Ten Great Religions by James Freeman Clarke

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Chapter IX.

The Teutonic and Scandinavian Religion.

Sec. 1. The Land and the Race.
Sec. 2. Idea of the Scandinavian Religion.
Sec. 3. The Eddas and their Contents.
Sec. 4. The Gods of Scandinavia.
Sec. 5. Resemblance of the Scandinavian Mythology to that of Zoroaster.
Sec. 6. Scandinavian Worship.
Sec. 7. Social Character, Maritime Discoveries, and Political Institutions
of the Scandinavians.
Sec. 8. Relation of this System to Christianity.

Sec. 1. The Land and the Race.

The great Teutonic or German division of the Indo-European family entered
Europe subsequently to the Keltic tribes, and before the Slavic
immigration. This people overspread and occupied a large part of Northern
Central Europe, from which the attempts of the Romans to dispossess them
proved futile. Of their early history we know very little. Bishop Percy
contrasts their love of making records, as shown by the Runic
inscriptions, with the Keltic law of secrecy. The Druids forbade any
communication of their mysteries by writing; but the German Scalds put all
their belief into popular songs, and reverenced literature as a gift of
the gods. Yet we have received very little information concerning these
tribes before the days of Caesar and Tacitus. Caesar describes them as
warlike, huge in stature; having reverence for women, who were their
augurs and diviners; worshipping the Sun, the Moon, and Fire; having no
regular priests, and paying little regard to sacrifices. He says that they
occupied their lives in hunting and war, devoting themselves from
childhood to severe labors. They reverenced chastity, and considered it as
conducive to health and strength. They were rather a pastoral than
agricultural people; no one owning land, but each having it assigned to
him temporarily. The object of this provision was said to be to prevent
accumulation of wealth and the loss of warlike habits. They fought with
cavalry supported by infantry. In the time of Augustus all attempts at
conquering Germany were relinquished, and war was maintained only in the
hope of revenging the destruction of Varus and his three legions by the
famous German chief Arminius, or Herrman[320].

Tacitus freely admits that the Germans were as warlike as the Romans, and
were only inferior in weapons and discipline. He pays a generous tribute
to Arminius, whom he declares to have been "beyond all question the
liberator of Germany," dying at thirty-seven, unconquered in war.[321]
Tacitus quotes from some ancient German ballads or hymns ("the only
historic monuments," says he, "that they possess") the names of Tuisto, a
god born from the earth, and Mannus, his son. Tacitus was much struck with
the physical characteristics of the race, as being so uniform. There was a
family likeness, he says, among them all,--stern blue eyes, yellow hair,
large bodies. Their wealth was in their flocks and herds. "Gold and silver
are kept from them by the anger, or perhaps by the favor, of Heaven."
Their rulers were elective, and their power was limited. Their judges were
the priests. They saw something divine in woman, and her judgments were
accepted as oracles. Such women as Veleda and Aurinia were reverenced as
prophets; "but not adored or made into goddesses," says Tacitus, with a
side-glance at some events at home. Their gods, Tacitus chooses to call
Mercury, Hercules, and Mars; but he distinctly says that the Germans had
neither idols nor temples, but worshipped in sacred groves[322]. He also
says that the Germans divined future events by pieces of sticks, by the
duel, and by the movements of sacred horses. Their leaders might decide
the less important matters, but the principal questions were settled at
public meetings. These assemblies were held at regular intervals, were
opened by the priest, were presided over by the chief, and decided all
public affairs. Tacitus remarks that the spirit of liberty goes to such
an extreme among the Germans as to destroy regularity and order. They will
not be punctual at their meetings, lest it should seem as if they attended
because commanded to come.[323] Marriage was sacred, and, unlike other
heathen nations, they were contented with one wife. They were affectionate
and constant to the marriage vow, which meant to the pure German woman one
husband, one life, one body, and one soul. The ancient Germans, like their
modern descendants, drank beer and Rhenish wine, and were divided into
numerous tribes, who afterward reappeared for the destruction of the Roman
Empire, as the Goths, Vandals, Lombards, and Franks.

The Scandinavians were a branch of the great German family. Their
language, the old Norse, was distinguished from the Alemannic, or High
German tongue, and from the Saxonic, or Low German tongue. From the Norse
have been derived the languages of Iceland, of the Ferroe Isles, of
Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. From the Germanic branch have come German,
Dutch, Anglo-Saxon, Maeso-Gothic, and English. It was in Scandinavia that
the Teutonic race developed its special civilization and religion. Cut off
from the rest of the world by stormy seas, the people could there unfold
their ideas, and become themselves. It is therefore to Scandinavia that we
must go to study the German religion, and to find the influence exercised
on modern civilization and the present character of Europe. This influence
has been freely acknowledged by great historians.

Montesquieu says:[324]--

"The great prerogative of Scandinavia is, that it afforded the great
resource to the liberty of Europe, that is, to almost all of liberty
there is among men. The Goth Jornandes calls the North of Europe the
forge of mankind. I would rather call it the forge of those instruments
which broke the fetters manufactured in the South."

Geijer, in his Swedish History, tells us:--

"The recollections which Scandinavia has to add to those of the
Germanic race are yet the most antique in character and comparatively
the most original. They offer the completest remaining example of a
social state existing previously to the reception of influences from
Rome, and in duration stretching onward so as to come within the sphere
of historical light."

We do not know how much of those old Northern ideas may be still mingled
with our ways of thought. The names of their gods we retain in those of
our weekdays,--Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Their popular
assemblies, or Things, were the origin of our Parliament, our Congress,
and our general assemblies. If from the South came the romantic admiration
of woman, from the North came a better respect for her rights and the
sense of her equality. Our trial by jury was immediately derived from
Scandinavia; and, according to Montesquieu, as we have seen, we owe to the
North, as the greatest inheritance of all, that desire for freedom which
is so chief an element in Christian civilization.

Scandinavia proper consists of those regions now occupied by the kingdoms
of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. The geographical peculiarity of this
country is its proximity everywhere to the sea, and the great extent of
its coast line. The great peninsula of Sweden and Norway, with the
Northern Ocean on its west, the Baltic and Gulf of Bothnia on its east,
penetrated everywhere by creeks, friths, and arms of the sea, surrounded
with innumerable islands, studded with lakes, and cleft with rivers, is
also unrivalled, except by Switzerland, in the sublime and picturesque
beauty of its mountains. The other peninsula, that of Denmark, surrounded
and penetrated also everywhere by the sea, differs in being almost level;
rising nowhere, at its highest point, more than a thousand feet above the
ocean. Containing an area of only twenty-two thousand square miles, it is
so penetrated with bays and creeks as to have four thousand miles of
coast. Like the northern peninsula, it is also surrounded with a multitude
of islands, which are so crowded together, especially on its eastern
coast, as to make an archipelago. It is impossible to look at the map of
Europe, and not be struck with the resemblance in these particulars
between its northern and southern geography. The Baltic Sea is the
Mediterranean of Northern Europe. The peninsula of Denmark, with its
multitudinous bays and islands, corresponds to Greece, the Morea, and its
archipelago. We have shown in our chapter on Greece that modern geography
teaches that the extent of coast line, when compared with the superficial
area of a country, is one of the essential conditions of civilization. Who
can fail to see the hand of Providence in the adaptation of races to the
countries they are to inhabit? The great tide of human life, flowing
westward from Central Asia, was divided into currents by the Caspian and
Black Seas, and by the lofty range of mountains which, under the name of
the Caucasus, Carpathian Mountains, and Alps, extends almost in an
unbroken line from the western coast of the Caspian to the northern limits
of Germany. The Teutonic races, Germans, Saxons, Franks, and Northmen,
were thus determined to the north, and spread themselves along the coast
and peninsulas of the Northern Mediterranean. The other branch of the
great Indo-European variety was distributed through Syria, Asia Minor,
Greece, Southern France, Italy, and Spain. Each of these vast European
families, stimulated to mental and moral activity by its proximity to
water, developed its own peculiar forms of national character, which were
afterwards united in modern European society. The North developed
individual freedom, the South social organization. The North gave force,
the South culture. From Southern Europe came literature, philosophy, laws,
arts; from the North, that respect for individual rights, that sense of
personal dignity, that energy of the single soul, which is the essential
equipoise of a high social culture. These two elements, of freedom and
civilization, always antagonist, have been in most ages hostile. The
individual freedom of the North has been equivalent to barbarism, and from
time to time has rolled down a destroying deluge over the South, almost
sweeping away its civilization, and overwhelming in a common ruin arts,
literature, and laws. On the other hand, civilization at the South has
passed into luxury, has produced effeminacy, till individual freedom has
been lost under grinding despotism. But in modern civilization a third
element has been added, which has brought these two powers of Northern
freedom and Southern culture into equipoise and harmony. This new element
is Christianity, which develops, at the same time, the sense of personal
responsibility, by teaching the individual destiny and worth of every
soul, and also the mutual dependence and interlacing brotherhood of all
human society. This Christian element in modern civilization saves it from
the double danger of a relapse into barbarism on the one hand, and a too
refined luxury on the other. The nations of Europe, to-day, which are the
most advanced in civilization, literature, and art, are also the most
deeply pervaded with the love of freedom; and the most civilized nations
on the globe, instead of being the most effeminate, are also the most
powerful.

The Scandinavian people, destined to play so important a part in the
history of the world, were, as we have said, a branch of the great
Indo-European variety. We have seen that modern ethnology teaches that all
the races which inhabit Europe, with some trifling exceptions, belong to
one family, which originated in Central Asia. This has appeared and is
proved by means of glossology, or the science of language. The closest
resemblance exists between the seven linguistic families of Hindostan,
Persia, Greece, Rome, Germany, the Kelts, and the Slavi; and it is a most
striking fact of human history, that from the earliest period of recorded
time down to the present day a powerful people, speaking a language
belonging to one or other of these races, should have in a great measure
swayed the destinies of the world.

Before the birth of Christ the peninsula of Denmark was called by the
Romans the Cimbric Chersonesus, or Cimbric peninsula. This name came from
the Cimbri, a people who, one hundred and eleven years before Christ,
almost overthrew the Roman Republic, exciting more terror than any event
since the days of Hannibal. More than three hundred thousand men, issuing
from the peninsula of Denmark and the adjacent regions, poured like a
torrent over Gaul and Southern Germany. They met and overthrew in
succession four Roman armies; until, finally, they were conquered by the
military skill and genius of Marius. After this eruption was checked, the
great northern volcano slumbered for centuries. Other tribes from
Asia--Goths, Vandals, Huns--combined in the overthrow of the Roman Empire.
At last the inhabitants of Scandinavia appear again under the name of
Northmen, invading and conquering England in the fifth century as Saxons,
in the ninth century as Danes, and in the eleventh as Normans again
overrunning England and France. But the peculiarity of the Scandinavian
invasions was their maritime character. Daring and skilful navigators,
they encountered the tempests of the Northern Ocean and the heavy roll of
the Atlantic in vessels so small and slight that they floated like
eggshells on the surface of the waves, and ran up the rivers of France and
England, hundreds of miles, without check from shallows or rocks. In these
fragile barks they made also the most extraordinary maritime discoveries.
The sea-kings of Norway discovered Iceland, and settled it A.D. 860 and
A.D. 874. They discovered and settled Greenland A.D. 982 and A.D. 986. On
the western coast of Greenland they planted colonies, where churches were
built, and diocesan bishoprics established, which lasted between four and
five hundred years. Finally, in A.D. 1000, they discovered, by sailing
from Greenland, the coast of Labrador, Nova Scotia, and Massachusetts Bay;
and, five hundred years before the discovery of Columbus, gathered grapes
and built houses on the southern side of Cape Cod. These facts, long
considered mythical, have been established, to the satisfaction of
European scholars, by the publication of Icelandic contemporaneous annals.
This remarkable people have furnished nearly the whole population of
England by means of the successive conquests of Saxon, Danes, and Normans,
driving the Keltic races into the mountainous regions of Wales and North
Scotland, where their descendants still remain. Colonizing themselves also
everywhere in Northern Europe, and even in Italy and Greece, they have
left the familiar stamp of their ideas and habits in all our modern
civilization[325].

Sec. 2. Idea of the Scandinavian Religion.

The central idea of the Scandinavian belief was the free struggle of soul
against material obstacles, the freedom of the Divine will in its conflict
with the opposing forces of nature. The gods of the Scandinavians were
always at war. It was a system of dualism, in which sunshine, summer, and
growth were waging perpetual battle with storm, snow, winter, ocean, and
terrestrial fire. As the gods, so the people. War was their business,
courage their duty, fortitude their virtue. The conflict of life with
death, of freedom with fate, of choice with necessity, of good with evil,
made up their history and destiny.

This conflict in the natural world was especially apparent in the
struggle, annually renewed, between summer and winter. Therefore the light
and heat gods were their friends, those of darkness and cold their
enemies. For the same reason that the burning heat of summer, Typhon, was
the Satan of Egypt; so in the North the Jotuns, ice-giants, were the
Scandinavian devils.

There are some virtues which are naturally associated together, such as
the love of truth, the sense of justice, courage, and personal
independence. There is an opposite class of virtues in like manner
naturally grouped together,--sympathy, mutual helpfulness, and a tendency
to social organization. The serious antagonism in the moral world is that
of truth and love. Most cases of conscience which present a real
difficulty resolve themselves into a conflict of truth and love. It is
hard to be true without hurting the feelings of others; it is hard to
sympathize with others and not yield a little of our inward truth. The
same antagonism is found in the religions of the world. The religions in
which truth, justice, freedom, are developed tend to isolation, coldness,
and hardness. On the other hand, the religions of brotherhood and human
sympathy tend to weakness, luxury, and slavery.

The religion of the German races, which was the natural growth of their
organization and moral character, belonged to the first class. It was a
religion in which truth, justice, self-respect, courage, freedom, were the
essential elements. The gods were human, as in the Hellenic system, with
moral attributes. They were finite beings and limited in their powers.
They carried on a warfare with hostile and destructive agents, in which at
last they were to be vanquished and destroyed, though a restoration of the
world and the gods would follow that destruction.

Such was the idea in all the faith of the Teutonic race. The chief virtue
of man was courage, his unpardonable sin was cowardice. "To fight a good
fight," this was the way to Valhalla. Odin sent his Choosers to every
battlefield to select the brave dead to become his companions in the joys
of heaven.

Sec. 3. The Eddas and their Contents.

We have observed that Iceland was settled from Norway in the ninth
century. A remarkable social life grew up there, which preserved the
ideas, manners, and religion of the Teutonic people in their purity for
many hundred years, and whose Eddas and Sagas are the chief source of our
knowledge of the race. In this ultimate and barren region of the earth,
where seas of ice make thousands of square miles desolate and
impenetrable, where icy masses, elsewhere glaciers, are here mountains,
where volcanoes with terrible eruptions destroy whole regions of inhabited
country in a few days with lava, volcanic sand, and boiling water, was
developed to its highest degree the purest form of Scandinavian life.

The religion of the Scandinavians is contained in the Eddas, which are
two,--the poetic, or elder Edda, consisting of thirty-seven poems, first
collected and published at the end of the eleventh century; and the
younger, or prose Edda, ascribed to the celebrated Snorro Sturleson, born
of a distinguished Icelandic family in the twelfth century, who, after
leading a turbulent and ambitious life, and being twice chosen supreme
magistrate, was killed A.D. 1241. The principal part of the prose Edda is
a complete synopsis of Scandinavian mythology.

The elder Edda, which is the fountain of the mythology, consists of old
songs and ballads, which had come down from an immemorial past in the
mouths of the people, but were first collected and committed to writing by
Saemund, a Christian priest of Iceland in the eleventh century. He was a
Bard, or Scald, as well as a priest, and one of his own poems, "The
Sun-Song," is in his Edda. This word "Edda" means "great-grandmother," the
ancient mother of Scandinavian knowledge. Or perhaps this name was given
to the legends, repeated by grandmothers to their grandchildren by the
vast firesides of the old farm-houses in Iceland.

This rhythmical Edda consists of thirty-seven poems[326]. It is in two
parts,--the first containing mythical poems concerning the gods and the
creation; the second, the legends of the heroes of Scandinavian history.
This latter portion of the Edda has the original and ancient fragments
from which the German Nibelungen-lied was afterward derived. These songs
are to the German poem what the ante-Homeric ballad literature of Greece
about Troy and Ulysses was to the Iliad and Odyssey as reduced to unity by
Homer.

The first poem in the first part of the poetic Edda is the Voluspa, or
Wisdom of Vala. The Vala was a prophetess, possessing vast supernatural
knowledge. Some antiquarians consider the Vala to be the same as the
Nornor, or Fates. They were dark beings, whose wisdom was fearful even to
the gods, resembling in this the Greek Prometheus. The Voluspa describes
the universe before the creation, in the morning of time, before the great
Ymir lived, when there was neither sea nor shore nor heaven. It begins
thus, Vala speaking:--

"I command the devout attention of all noble souls,
Of all the high and the low of the race of Heimdall;
I tell the doings of the All-Father,
In the most ancient Sagas which come to my mind.

"There was an age in which Ymir lived,
When was no sea, nor shore, nor salt waves;
No earth below, nor heaven above,
No yawning abyss and no grassy land.

"Till the sons of Bors lifted the dome of heaven,
And created the vast Midgard (earth) below;
Then the sun of the south rose above the mountains,
And green grasses made the ground verdant.

"The sun of the south, companion of the moon,
Held the horses of heaven with his right hand;
The sun knew not what its course should be,
The moon knew not what her power should be,
The stars knew not where their places were.

"Then the counsellors went into the hall of judgment,
And the all-holy gods held a council.
They gave names to the night and new moon;
They called to the morning and to midday,
To the afternoon and evening, arranging the times."

The Voluspa goes on to describe how the gods assembled on the field of
Ida, and proceeded to create metals and vegetables; after that the race of
dwarfs, who preside over the powers of nature and the mineral world. Then
Vala narrates how the three gods, Odin, Honir, and Lodur, "the mighty and
mild Aser," found Ask and Embla, the Adam and Eve of the Northern legends,
lying without soul, sense, motion, or color. Odin gave them their souls,
Honir their intellects, Lodur their blood and colored flesh. Then comes
the description of the ash-tree Yggdrasil, of the three Norns, or sisters
of destiny, who tell the Aser their doom, and the end and renewal of the
world; and how, at last, one being mightier than all shall arrive:--

"Then comes the mighty one to the council of the gods,
He with strength from on high who guides all things,
He decides the strife, he puts an end to struggle,
He ordains eternal laws."

In the same way, in the Song of Hyndla, another of the poems of this Edda,
is a prediction of one who shall come, mightier than all the gods, and put
an end to the strife between Aser and the giants. The song begins:--

"Wake, maid of maidens! Awake, my friend!
Hyndla, sister, dwelling in the glens!
It is night, it is cloudy; let us ride together
To the sacred place, to Valhalla."

Hyndla sings, after describing the heroes and princes born of the gods:--

"One shall be born higher than all,
Who grows strong with the strength of the earth;
He is famed as the greatest of rulers,
United with all nations as brethren.

"But one day there shall come another mightier than he;
But I dare not name his name.
Few are able to see beyond
The great battle of Odin and the Wolf."

Among the poems of the elder Edda is a Book of Proverbs, like those of
Solomon in their sagacious observations on human life and manners. It is
called the Havamal. At first we should hardly expect to find these maxims
of worldly wisdom among a people whose chief business was war. But war
develops cunning as well as courage, and battles are won by craft no less
than by daring. Consequently, among a warlike people, sagacity is
naturally cultivated.

The Havamal contains (in its proverbial section) one hundred and ten
stanzas, mostly quatrains. The following are specimens:--

1. "Carefully consider the end
Before you go to do anything,
For all is uncertain, when the enemy
Lies in wait in the house.

4. "The guest who enters
Needs water, a towel, and hospitality.
A kind reception secures a return
In word and in deed.

7. "The wise man, on coming in,
Is silent and observes,
Hears with his ears, looks with his eyes,
And carefully reflects on every event.

11. "No worse a companion can a man take on his journey
Than drunkenness.
Not as good as many believe
Is beer to the sons of men.
The more one drinks, the less he knows,
And less power has he over himself.

26. "A foolish man, in company, had better be silent.
Until he speaks no one observes his folly.
But he who knows little does not know this,
When he had better be silent.

29. "Do not mock at the stranger
Who comes trusting in your kindness;
For when he has warmed himself at your fire,
He may easily prove a wise man.

34. "It is better to depart betimes,
And not to go too often to the same house.
Love tires and turns to sadness
When one sits too often at another man's table.