Viking Goddesses E-Book

E. Kaman

• Herausgeber: Lokay
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Forbidden Knowledge
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 406

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Viking Goddesses, the second edition of the first volume of the "Forbidden Knowledge" series, offers a captivating exploration of Norse mythology, with a focus on powerful women. Part I introduces the enigmatic Völur, and through the tales of Freyja, Gullveig, and Menglöð, readers are transported to a world where goddesses wield immense influence.
Then the book delves into the age of the Nornir, weavers of fate, and introduces readers to Valkyries, mistresses of death, and swan maidens. Finally, we meet the revered Dísir. Part II examines the transition of divine women into earthly affairs, revealing intriguing changes within Norse society. Lastly, the book provides valuable appendices for those eager to discover more about Norse language and literature. With over 60 illustrations enriching the narrative, "Viking Goddesses" offers an engaging journey into the captivating realm of Norse mythology and the enduring legacy of its female figures.

Leseprobe

E. Kaman – Éva Pápes

Viking Goddesses

Forbidden Knowledge

Book One

Translated by Rachel Maltese

Lokay

2024

ISBN number: 978-1-9990366-3-8

2nd edition, revised and updated

© Kaman – Pápes 2024

All rights reserved. ©

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or manual, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system without written permission from the publisher.

Cover graphic design and illustrations: Eva Lokay

Book designer: Ibolya Kálmán

Publisher: Lokay

Distributor: Publishdrive

Authors’ website: vikingseeress.com

Table of Contents

Preface

Chronicles and Chroniclers

The Eddas

Lady Sun

Lady Moon

Part I: The First Women of the Icy North

The Age of the Völur

The Beginning and the End

Hyndla

The Wakened Völva

The Age of Goddesses

Menglöð – The Realm

Freyja – The Woman

Gullveig – The War

The Age of the Nornir

The Genesis of Humankind

Beneath the World Tree

The Cloth of Fate

The Age of the Valkyries

Mistresses of Death

Swan Maidens

The Dísir

Part II: The Age of Transition

The Transformation of the Völur

Goddesses sans Thrones

After Menglöð

Twins and Incest

Divine Nornir on Earth

Variations on the Valkyries

Óðin’s Women

The Serving Girls

The Pseudo-Valkyries

Part III: The Vision from the Past

Vestiges of the Realm of Women

Women’s World, Men’s World

Women’s Legacy

Appendices

Old Norse Language, Words and Texts

The Alphabet

Old Norse Words

Kennings

Galdralag

Translation

Family Names

Old Norse Words and Texts

“Silence I bid”

“Tell me, Fjölsviðr“

“A small sword will be ready”

“The Æsir were assembled”

“Óðin hurled”

“There are three pure sisters”

“She remembers the war“

“Playing on the lawn”

“Thence came maidens”

“She saw Valkyries“

Various Parts of the Darraðarljóð

“She was called Heiði“

“Gunnlöð gave me drink”

The Old Norse literature

Certain Songs of the Poetic Edda Related to the Gods

Völuspá

Hávamál

Vafþrúðnismál

Grímnismál

Skírnismál (För Skírnis)

Hárbarðsljóð

Hymiskviða

Lokasenna

Þrymskviða (Hamarsheimt)

Alvíssmál

Baldrs draumar (Vegtamskviða)

Rígsþula (Rígsmál)

Hyndluljóð & Völuspá hin skamma

Gróttasöngr

Svipdagsmál

Darraðarljóð

Hrafnagaldr Óðins (Forspjallsljóð)

Snorri Sturluson: Prose Edda (a Brief Overview)

Prologue

Gylfaginning

Skáldskaparmál

Nafnaþulur

Háttatal

Skáldatal

Snorri Sturluson: Heimskringla

Historical writings and Collections

Íslendingabók – Book of Icelanders

Landnámabók – Book of Settlements

Hauksbók – Haukr’s Book

Flateyjarbók – The Book of Flat Island

Miscellaneous additions

Baugr and the Viking Marriage

Spinning and Weaving

The Tree that Reached the Sky

The Mandorla

Venuses

Geography Primer

Our Cover Rune

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Bibliography

Book references

Manuscript references

Old Norse Text References

Web references

List of Illustrations

Preface

In Western culture, light—or illumination—is generally linked to good, and darkness to evil. This book is one of a series dealing with the dark side of knowledge. In this book, however, the word “dark” is used with different connotations. To us, dark knowledge is not dark because it is evil, but because it is not governed first and foremost by principles of transparency, order, rationality, or logic. Given the prodigious emotional energy it represents, its effects cannot be assessed or quantified, nor can it be described by scientific means. Still, it has a place among the forces that define our lives.

An alternate name for it might be knowledge of the night, as is appears in forms akin to those of dreams, visions, or premonitions, its origins residing in that elusive space that defies any attempt at definition.

Our ancestors conceived of their environment as an overarching whole, of which they themselves were part. To protect themselves from the thousands of hazards this environment harboured required acutely honed senses—in many cases beyond those afforded by their physical beings— as indeed, their very survival depended on them.

When approached by a person of evil intent, they needed to detect the danger this presented, as well as to perceive the wishes of powers exterior and superior to them. Living in perfect communion with nature, they were constantly aware of—and constantly subordinated themselves to—the laws that guided the universe, which they took pains never to violate, and on which they frequently sought instruction.

Those who supplied this information were women with the ability to hear, or even to summon this unseen world, who served as “bridges” to it, who formed the first mediators between humanity and the gods. Women capable of interpreting the dark side and harnessing its forces became the first wise seeresses, healers, venerated—even fearsome—priestesses, oracles who divined the future from a state of ecstasy.

And the reason it was to women, and not men that this fell was that the primary experience prompting humanity to reflect upon things beyond mere survival was the mystery of birth, a process in which men, at that time, had no clearly defined role.

Over time, as human beings began gradually to separate their own egos from those of others, this consciousness of instinct, of communal motion, began to break down. A time came when individual personalities began to emerge and individual courses took their beginnings, in which humans found themselves falling away from the former cohesive whole. The process occurred in different areas of the world at different times and in different ways, and is still underway today—indeed, many cultures on the planet still look to communal awareness as their principal guiding power.

Around the beginning of the 17th century, there commenced in Europe a set of sweeping changes centered around the principles of logic, rationality, and systematic thinking. The rise of the individual reached its summit in the wake of Renaissance humanist self-definition in a period known as the Enlightenment.

There, rationalism became the definitive principle around which humankind’s sense of the world was to be organized; science, repeatable experiments, documented exposition, and the distillation of natural laws into written symbols the manner in which our surroundings were to be described. The term Enlightenment itself is a pregnant one that encapsulates our association of light, illumination, and organization with all that is good and desirable, and relegation of all that belongs to the night and the dark to the kingdom of evil.

The communal culture of “natural man” and concomitant knowledge of the extranatural were replaced by a world in which humans conceived of themselves as individuals, operating under their own order with their own systems and laws. Not surprisingly, therefore, magic was expelled from Western culture as a mode for interpreting that world.

Since things belonging to the “dark side” of knowledge cannot be examined using laboratory methods, their workings being non-reproducible, they were pronounced non-existent, relegated to the status of superstition or falsehood, marked for extermination in the interest of humanity. While all of this was underway, those who continued to channel communal knowledge and to perceive the world in the manner of natural humankind were pushed to the fringes of society.

It is a mentality that can be traced back as far as the early Middle Ages, and one that would prompt what are now commonly known as the witch hunts. Knowledge derived from the dark and the night was irreconcilable with the systems of norms that dominated societies led by men, as Western society had clearly become. It is no coincidence, therefore, that it was chiefly women who fell victim to the purge which, led by the Christian Church, sought to expunge the old knowledge from human memory. Though by this time, ironically enough, the forces presumed to underpin the dark knowledge may long have faded, still, it is clear that a transition from old age to new did occur.

As a result, the preternatural consciousness passed into oblivion, the citizens of Western culture left nature behind with ringing finality, and the dark knowledge was thenceforward forbidden. Under the persecution that followed, the shamans, priestesses, soul seers, and sorceresses who possessed it grew so weak in both its theory and its practice that they ceased to have any true bearing on the thought processes that shaped the world about them.

At the same time, weakened though it was, their extranatural awareness did not disappear entirely. In the tales of simple rural folk, God and Saint Peter visited homes and worked wonders in much the same way the pagan gods had before them. The preternatural perception, too, has lived on in the forces—hidden or openly displayed—of the hagiographies, rituals, and ecstatic practices of various religions, in the visions of saints and prophets, and, of course, in art, where much inspiration has been drawn from the domain of the night.

On the scale of day-to-day life, extranatural awareness is most clearly palpable in the perceptions of women, who faithfully preserve their own part in all this—in the ecstasies of sexuality, in the images of dreams and visions, in ordinary hunches, and in the type of thinking commonly shrugged off as “I just know”.

The dark realm functions in terms less of what one sees than what one feels, such that its consequences and outcomes simply materialize, and each course of action arises without recourse to visible planning or preparation. The event of suddenly knowing something is neither instinct, nor intuition, as it is frequently named. Of course, we are by no means claiming that people with this ability can put their finger on any knowledge at any time. Rather, the ability to “suddenly just know” is no more a given than is knowledge of the rational sort: in other words, both skills require a certain degree of honing.

A good example of how the dark side functions can be found in story that precedes the publication of this book and, indeed, of the entire Forbidden Knowledge series:

My co-author and I have known each other and been friends for over forty years, yet in all that time, it never occurred to us that we might someday write a book together. No plans were ever made, no words exchanged on the subject, rather, fate carried us to opposite ends of the earth, to countries a full 10,000 km apart.

Fortunately, with the help of the Internet, we were able to sustain our relationship, and during one conversation, one of us expressed the thought that certain old folk tales, such as Sleeping Beauty, were originally quite different than is commonly remembered today. At this, the other requested the source of the information, later going so far as to look into the matter and discovering that the earlier tale of Briar Rose was indeed quite different.

And it was here that the underlying presence of the “dark side” first became apparent. In some nebulous way, the subconscious cooperation between our two minds gave direction to what had previously been no more than a topic of mutual interest, and we began consciously to seek out folk stories featuring women who had fallen asleep in the manner of Sleeping Beauty.

Again thanks to the Internet, it was not long before we had gathered together more than twenty such stories from every corner of the globe, including many early versions of known tales that differed substantially from the way they are typically told today. One of these was the story of Brynhild, the Old Norse Valkyrie, which caught our interest for its account of the protagonist’s having slept within a ring of fire. Our immediate feeling was that Brynhild’s sleep stood out from the others, in part because the story was rather a myth than a tale, but also for its distinctive quality in general.

And here again, the dark side made its presence felt: the two of us began writing a book together, not because we had discussed it or made prior plans, but because all at once we just knew that this is what we had to do. There was no question. One day one of us sat down and started writing, and the other did the same. No consultation ever took place as to division of labour: each of us knew what our part would be. Not once did we deliberate as to how to progress, nor set any deadlines: each of us covered her own individual area, and somehow we just knew which of us was capable of producing which sections of the text.

The book we were in the process of writing addressed the topic of sleeping women—Briar Rose and the rest. And as our work unfolded, so did something else: the exciting image of an entire panoply of phenomena looming behind the dream-laden slumber of fairy-tale women. Depth, sleep, prolonged submersion in the darkness of existence; this and much more beckoned to us to come find out why these women slept and what went on when they did. What was going on as they moved into this sunken state that then changed their lives?

As we made headway with our writing, we began to understand that Brynhild, simply, did not fit the same mould as the rest, so much so that in the end, we agreed to leave her out. The initial lines of our book Sleeping Women were put to paper in January of 2017, and by mid-May, we were already half-finished. At this point, for some reason we never could explain, we put the incomplete book aside and began looking exclusively into the myth of Brynhild, whereby it soon became clear that the translations available to us did not yield the story content we needed to conduct our analysis.

To obtain it, it became necessary to translate the Völsunga Saga, which includes the story of Brynhild, from the original; and to do this required that one of us learn Old Icelandic to the appropriate level. By September of 2017, the translation was ready, and the two of us found ourselves utterly absorbed in what it had to say.

Once more, the dark side reared its inscrutable head. Having first acted on the impulse to examine the Völsunga Saga, now we found our attention drawn to Old Icelandic traditions, the frozen vestiges of Viking culture, and indeed, the whole of Icelandic literature. We were curious to discover what the sagas would reveal of the workings of darkness, and in this way, the idea for this book was born. We commenced writing in October and by August of the following year, were more or less finished. Under the influence of the dark side, Brynhild was again omitted from consideration, as her story proved too recalcitrant, and too independent, to share space with others.

Still, from the stories we did encounter there began to emerge the contours of a past world, one in which dark knowledge, a factor of great importance to all, was represented by women. The women in question dreamt, performed magic, interpreted dreams, and delivered messages from the gods. And on this point, given that it is a people’s conception of the gods that typically reveals the most about them, we found our attention drawn in particular to the stories of the most ancient of seeresses – the völur – who, in the myths, told of the creation of gods and humans, of fate and war. Who were their gods? What did they know? How did they live? How were they shaped by the human imagination of the time?

We began to hunt for clues that might help us answer these and other similar questions. Examination of the sagas uncovered a forgotten lifestyle, headed by women of the night, bearers of the knowledge of the dark side. These were stories of goddesses, völur, and sky-bound Valkyries, stories of women who sat on golden thrones, awaiting the men fate had assigned them, who would sit at their sides.

Our mission was to give voice to an age that had been left out of the history books, one recounted in sagas written only hundreds of years after the fact, preserved for posterity in northern ice. As we worked, we felt a force compelling us; became part of an intimate process in which one thought birthed the next; experienced the energy about which we were writing.

The result: the first volume of Forbidden Knowledge, of which you now hold the second edition in your hands. In this book, we bring to life the women of the divine universe of the Old Norse myths, recount the events of the “first war,” and examine the process by which feminine power and knowledge began to lose their hold on humankind.

Our story as authors may alone be enough to demonstrate how the dark side operates. Though the changes in direction we experienced could, to some, seem random and purposeless, it is clear to us they were not. Those who routinely proceed only along well-plotted, visible courses may doubt the effectiveness of not seeming to know what one wants, grasping at straws, leaving jobs half done, etc. From the vantage point of today, however, one might say we could not have approached the subject matter as it presented itself in any shorter, more direct way.

And the reason it happened this way was that we simply let the dark side do its work, rather than resisting, let it lead us. It should be added that we did not set out with the intent of proof of hypothesis, but were motivated by what could best be likened to curiosity, though this description is not wholly apt, as the force that drove us was considerably more powerful than any simple thirst for knowledge.

The dark side, when it acts, is a palpable thing, and we let it take us where it willed, skipping parts others might have held important to chase after shadows and vague references. In the end, we found we had exhumed as many forgotten books as we had read articles written only yesterday. No plan; no set course; no stated objective. Every day a new turn of events; new knowledge; new experiences.

We do not believe that the value of a book appreciates or depreciates in line with the methods applied to its writing or the time or effort required to produce it; nor is it important how much we, the authors, agreed with each other in the course of our work or debated certain details or conclusions. From the standpoint of the final product, not even whether it represents the final shape of a concept born at the outset can be said to be of any particular significance.

In writing this book, we have made as much use of planning, research, deductive reasoning, and logic—the organized, step-by-step approach of the light side—as we have of the ways of the dark: obscure and inscrutable even to us, but clearly present, as we continuously felt. And as we researched the topics that commended themselves to our attention, we came to appreciate the value of this knowledge—this right-brain, visually perceptive, visionary approach—even to intellectual pursuits. Clearly, this very different mode of operation was not an enemy to rationality, but its equal.

It was for these reasons that we came to feel it so important that not only we ourselves learn about the extranatural side of human thought, but that we share it with others. It is a form of knowledge left to us by human tradition, one that can bring balance to a mind limited by its own rationality, make space for imagination, and permit those who tap into it to perceive a universe that lies beyond the capacity of their five bodily senses.

Skype, between Canada and Hungary, 22 February 2020

The Authors

Chronicles and Chroniclers

In this book we will be examining the faded contours of a story left to us by our pre-literate pagan1 ancestors of the Viking age and earlier through the mediating activity of Christian chroniclers and scribes.

1. Viking ship and warriors

The term Viking applies not to a particular ethnicity, but to a group of explorers, conquerors, and traders whose knowledge of ship-building and sailing enabled them to fan outward from their Scandinavian homes and settle in locations far removed from Northern Europe. Though early Vikings returned home after each excursion, later groups were to construct settlements in places as distant as the British Isles, the French coast, and the territory of present-day Russia. The settlement of Iceland in the decades between 870 and 930 CE was also the result of Viking exploration.

Beyond their historical towns and villages, archaeologists have found traces of Viking activity in places as far-flung as North America, the Mediterranean, the Near East, and even Central Asia. The centuries in which this prodigious spread was accomplished are known collectively as “the Viking Age,” a period that extends roughly from 700 until 1100 CE.2

In modern terms, Viking activity might almost be described as piracy, though the Vikings were not by any means the first people to pursue a lifestyle characterized by raiding. After all, the Angles and Saxons had conquered the British Isles in precisely the same way.

The Vikings were rediscovered in the 18th century, when they were painted as romantic “barbarian warriors” and “noble savages”. Such appellations tended to obscure the fact that there were women among them, who also played significant roles in the conquest and administration of new lands.

In the 20th century, the meaning of Viking was expanded to encompass not only the conquering voyagers, but also those who remained behind. Of the peoples now referred to as Vikings, only about ten percent actually fell under the heading of adventurers, the rest having consisted of settled families of farmers, pastoralists, hunters, and traders.

Today, the word Viking is applied as an adjective to various elements of the cultures of Scandinavia: e.g. Viking ship, Viking art, and Viking religion.

For the purposes of this book, where not stated otherwise, the term “Viking age” will refer to the period lasting from roughly the second half of the first millennia to 1100 CE.

In this book we delve into the Eddas and Icelandic sagas, texts remaining to us from Old Norse mythology, in an attempt to divine just what it was that these magically endowed woman knew, how they lived and thought, and what powers they embodied.

The term saga means story, tale, legend or history. To begin with, the telling or performance of sagas, the primary source for our analysis, constituted an important part of the norse community life. Though taken down in the Christian era, these stories were by no means new, but had been told, honed, and perfected – ennobled, as it were – over the course of many generations.

Prior to their transcription, the sagas, like folk tales, were spread by word of mouth from person to person, their essential messages regarding the deeds of the ancestors growing ever clearer in the process. Traversing progressive generations through the vehicle of memory, their rich tradition of songs, poems, and legends preserved the worldview, mentality, legal practices, and customs of the earliest Old Norse communities. Originally, the term saga, was applied exclusively to the transcribed versions of the tales and was thus construed to mean “written story”. Later, both the written and oral traditions came to be referred to as sagas.

The classic sagas were first transcribed sometime during the 13th century, most of them in Iceland, where the adoption of Christianity had not brought with it a general prohibition against – and hence the obliteration of – pagan customs, at least for a while. Some sagas entered the written literature at the last moment, just as the tradition was on the verge of disappearing; still others were never recorded at all.

The Old Norse literature used for this book consists of poems and sagas encompassing stories of ancient times (Fornaldarsögur), along with Icelandic family histories (Íslendingasögur), the two Eddas, and various works of skaldic literature. We did not include in our research the so-called riddara (chevalier) sagas and biskupasagas (bishops' sagas).

The Eddas

Two of literary works are collectively known as Edda, the Prose Edda and Poetic Edda. Given that both titles feature the word edda, one might assume the two volumes to offer the same general content, one in verse and the other in prose form, though as we will see later, nothing could be farther from the truth.

2. Detail of folio 1v of manuscript DG 11 4to

Before looking at their content, however, it is worth recounting the long and complicated story of how the Eddas came to have the names they bear today and analyzing the similarities and differences between them. The author of the Prose Edda is known: Snorri Sturluson (1179-1241), an Icelandic poet and historian, who penned the volume he called Edda sometime around the year 1220.

The source for this information is the first page of the Codex Uppsaliensis, (Illustration 2) which offers the following identification:

Bók þessi heitir Edda. Hana hefir saman setta Snorri Sturluson eptir þeim hætti sem hér er skipat. Er fyrst frá ásum ok Ymi, þar næst skáldskapar mál ok heiti margra hluta. Síðast Háttatal er Snorri hefir ort um Hákon konung ok Skúla hertuga.3

This book is called Edda. It was compiled by Snorri Sturluson, as follows: first [it tells] about the Æsir4 and Ymir, followed by a section on poetry and the names of many things. Finally [comes] the Háttatal, written by Snorri himself regarding King Hákon and Duke Skúli.

Snorri planned his Edda as a textbook, one that would familiarize readers with the various elements of Icelandic poetry to support them in their reading and interpretation of skaldic literature. To accomplish this, Snorri quoted vast swaths of verse, many of them taken from previously circulated skaldic works, but also including passages, origins of which were unknown even to Snorri’s contemporaries.

It came to be presumed, therefore, that Snorri had had one or more sources available to him that had since been lost. In particular, it was assumed that Snorri’s Edda, which was well-known in Iceland, must have had an antecedent, from which certain verses had been taken, hence the alternate titles for two Eddas: the Younger Edda for Snorri’s textbook, and the Elder Edda for the work presumed lost.

All this changed following the discovery of a volume scholars now refer to as the Konungsbók (better known by its Latin name, Codex Regius), a tome of poetry written or collected sometime between 1260 and 1280 by a person (or persons) whose identity has never come to light. The manuscript – which has no distinguishing title page and thus offers no name for itself – emerged from obscurity only in 1643, when it came into the possession of Brynjólfur Sveinsson, Bishop of Skálholt.

The Bishop presented the manuscript to the Danish king, whose ownership earned it its present title: the Konungsbók, or King’s Book. In this way, the volume came to reside in the Copenhagen royal library, where it remained until 1971, when it was ceremoniously returned to Iceland.

Though the Codex Regius was put to paper – or more properly, to vellum5 – later than Snorri’s Edda, the undated poems it preserves are presumed, based on their content, to be much older than the book itself. At the time it was written, Iceland had been a Christian land for over two centuries, a circumstance reflected in the prosaic commentary injected into the work in numerous places and the Christian influence felt behind many of its passages. The original poetry it contains, however, is easily recognizable for its style, content, and word usage.

The Konungsbók is the best-known and oldest manuscript to contain a portion of what is now known as the Poetic Edda, a volume that constitutes not a clearly defined, independent work, but a collection of individual poems.

Though there is no agreement as to which items the Poetic Edda should rightly include, most scholars, deferring to the material of the Konungsbók, have ascribed to it a total of ten songs pertaining to the gods and twenty poems recounting the deeds of mythical heroes. At the same time, other, later manuscripts include poems that, though not found in the Konungsbók, are nonetheless a natural fit for the Poetic Edda’s style and content. What is beyond question, however, is that all texts included in the work must take the form of poetry, rather than prose, in keeping with the volume’s title.

Originally, Bishop Sveinsson believed the Konungsbók to have been compiled by Icelandic priest and scholar Sæmundur Sigfússon and so referred to it as Sæmundar (Sæmund’s) Edda, a title that both distinguished it from Snorri’s work, and suggested a connection. By the time his error was discovered, the name had stuck. Later, the word Prose was appended to Snorri’s Edda, and the two works were set apart once and for all.

To summarize: the Elder Edda or Poetic Edda is a collection poems of unspecified number and unknown authorship, originally known as Sæmundar Edda; the Younger or ProseEdda is a later textbook authored by Snorri Sturluson i.e. SnorraEdda. Apart from their similar names, confusion between the two arises in that Snorri uses excerpts from the Poetic Edda in numerous parts of the Prose Edda as linguistic illustrations.

And so, with this tangential line of inquiry exhausted, we return to the question of content.

The 30 sagas and 7 þættir (short story) relating stories of ancient times ([Fornaldarsögur) cover episodes from the era prior to Iceland’s settlement. As this process commenced only around 870, these sagas probably refer to prior events in Scandinavia (Sweden, Denmark, and Norway) for purposes that by modern standards would be regarded as entertainment, rather than historical record.

Another 41 sagas and 49 þættir consist in Icelandic family histories (Íslendingasögur) and based on historical events occurring in Iceland in the 9th and 10th centuries. The authors of these sagas are unknown.

The word skáld or skald means poet. Individuals who earned this title lived and composed poetry in the royal courts of the territories of Scandinavia during the Viking Age. Skaldic literature deals with topics ranging from the pagan gods to the deeds of great men, the laudation of kings, and the exposition of historical events.

Such remnants of Old Norse literature as did come to be written down by Christian chroniclers a couple of hundreds of years later , it is clear, are not wholly identical to the body of tales passed down from one teller to the next prior to the region’s conversion to Christianity. Indeed, in conducting the research for this book, we experienced that the clerics and laymen who collected and recorded the sagas had frequently modified or adjusted the texts to suit their worldviews and religious beliefs, in some cases deliberately omitting events and facts deemed offensive to the Church or early medieval Christian perceptions.

Excluded from the telling were topics that would certainly have elicited more from the Church than a mere head shaking – that would likely have resulted in the manuscripts’ being banned or burned, and thus lost to future generations. Given the detail in which these stories had been preserved, such omissions left glaring gaps in the text that an astute reader or researcher would immediately mark as inconsistencies. Where other sources, records or references were available, the points at which the friars and copyists seem to have suffered sudden, universal “memory lapses” became all the more apparent.

Interestingly, more often than not, these sensitive topics related to woman, and in the vast majority of cases, the events that were omitted or rewritten were precisely those in which women appeared as either creators, or persons of power. Other blacked-out details included those that spoke of women as leaders, gurus, or community dignitaries, that offered original accounts of pagan sacrifice and initiation, or that described the techniques associated with pagan magical practices.

It is likely, moreover, that neither the descriptions of female characters one does find in the sagas, nor those of the events related to them represent factual documentation of the lives and times they purport to recount, but instead reflect the manner in which Christian male chroniclers viewed women at the time the stories were transcribed.

The resulting information vacuum has forced those interested in obtaining a true picture of the times to reconstruct it themselves, via deduction and guesswork, from what scant information writers did include in the texts, whether unwittingly or for some other reason.

And here it must be conceded that we actually owe contemporary storywriters a great deal: though unable to transmit the original material in full, they did reproduce and leave behind as much as they could, and the scale of that effort is actually prodigious. In fact, it may be that the Icelandic sagas that have preserved the most complete picture we have of that now-faded age, permitting at least a partial reconstruction of the nature of ancient feminine lore, the worldview it described, and the practices it entailed.

Thus, from the details of this meagre material, there emerge the thrilling contours of an utterly foreign world, one whose power structures and living conditions differed radically from our own. And though we, the authors of this book, are pointedly aware that any conclusions we draw from such scanty evidence can be, at best, one possibility among many, we regard the attempt to give an account of a time when the power, acumen, and decisions of women determined the fate of the world they knew an important venture, to say the least.

The pages to follow introduce the reader to the first mistresses of the icy North in all their glory. The first chapter discusses the völur, Viking seeresses with the ability to perceive time from beginning to end. From there, the next chapter moves to an examination of three goddesses: the gold-enthroned Menglöð; Gullveig, who caused the war between the Vanir and Óðin’s Æsir; and Freyja, perhaps the best-known female member of the Norse pantheon.

The deities having been given their due, the third chapter then probes the Nornir, or Fates, found to have played a crucial role in the creation of humankind, whose method of weaving destiny is also discussed. The fourth chapter turns from ladies of life, to those associated with death, in a discussion of the formidable Valkyries. Finally, the concluding chapter of the first part unfolds the secrets of the group-goddesses, the dísir.

Following this survey of specific female figures, the second part of the book, “The Age of Transformation,” explores what became of these mighty goddesses and seeresses, that is, how – and into what – their powers were transformed over time, closing with a look at several questions related to the modern day:

How is ‘feminine lore’ understood today?

What are its roots and how do they still affect humankind?

How is what this book terms ‘vision from the past’ still useful?

The responses, it is hoped, will both pinpoint what it is that the Norse women left behind them, and demonstrate how that legacy is still woven – if invisibly – into the fabric of the present.

Lady Sun

Before we get to know the Northern women more closely, it's worth taking a look at the Sun and the Moon, as well as the personifications of these celestial bodies. According to everyday thinking, the Sun represents active, masculine energy, symbolizing warmth, light, power, and strength. Sun deities and solar heroes are associated with these qualities.

Its counterpart or complement is the Moon: representing, among other things, the feminine aspect, darkness, moisture, and submissiveness6.

3. The fifth verse of the Völuspá on folio 20r of manuscript AM 555 4to

The following passage comes from one of the best-known works of Old Norse literature, the poem known as Völuspá in the Poetic Edda. (Illustration 3)

5.7

The sun was in the south

with the Moon,

her right hand

on the brim of the sky.8

As the ancient Icelandic grammar makes clear, in Old Norse mythology, Sól (Sun) was female and Máni (Moon) male.9 According to both Eddas, Sól and Máni are sister and brother.

4. Nut leans over Geb

The further back in time we go, the more evidence we find that the Sun once was a woman. For example this was the case with the Egyptians, for whom the sky was also personified as goddess Nut and the earth her twin and husband the male god Geb (Illustration 4)

This point is important, as by contrast, the Sun – female in more than one language – has symbolized man/masculinity on the one hand and the intellect on the other for several thousand years now. In the words of Hans Biedermann:

In male-dominated societies, the Sun is imagined as masculine, just as naive conceptualizations held the deity itself to be male; the only exception to this is the Japanese Sun Goddess Amaterasu Omikami, ruling deity of the Shinto pantheon.10

Like the goddess herself, the meaning of the name Amaterasu Omikami is something quite beautiful: great kami (divinity or deity) who shines in the heavens.11 Her brother, god of the Moon, rules the night.

Though Biedermann describes this one case only, a look back at earlier times soon reveals others, such as the Hittite goddess Arinniti12 and Egyptian Sun Goddess Iusaaset, while numerous other goddesses – the Sami Beaivi, the Hindu Ushas, the Celtic Áine, and the Greek Athena, to name just a few – possess attributes13 connected to the dawn, daylight, warmth, and other concepts surrounding the Sun.

If some of these names sound unfamiliar, it should come as little surprise: though once powerful deities, revered for bringing light, warmth, and fertility and producing and maintaining such phenomena as the dawn, sunset, and seasons, today, their cults have all but disappeared. It would seem that the further back one goes, the more likely it is that one finds sun deities and indeed, a Sun itself, whose fundamental aspects are not male, but female.

The Australian aborigines, too, view the sun as feminine – a woman who rises each morning to bring light to the world. The Australian example is notable in that the culture in question was isolated enough for its Sun goddess myth to preserve a key element that, as beliefs surrounding the Sun were radically transformed, has gradually disappeared in other parts of the world: specifically, that the goddess returned to the East via an underground passage.

The following excerpt from an Australian myth describes how this particular culture envisioned the Sun’s pathway:

The sun-woman, Wuriupranili, and the moon-man, Japara travel at different times across the sky. Each carries a torch of flaming bark, but when they reach the western horizon they extinguish the flames and use the smouldering ends to light their way as they return eastwards through the darkness of the underground world.

Each morning, the fire lit by the sun-woman to prepare her torch of bark provides the first light of dawn. The clouds of sunrise are reddened by the dust from the powdered ochre14 which she uses to decorate her body. It is then that the soft, melodious call of Tukumbini, the honey-eater, wakens the people to the duties of another day.

At sunset, Wuriupranili reaches the western horizon. But, before she returns by an underground passage to her camp in the east, she again decorates herself with red ochre, thus causing the brilliant colours of sunset.15

The concepts of a parallel way of the sun and way of darkness are found not only in the story of Wuriupranili, but also in that of Gnowee, a goddess of the Australian Wotjobaluk tribe, who passes beneath the earth to spend the day using the torch of the Sun to search for her lost male child.

Gnowee, the sun, was once a woman who lived upon the earth when it was dark all the time, and the people had to walk about with the aid of bark torches.

One day she left her little boy asleep while she went out to dig roots for food. Yams were scarce, and Gnowee wandered so far that she reached the end of the earth, and continuing her wanderings, passed under it and came up on the other side.

Not knowing where she was, as it was dark, she could not find her little boy anywhere. So she went into the sky carrying her great bark torch, and still wanders across it and then travels under the earth looking for him.16

From these myths it is apparent that the sun goddesses’ “job” had to do not only with light and the heavens, but also with darkness and the underworld; that her course across the heavens for the purpose of bringing light, heat, and fertility to the earth was mirrored by a similar arc through the depths of the dark world below. Thus, she travelled along a circular path, whose first half took place in daylight, and its second half in the blackness of night. As both halves were her territory, she was equally at home in each; and it is in these terms that the ancient entity embodied by Wuriupranili, Goddess of the Sun, unfolds before us.

Let’s take a look at illustration 5.

5. The unity of day and night

Within the first field is incorporated the yellow semicircle representing the day, but without the darkness to distinguish it, its presence cannot be perceived. Likewise, the second field includes the dark blue semicircle representing night, but without the presence of the day, it, too, remains imperceptible. The third diagram reveals both night, and day, the presence of each defining the other. Thus, the existence of day presupposes that of night and vice versa, and the two cannot exist separately.

In the beginning, day and night were both personified by a woman, a female goddess. The sun goddess, queen of the day and night was the yet-undifferentiated primal archetype,17 the inspiration behind the world’s first cults.

Accompanying Wuriupranili, however, was a male figure – in the Australian myths the god of the Moon, Japara – who followed a similarly circular path that was not merely as complete as, but indeed, identical to his counterpart’s, though offset in time. Japara, too, carried a torch – albeit a smaller one – to illuminate his course through the heavens.

Tellingly, however, both Sun and Moon have undergone radical transformation over the course of the centuries. By appropriating the concepts of light, warmth, and daytime and pairing them with all that is good and superior in value – e.g. with the powers of the mind – the companion Moon became the hero Sun, a god who gathered both sides of the world – day and night alike – under a single yoke.

At the same time, Lady Sun, who once stood for both light and dark, also changed, her attributes, representing two aspects, cleaved asunder to be borne instead by two different types of goddesses, the first relating to the Sun, daylight, fertility, and all that is warm, and the second reigning over darkness, the depths of the earth, death, and sorcery. Appearing concurrently with the sun goddesses, therefore, were the goddesses of the night, the underworld, and blackness, exemplified by Ishtar (Astarte) of Asia Minor and Nyx of ancient Greece.

An apt illustration of the process of transformation in question comes in the figure of Hecate, a goddess associated with Hellenic culture who was responsible for overseeing not only the heavens and the earth, but also various passageways, such as those linking the worlds of the living and the dead, or light and darkness. It was in this latter capacity that Hecate’s power extended, too, to the underworld, and with it, to such concepts as magic, crossroads, doors, gateways, and all else having to do with the boundaries between realms. Over time, her cult – as human life itself – was transformed and her figure merged with those of various other familiar gods and goddesses.

6. Hecate in triune form

Hecate’s rather broadly defined authority, though limited to specific duties, nonetheless reflected the ancient belief in feminine plenitude. Accordingly, the goddess was typically depicted in triunal form, the hands of each characterization endowed with their own peculiar objects. (Illustration 6)

The first of the three figures (on the left side), for example, bore two torches, one lit and the other merely smouldering, indicating Hecate’s equal comfort in the world of day above, and night below. The torches shone in the dark because her power permitted her to illuminate lightless places.

The triune goddess’s second pair of hands held a snake and a dagger. The first of these, the snake, symbolized depth and moisture, its venom both healing and lethality.

A snake sheds its skin and grows a new one – it possesses the ability to transform itself in the manner of the Moon, which also passes through its various of phases.

It is thus no coincidence that cultures everywhere regarded the snake as the animal of the moon, its ability to resurrect tying it to the light, even while its home lay the dark of the underworld. The snake, therefore, like the world itself, represented at once the extreme and the whole, the light and the darkness.

The dagger, on the other hand, was the feminine equivalent of the masculine sword, small but equally deadly, symbolizing her power to kill, to cut, to separate, to shear off.

Finally, the third figure of the triune carried a key and rope,18 the former symbolizing her authority to allow passage between the worlds – to open up the way from one world to the other, or to close it to prevent the flow of traffic entirely – an essential feature of which was the power to decide exactly who should have access to the secret and the hidden, what particular roadways to reveal, and which paths to hold closed to those to whom access has not been granted. Thus, it was Hecate that held the key to the mysteries and to magic.

The rope, too, was a symbol with multiple meanings. Here, we find in it a representation of the knowledge of sorceresses and – later – of midwives, as well as of the purveyors of healing and evil known as witches. The skill in question was one that walked the boundary between binding and release, murder and healing, harm and help. To know at all times what was necessary to take or preserve life was a terrible gift, and it was no wonder those who possessed it, who knew both faces of the world’s flora, the murderous and the medicinal, were regarded with deferential suspicion.

In the triplicity of the goddess Hecate was preserved something of the former omniety of womankind, the feminine capacity of changing in the manner of the Moon and its phases – of embodying day and night simultaneously.

Though over time, the individual parts of the triple goddess would each develop their own character and gain status as separate deities, Hecate herself continued to be depicted as three bodies fused together. Thus, in her, feminine plenitude continued to encompass both dark and light; the knowledge of both night and day. Hecate’s presence in both night, and day recalls the pathway taken by a foetus growing in the womb, which begins its existence in darkness, then continues in light, progressing from the inside outwards.

A large proportion of creation myths hold that the world was conceived of a woman, who carried it within her and brought it into being. In this way, woman represents a meeting of interior and exterior, her sight and knowledge being simultaneously internal/divine and external/mortal.

At the same time, therefore, woman links vertical to horizontal, godly to human, celestial to terrestrial, luminous to lightless, external to internal. In gestation, she experiences, vicariously, the absence of light in the womb, and in childbirth, its first brilliance.

The phenomenon may best be envisioned not as a process, but as a condition, where all things happen at once, extracted from the dimension of time, to exist perpetually, outside the confines of temporality. Her existence is analogous to the universe itself – all that happens there, happens in her. Ultimately, it is this that explains how the völva can concurrently communicate the world’s creation and destruction: she perceives events – indeed, time itself – simultaneously from without and within.