D’AULAIRES’ BOOK OF NORSE MYTHS

  BY INGRI AND EDGAR PARIN D’AULAIRE

  PREFACE BY MICHAEL CHABON

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 1967 by Ingri and Edgar Parin d’Aulaire

  Copyright © renewed 1995 by Nils Daulaire and Per Ola d’Aulaire

  All rights reserved.

  Originally published as Norse Gods and Giants

  Published in the United States of America by The New York Review of Books

  The authors are grateful for the assistance of Odd Nordland, Assistant Professor at the Institute for Nordic Languages and Literature at Oslo University, Oslo, Norway.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  d’Aulaire, Ingri, 1904-[Norse gods and giants] d’Aulaires’ Book of Norse myths / Ingri and Edgar Parin d’Aulaire. p. cm.—(New York Review children’s collection)

  Originally published: Norse gods and giants. Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday, 1967.

  ISBN 1-59017-125-X (alk. paper)

  1. Gods, Norse—Juvenile literature. 2. Mythology, Norse—Juvenile literature. 3. Giants—Mythology—Juvenile literature. I. Title: Book of Norse myths. II. d’Aulaire, Edgar Parin, 1898- III. Title. IV. Series. BL860.D355 2005 293’13-dc22 2004029214

  ISBN 978-1-68137-789-6

  Cover design by Louise Fili Ltd.

  TO THE MEMORY OF

  MAY MASSEE

  OUR OLD FRIEND

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Frontispiece

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface

  D'AULAIRES' BOOK OF NORSE MYTHS

  Introduction

  The First Gods and Giants

  The Creation of the World

  The Creation of Man

  Yggdrasil, the World Tree

  Asgard and the Aesir Gods

  Odin, the All-father

  Thor, the Thunder-god

  Loki, the God of the Jotun Race

  Sif’s Golden Hair

  Loki’s Monstrous Brood

  Balder, the God of Light

  Heimdall, the Watchman of Asgard

  Njord, Frey and Freya

  Bragi, God of Poetry

  Odin’s Eight-legged Steed

  The Valkyries and Valhalla

  Frigg and the Goddesses

  Freya’s Wonderful Necklace

  Idunn’s Apples of Youth

  Skade, the Ski-goddess

  Frey and Gerd, the Jotun Maiden

  The Theft of Thor’s Hammer

  Thor and the Jotun Geirrod

  Thor and the Jotun Utgardsloki

  Thor and the Jotun Rungnir

  Thor and the Jotun Aegir

  The Death of Balder

  Loki’s Punishment

  Ragnarokk, the Destiny of the God

  A New World

  Reader’s Companion

  Biographical Notes

  Preface

  I was in the third grade when I first read this book, and already suffering the changes, the horns, wings, and tusks that grow on your imagination when you thrive on a steady diet of myths and fairy tales. I had read its predecessor, d’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths (1961), and I knew my Old Testament pretty well, from the Creation more or less down to Ruth. There was rape and murder in those other books, revenge, cannibalism, folly, madness, incest, and deceit. And I thought all that was great stuff. (Maybe that says something about me, or about eight-year-old boys generally. I don’t really care either way.) Joseph’s brothers, enslaving him to some Ishmaelites and then soaking his florid coat in animal blood to horrify their father: great stuff. Orpheus’ head, torn off by a raving pack of women, continuing to sing as it floats down the Hebrus River to the sea: that was great stuff, too. Every splendor in those tales had its shadow; every blessing its curse. In those shadows and curses I first encountered the primal darkness of the world, in some of our earliest attempts to explain and understand it.

  I was drawn to that darkness. I was repelled by it, too, but as the stories were presented I knew that I was supposed to be only repelled by the darkness and also, somehow, to blame myself for it. Doom and decay, crime and folly, sin and punishment, the imperative to work and sweat and struggle and suffer the Furies, these had entered the world with humankind: we brought them on ourselves. In the Bible it had all started out with a happy couple in the Garden of Eden; in the Greek myths, after a brief eon of divine patricide and child-devouring and a couple of wars in Heaven, there came a long and peaceful Golden Age. In both cases, we were meant to understand, the world had begun with light and been spoiled. Thousands of years of moralizers, preceptors, dramatists, hypocrites, and scolds had been at work on this material, with their dogma, and their hangups, and their refined sense of tragedy. The original darkness was still there in the stories, and it was still very dark indeed. But it had been engineered, like a fetid swamp by the Army Corps, rationalized, bricked up, rechanneled, given a dazzling white coat of cement. It had been turned to the advantage of people trying to make a point to recalcitrant listeners. What remained was a darkness that, while you recognized it in your own heart, obliged you at the same to recognize its disadvantage, its impoliteness, its unacceptability, its being wrong, particularly for eight-year-old boys.

  In the world of the Northmen, it was a different story.

  As the d’Aulaires told it, in this follow-up volume to their Book of Greek Myths (originally titled Norse Gods and Giants), there was something in Scandinavian mythology that went beyond the straightforward appeal of violence, monstrosity, feats of arms, sibling rivalry, and ripping yarns. Here the darkness was not solely the fault of humans, the inevitable product of their unfitness, their inherent inferiority to a God or gods who—quite cruelly, under the circumstances—had created them.

  The world of Norse gods and men and giants, which the d’Aulaires depicted, in a stunning series of lithographs, with such loving and whimsical and brutal delicacy, begins in darkness, and ends in darkness, and is veined like a fire with darkness that forks and branches. It is a world conjured against darkness, in its lee, so to speak; around a fire, in a camp at the edges of a continent-sized forest, under a sky black with snow clouds, with nothing to the north but nothingness and flickering ice. It assumes darkness, and its only conclusion is darkness (apart from a transparently tacked-on post-Christian postlude). Those veins of calamity and violence and ruin that structure it, like the forking of a fire or of the plot of a story, serve to make more vivid the magical glint of goodness that light and color represent. (Everything that is beautiful, in the Norse world, is something that glints: sparks from ringing hammers, stars, gold and gems, the Aurora borealis, tooled swords and helmets and armbands, fire, a woman’s hair, wine and mead in a golden cup.) Here the gods themselves are no better or worse, in the moral sense, than humans. They have the glint of courage, of truthfulness, loyalty, wit, and in them maybe it shines a little brighter, as their darkness throws deeper shadows. The morality encoded in these stories is a fundamental one of hospitality and revenge, gift-giving and lifetaking, oaths sworn, dooms pronounced, cruel and unforgettable pranks. Moreover (and to my eight-year-old imagination this more than anything endeared them to me) the Norse gods are mortal. Sure, you probably knew that already, but think about it again for a minute or two. Mortal gods. Gods whose flaws of character—pride, unfaithfulness, cruelty, deception, seduction—while no worse than those of Jehovah or the Olympians, will one day, and they know this, prove their undoing.

  Great stuff. Start anywhere; start with Odin. First he murders the gigantic, hideous monster who whelped his father, and slaughters him to make the universe. Then he plucks out his own right eyeball and trades it to an ice giant for a sip—a sip!—of water from the well of secret knowledge. Next he hangs himself, from a tree, for nine days and nine nights, and in a trance of divine asphyxia devises the runes. Then he opens a vein in his arm and lets his blood commingle with that of the worst (and most appealing) creature who ever lived, thus setting in motion the chain of events that will lead to the extinction of himself, everyone he loves, and all the nine worlds (beautifully mapped on the book’s endpapers) that he himself once shaped from the skull, lungs, heart, bones, teeth, and blood of his grandfather.

  The d’Aulaires capture all of this, reporting it in a straightforward, fustian-free, magical-realist prose that never stops to shake its head or gape at marvels and freaks and disasters, making them seem somehow all the stranger, and more believable. Their spectacular and quirky illustrations (a pair of adjectives appropriate to few illustrators that I can think of offhand) never found a more appropriate subject than the Norse world, with its odd blend of gorgeousness and violence, its wild prodigies and grim humor. What makes the book such a powerful feat of visual storytelling is the way in which the prose and the pictures (reflecting, perhaps, the marriage and lifelong partnership of the authors) complement each other, advance each other’s agenda. Almost every page that is not taken up by a giant bursting lithograph of stars and monsters is ornamented, with a smaller drawing, or with one of the curious, cryptic, twisted little margin-men, those human curlicues of fire, that so disquieted me as a kid and continue, to this day, to freak out and delight my own kids. Through th
is intricate gallery of marvels and filigree the text walks with calm assurance, gazing calmly into every abyss, letting the art do the work of bedazzlement while seeing to it that the remarkable facts—the powers and shortcomings of Mjolnir the mighty hammer, the strange parentage of Sleipnir, Odin’s eight-legged steed—are laid bare. This simultaneous effect of wonderment and acceptance, this doubled strength, allows the d’Aulaires to balance their recreation of the Norse world exactly on its point of greatest intensity: the figure of Loki.

  Ally and enemy, genius and failure; delightful and despicable, ridiculous and deadly, beautiful and hideous, hilarious and bitter, clever and foolish, Loki is the God of Nothing in Particular yet unmistakably of the ambiguous World Itself. It was in reading this book that I first felt the power of that ambiguity. Loki never turned up among the lists of Great Literary Heroes (or Villains) of Childhood, and yet he was my favorite character in the book that was for many years my favorite, a book whose subtitle might have been How Loki Ruined the World and Made It Worth Talking About. Loki was the god of my own mind as a child, with its competing impulses of vandalism and vision, of imagining things and smashing them. And as he cooked up schemes and foiled them, fathered monsters and stymied them, helped forestall the end of things and hastened it, he was god of the endlessly complicating nature of plot, of storytelling itself.

  I grew up in a time of mortal gods who knew, like Odin, that the world of marvels they had created was on the verge, through their own faithlessness and might, of Ragnarokk, a time when the best impulses of men and the worst were laid bare in Mississippi and Vietnam, when the suburban Midgard where I grew up was threatened—or so we were told—by frostgiants and fire-giants sworn to destroy it. And I guess I saw all of that reflected in this book. But if those parallels were there, then so was Loki, and not merely in his treachery and his urge to scheme and spoil. Loki was funny—he made the other gods laugh. In his fickleness and his fertile imagination he even brought pleasure to Odin, who with all his well-sipping and auto-asphyxiation knew too much ever to be otherwise amused. This was, in fact, the reason why Odin had taken the great, foredoomed step of making Loki his blood brother—for the pleasure, pure and simple, of his company. Loki was the god of the irresistible gag, the gratuitous punchline, the improvised, half-baked solution—the God of the Eight-Year-Old Boy—and like all great jokers and improvisers, as often the butt and the perpetrator of his greatest stunts.

  In the end, it was not the familiar darkness of the universe and of my human heart that bound me forever to this book and the nine worlds it contained. It was the bright thread of silliness, of mockery and selfmockery, of gods forced (repeatedly) to dress as women, and submit to the amorous attentions of stallions, and wrestle old ladies. The d’Aulaires’ heterogeneous drawings catch hold precisely of that thread: they are neo- Raphaelite friezes as cartooned by Popeye’s Elsie Segar, at once grandiose and goofy, in a way that reflects both the Norse universe—which begins, after all, with a cow, a great world-sized heifer, patiently, obsessively licking at a salty patch in the primal stew—and my own.

  We all grew up—all of us, from the beginning—in a time of violence and invention, absurdity and Armageddon, prey and witness to the worst and the best in humanity, in a world ruined and made interesting by Loki. I took comfort, as a kid, in knowing that things had always been as awful and as wonderful as they were now, that the world was always on the edge of total destruction, even if, in Maryland in 1969, as today, it seemed a little more true than usual.

  MICHAEL CHABON

  D’AULAIRES’ BOOK OF NORSE MYTHS

  Introduction

  WHEN the last ice age came to an end, the great glaciers that capped Northern Europe melted, uncovering a barren and rugged land. On the heels of the withdrawing ice came reindeer, wolves, bears, and foxes. They were pursued by hunters

  These men were forever struggling against Frost Giants, the cold-hearted spirits of the mountains and glaciers. But they found shelter in the valleys, where meadows grew lush and forests grew dense and deep. For thousands of years the beasts and the men who hunted them roamed throughout the north.

  Then, from the east, burst a tribe of fierce horsemen. They stormed westward, settling new lands as they went. Led by a hulking, one-eyed chieftain, they spurred their horses on until at long last they were stopped by the crashing waves of the North Sea. They could go no farther, so they settled and made the land theirs.

  Life in the north was hard for these new settlers. The Frost Giants sent bitter storms howling down from the mountains. Wild beasts, trolls and evil spirits lurked in the pathless forests, and cruel mermaids wrecked their ships. But the settlers were tough, and they were protected by their own gods, the Aesir, who had come with them from their faraway lands.

  First among the Aesir gods was Odin, ruler of gods and men. His realm was made up of nine worlds: the worlds of the dead; of fire; of gnomes; of men; of giants; of elves; of the Vanir gods; of the Aesir gods; and the world with the roof of glittering stars, where all good souls would one day meet.

  Through all these nine worlds grew the ash tree, Yggdrasil. Only as long as this tree flourished was the reign of the Aesir fated to last. Like plants, beasts, and men, the Aesir gods, too, one day must die.

  A thousand years ago, when Christianity conquered the north, the Aesir gods perished. They met their destiny on the day of Ragnarokk, when they and the monsters of the mountains and glaciers destroyed each other. Soon they were almost forgotten in most of the lands where they had once been worshiped. All that remained of them were fragments in folklore and a few of their names that had been given to the days of the week.

  Tuesday is named for Tyr, ancient god of the sword; Wednesday is Odin’s day; Thursday is Thor’s; and Friday is the day of Freya, goddess of love.

  Though the Dutch, Germans, Franks, and Saxons forgot these old gods and their battles with ice-age monsters, the Norse did not. Through the long winter nights Norsemen, young and old, would gather around their smoky fires in their long halls to hear the stories and songs of their bards.

  To keep the trolls and giants away, they used to paint Thor’s hammer on their barn doors and the dragons’ heads carved on their church portals were there to frighten away the heathen spirits. To this very day, in lonely valleys, the people may tell of meetings with trolls and gnomes and other strange creatures of the past.

  On the outlying island of Iceland, where volcanoes and glaciers stand side by side, the memory of the ancient Aesir gods was kept alive longer than anywhere else. Passed on, word by word, from father to son, these stories were at last written down in two books: the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda.

  The Poetic Edda is a collection of old Norse verse, set down in the tenth and eleventh centuries. The Prose Edda, a collection of myths and fanciful tales, was written by Snorri Sturluson about the year 1200.

  From these two great Icelandic books, and from scattered folklore and songs, we know today how the ancient Norsemen thought the world of their ancestors was created, how it flourished, and how it came to an end.

  The First Gods and Giants

  EARLY in the morning of time there was no sand, no grass, no lapping wave. There was no earth, no sun, no moon, no stars. There was Niflheim, a waste of frozen fog, and Muspelheim, a place of raging flames. And in between the fog and fire there was a gaping pit—Ginungagap.

  For untold ages crackling embers from Muspelheim and crystals of ice from Niflheim whirled around in the dark and dismal pit.

  As they whirled together, faster and faster, fire kindled a spark of life within the ice. An enormous, ugly shape rose roaring from Ginungagap. It was the frost giant, Ymir, first of the race of the jotuns. At his side a hornless ice cow came mooing from the pit.

  Together jotun and cow lived on the rim of Ginungagap. The jotum did not lack for food. Four rivers of snow-white froth flowed like milk from the huge ice cow’s udder, and Ymir drank and drank and grew to a towering height.

  As for the cow, she found plenty of food licking the salty brim of Ginungagap.