A meeting with Huginn and Muninn, Odin's ravens

A couple of days ago I met Odin's ravens.

I was hiking in the mountains, around a small lake called Dalevatnet, when I first heard their hoarse cries. Looking up and around I saw no birds, but I knew a pair of ravens were living in the area, so I kept on walking and listening, watching my steps in the wet bogs around the lake. The autumn had turned the marches into a reddish brown; up the hillside the birches were loosing their yellow leaves.

The weather was grey and the wind cold, and I was halfway around the lake when I heard the ravens croak again, and now two birds came gliding over the mountan ridge; riding the wind, they followed the hill, only occationally flapping their wings.

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DESCRIPTION OF THE LETHAL OATH

The Lethal Oath is the second book in The Viking Series. It's a historical action-adventure novella with Sigve the Awful as the main character. The story is set in Norway in the late Viking Age.

In the novella, Sigve enters into a hot erotic relationship with Ylajali. She is a mysterious thrall girl and the only person who knows the secret of Sigve's sword. She knows the slayer rune, the spell that quickens the sword and gives its wielder superhuman strength.

Despite his young age - and mostly because of the slayer rune - Sigve has gained reputation as a swordsman. In the beginning of the book, Sigve becomes the youngest chieftain in King Godred realm. During the inaugural feast, on his sword, he swears a sacred oath, only to discover it stands in the way of his getting Ylajali in bed.

Twilight of the Thunder God (Amon Amarth)

Human sacrifice

In episode eight of Vikings, Ragnar Lothbrok with family and friends travel to Uppsala, the most renowned sacrificial site in all the Viking World. The description in Vikings builds closely on Adam of Bremen’s accounts of the Uppsala temple and rituals in Deeds of Bishops of the Hamburg Church.

When Ragnar visited the temple in the episode, I got associations to a church and to Christian liturgy, and details in Adam’s description remind more of Christian churches from the eighth and ninth centuries than a pagan offering place. Extensive searches and excavations at Uppsala have never revealed signs of a temple, but rather of a great king’s hall that Adam may have heard of.

Adam’s descriptions of rituals and human sacrifices at Uppsala have also been doubted and ascribed to Christian bishops’ habit of gross exaggerations in their anti-pagan propaganda. Human sacrifices, however, are told of many places in the old sagas.

King Domaldi is sacrificed. Illustration to Heimskringla by Erik Werenskiold.

Ragnarok

Ragnarok by A.S. Byatt
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A.S. Byatt’s Ragnarok: The End of the Gods is a great book: well-written, interesting, exciting. I read it twice.

Ragnarok is about a little girl. Evacuated from Sheffield, she grows up in the English Second World War countryside. Here she starts reading the English version of the German book Asgard and the Gods. Digging into the mind of the child, Byatt simultaneously tells the girl’s life, her experiences with Asgard and the Gods, and the story of the Norse gods and Ragnarok. It’s elegant.

I don’t understand the end of the book. Does it give a stripe of hope? I don’t know. In Voluspå (the great Edda poem telling of the World’s beginning and end), a new and cleansed Earth rises after Ragnarok. But I prefer to believe that the Vikings and Byatt see Ragnarok as the ultimate destruction. Humanity lives and dies. End of story.


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Ship burial

The most famous description of a Viking ship burial is an eyewitness account given by Ahmad ibn Fadlan, an Arab traveller. He visited Kievian Vikings (in present-day Ukraine) in the 10th century. In episode six in the TV series Vikings, Earl Haraldson is buried in much the same way as the chieftain is buried in Ahmad ibn Fadlan's description. Both stories involve the burning of a ship with lots of grave offering, intercourses with a thrall woman who is sacrificed and buried alongside the chieftain in the ship, and a death angel.