, isn't it? Yes, there is a Christ-like feeling about that and I think Snorri in the 13th century recognised that.

but I mean it's very hard to imagine how medieval Icelanders felt about the temporal status of Ragnarok whether it had happened or was about to happen or was always sort of happening in a mythic eternity it's very hard to place it Not to go any further than our own history in this country and they brought the gods

in we think fifth or sixth century there really as well you're looking after the conquest right up to the 15th century, the way that the warrior's force in this country behaved, acted, acted out their lives and their cultures. It seems to be very like that which was represented in Norse, much more like that was represented in Christianity, for instance, much more like that than was represented in the Greek gods and so on.

Would you say that? Well, that's a sort of warrior society. There are warrior society universals, I think, where what is the chief practice of the elite members of society, the aristocracy, is fighting either against external enemies or fighting amongst themselves if there isn't anybody else to fight. And so ideas of glory, of personal reputation, are valorized. You just think this is a warrior society, too, correct around the world?

I think more or less. The Chinese warlords, the Mughals, whoever we talk about. You may want to put a different sort of explanatory emphasis on what happens when you're killed in battle, so that although we have no idea what Anglo-Saxons thought happened to their dead under the pagan system, if we can call it a system,

we have at least what may be quite a late idea that in Old Norse, the heroic dead on human battle fields or went off to live in Valhalla with Othin to help out the gods in the final battle. And so some warrior society seem to be interested in the question of whether their warrior activity, will be recognised after death and some perhaps not so interested. Well, that wasn't a very fruitful path they're introduced.

So back into, when the north gods are re-emerging in literature, become literature, re-emerging literature in the 19th century, there's a great revival of interest in them. What are people looking for then? And what are they finding? Yeah, I think the 19th century is even a bit late. I think we might be talking about the 18th century because I've been doing some work recently on Blake, William Blake, whose great prophetic books draw to a surprise.

large extent on Norse mythology. And of course, the romantic poets were very keen on this thing, the romantic sublime, and they liked awe-inspiring incident and strange supernatural things happening. So Norse myths in poetic form were becoming available, actually through Latin translations, and that was just what they wanted.

Into the 19th century, it's slightly different because then you're looking at a kind of a myth that stresses heroism and the triumph of the will and all that slightly dodgy stuff. But we're also looking at myths that are brought in to define and fortify a particular state and a particular state of mind of that state, aren't we? We're talking about the German becoming state thing.

Absolutely, and we're specifically talking about Scandinavia here and a variety of political problems that Scandinavia ran through in the 19th century, the wave of nationalism that affected the whole of Europe in this period, affected Scandinavia as much as everywhere else. And in particular, Norway, which did not achieve complete independence, complete stated until the beginning of the 20th century, then made great use of its Viking past, both mythological and historical. But when and why was it pulled into Germany so effectively?

I think because German scholars had really pioneered scholarly and scientific translation of Old Norse and had made it available in reasonably accessible editions. What did they say it was peculiarly suitable as they thought for them? Well, because it was part of their own Germanic past. If they saw themselves as the heirs of a pan-Germanic tribal system from a millennium before, And so although there wasn't preserved in specifically German traditions, the whole story of the creation and the gods and so on, yet they could find it in Old Norse and say, well, those are our ancestors too.

And that was what attracted Wagner to this particular story. He bolted onto the traditions that he knew in German of the dragon-killing hero Siegfried and make an enormous creation to Ragnaruk story out of it and still be able to claim that as the Germanic heritage. Yes, it was a grand claim because it was anti-German. Christian, so it's granted, again, all the sort of turning the other cheat Christianity, and it seemed to be link up with the Greeks, so they were the Northern Greeks. Yes.

Is that too simple? They were the Northern Greeks, but they were our people and not a bunch of southern, people who weren't feeding into Germanic heritage in the same way. The Greeks aren't the ancestors. This is a better set of gods who are the ancestors. Right. We certainly shouldn't underestimate the strength of the individualist ethos that there is within heroism and the heroism that is so closely connected to these personal relations with the gods

and the choice that you have in the relationships with the gods. If there was one distinction I would draw between the military ethics that you get before the conversion and those that you get represented in the romance poetry which reflects the ideals of the knights in armour of the Christian period, it is the fact that in the end a hero in the early heroic poetry will be saved by his own cunning, his own skill, whereas the knights in armour, in the end, what will decide their survival, is their Christian virtue. Thank you all very much indeed. We haven't got a programme next Thursday morning because there's a budget, but there'll be a repeat of a previous programme in the evening.

The decline of all of the Roman Empire, no irony intended. And thank you for listening. Good morning. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programs about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio four.