Othala is
the rune of ancestral property, of the links with our ancestors, and of our
genetic inheritance. The Eddic poem, Skirnisför,
as I understand it, asserts the importance of this genetic inheritance.
We naturally
inherit thousands of things from our ancestors: then what is the magical
inheritance symbolized by Othala? Quite surprisingly, this is all explained in
very simple words in the small poem the OERP devotes to rune Eþel, which is the
Anglo-Saxon name of the Old Germanic Othala. Under a trifling form, it explicitly
states two primary ideas and implicitly one more.
The first
explicit idea is that the most precious of our ancestral inheritances is
freedom, a behavior that is a stubborn search for freedom or may I say an even
slightly ‘stupid’ one (if I tell you that I am particularly proud of my own
stupidity in that respect)? Be it the brute force of tyrannies or the subtle
persuasion of advertisement, everything that hinders our freedom destroys our
magical strength. I need however to hone down this statement. A Jew thrown in
Dassau by the nazis is still ‘fey’, he is still inhabited by the magic of those
who will soon die. As Christians say, he “did not sell his soul to the Devil.”
In opposition, the poor guy, turned into an idiot by an excess of TV washed
down with an excess of beer, is already a soulless living-dead. This need for
freedom is what is meant by this statement of the OERP: “Native country is
loved by each human, if there the moot holds.”
The second
explicit idea is that each human being is right in trying to lead a most
pleasant life, as long as no one else suffers from it. In other words, there is
nothing like an “original sin” that sentences us to feel guilty while are we
appreciating the small pleasures of life. No judge rulies each one of our
intimate actions. There is no stupid God who cares if we have sex from the
front or the behind. There is no equally mentally retarded Devil who cares
about stealing a soul obviously useless to him. This is what means, in depth,
the seemingly obvious OERP statement “that he enjoys justly and often the
convenience of his sweet home.”
The
implicit idea is that Othala is a magic carrying rune, that is, our ancestral
inheritance is the magic. This is acknowledging that, even within the ‘worst’
of humans, rationality carries always more or less a hue of irrationality. It
can be the wish of leaving something after one’s death, or a tiny feeling of
emptiness when looking at the stump of a large oak, or only the frantic scare
of death, all this belongs to irrational, magical behaviors.
Othala is thus the rune of our ancestral inheritance, magic. It
completes and unifies the whole 24 runes Futhark, the one we have now finished
studying.
Cognates:
German Adel (nobility), Old English eðel (fatherland ), Old Norse óðal and öðli (ancestral property, patrimony), aðal, eðli, øðli and œði (nature, disposition), aðili (driver of a process), eðlingr and öðlingr (noble chief). As you can see, this root is found in many
parent words linked to an inheritance, such as a genetic one or material possessions.
Krause
attributes to this rune the meaning of “inheritance, ancestral property.” It is
the rune of the link with the ancestors. As its Old Norse meanings exemplify,
this patrimony can be held in our genes or in various belongings.
Its
classical shape is
This rune,
in spite of the scholars’ opinion, is explicitly cited in an Eddic poem,
Skirnir’s journey (Skirnisför). In
this poem, Skirnir, Freyr’s servant, has the mission of convincing the Giant
maid Gerdhr to marry Freyr. At first, Gerdhr rejects the gifts of Freyr and
refuses to marry him. It follows then that Skirnir makes threats and promises
of curses if Gerdhr goes on refusing. These curses are no longer part of our
culture and their wording is now hard to understand. In this case, it is
particularly important to forget the inherent mixture of Christianity and
rationality of our education.
This poem
is made of 42 verses. Skirnir and Gerdhr meet each other in 16. Verses 19 à 22
tell of the gifts Freyr offers to Gerdhr to seduce her, and of her words of
refusal. In verses 23 to 25, Skirnir threats Gerdhr and her father with a
wondrous sword given to him by Freyr. Direct threats to Gerdhr start at verse
26 [Note 1]:
Tams vendi ec þic drep, With the taming wand I strike you,
enn ec þic temja mvn, still I will tame you,
mær, … maid,
…
The first
curse begins at verse 29. Its first four words could all be translated by
‘witchery’. The experts see here already an allusion to the runes while the
text will describe later how Skirnir explicitly uses the runes.
Topi oc opi [Ma: œpi] (Witchery of …) madness and mad
shrieking [if œpi: only ‘shrieking’]
tjasull oc óþoli, teasel and óþoli
vaxi þér tár meþ trega; they increase the tears with grief;
seztu niþr, sit
down,
en ec mun segja þér I will tell you
svaran sús-breca the heavy sorrow
[or the heavy ‘roaring of the braking
waves’]
auk tvennan trega: and as well the double griefs.
The first
line is now presented under its normalized form “Tópi ok ópi” which introduced no double meaning.
The teasel, now called tjösull, Latin dipsacus, is a thorny plant similar to a thistle. The use of this
word is explained by the poem itself. Verse 31 predicts Gerdhr’s loneliness by
comparing her to a thistle (þistill)
growing on a roof, and the teasel even more strongly evokes solitude with its
long wiry and thorny stem ending with a floral envelope including long bracts,
stiff as prison bars. I do not yet comment on the word óþoli; it will receive a thorough explanation further on.
Tjösull (Dipsacus fullonum, fuller’s teasel) and Cirsium eriophorum (‘ass’s thistle’)
Two ‘thistle’: none of them belongs
to the genre ‘thistle’ (carduus).
Thistle can
be very thorny but the teasel (tjösull, Latin: dipsacus), looks very much like a prison with its purplish flowers
smothered by a prickly green hat.
Scotish and US donkeys eat yet another ‘ass’s thistle’, Onopordon Acanthum, now called ‘Scotch
thistle’ in England and ‘Scotch-cotton thistle’ in the USA. French donkeys say
they prefer the tilted thistle (carduus nutans).
The implied pun is here to emphasize that, even today, the floras fail to give
uniform names to the plants. That the Edda askr
might have been a yew is not at all as surprising as the scholars feel it is!
These
beautiful drawings were made by Marjorie Blamey and are published in The illustrated Flora of Britain and
Northern Europe, Blamey and Grey-Wilson, Bath Press, 1983.
Verses 30
to 35 contain a sequence of cursing threats, without explicitly calling on
magic as did verse 29. Skirnir is even rude by stating that Gerdhr will never
drink anything but hland gefi,
she-goat piss. More seriously, these verses contain two pieces of information
preparing the ultimate threat of verse 36, the one leading Gerdhr to stop
resisting.
One of
these threats states that if she refuses to live with Freyr, she will have only
two choices. Either she will lead a lonely life, or she will live with a man of
her own race, a giant. This threat looks extremely racist. That Gerdhr herself
seems to share this racism is explained by the fact that the skald specifies
that this giant will be both genetically deficient (he has three heads) and is wicked
(he neglects her and gives her urine to drink).
Another
threat describes Skirnir preparing himself to perform ultimate magic, he is
going to score runes on a magic wand. He has chosen a gambantein in the forest. The word teinn means a twig of a living tree. In its magical use, this word
is rather used in the composed form hlautteinn
where the twig is dipped in sacrificial blood and then shaken in order to see
the future from the shape drawn on the floor the blood droplets. In the present
case, no foreseeing is involved. Skirnir’s purpose is to bewitch Gerdhr in
loving Freyr. The skald had thus to use another word than hlautteinn. Classical translations speak of a “magic wand.” The
word gambr can mean a ‘wanton talk’,
and a gambantein might be a ‘rambling
twig’, i. e. a wand by which states of conscience akin to madness can be
reached. Anyhow, verse 32 makes known that Skirnir very carefully chooses this wand
on a hrár viðr, a young tree. The
gathering itself is certainly done carefully since Skirnir states, “I went in
the forest to get a gambantein, and I
got a gambantein.” (Til holtz ec gecc … gambantein at geta,
gambantein ec gat.) All this takes place in a magical and solemn
environment hard to render with simple words as the skald does.
By all
this, Skirnir puts pressure on Gerdhr and he is now ready to deliver a final
thrust to her, the runes. It is striking to notice that all along the first
verses Gerdhr is quite sarcastic to Freyr’s proposal. Suddenly, after verse 36,
she becomes very kind and says she did not believe she could start loving [or choosing] one of the Vanir.
Let us now
see what this verse 36 says, translate it, and then explain why Gerdhr changes
her mind so quickly.
The runes
she is threatened with are:
Þurs ríst ec þér Þurs carve I for you
oc þriá stafi: and
three runic inscriptions
ergi oc æþi [Mö: œði; Ge: øþi ] sexual
fury and madness fury
oc óþola; and
óþola;
Þurs obviously is rune Thurs, ON name of rune
Thurisaz. As we have seen when studying this rune, it is harmful to women, it
puts their magical power to sleep. Gerdhr is certainly not devoid of magical
power and Skirnir is a wise person, better to disarm a foe before fighting her
or him.
In
homosexual behavior among men, ergi serves
to point at the one who is buggered. When applied to a woman, it says she
appreciates it and ‘therefore’ she is extremely aroused. As an insult, it means
a woman who cannot control her sexual desire. In the Ljóðatal, Ódhinn speaks of two runes that can be used to sexually
excite a woman. They are the rune of the secular pleasures, Wunjo, and the rune
Ihwaz able to make the wise woman ‘lose her head’. It seems to me thus probable
that Skirnir has carved a rune like Ihwaz, called Ýr in Old Norse.
The three
forms æþi, œði, øþi are equivalent
and can mean either ‘nature, character’ or ‘mad fury’. As we shall
see, the next rune, óþola, is the one of the
inherited character. Thus, the meaning ‘mad fury’ is the most probable. The
rune representing the concept of madness is Algiz. In spite of having no
Norwegian Futhark equivalent, this rune must represent æþi.
Even though the time when this poem was composed is
still disputed, it may contain ancient sayings as the tales do, using words the
meaning of which is hardly understandable. I assume that the way of speaking “æþi, œði, øþi, óþola” is very ancient and refers to knowledge we can only
guess about, as I am presently doing by interpreting these words using the
ancient rune names. I therefore see no principle opposition to óþola being a reference to a rune lost in the Viking
Futhark.
The scholars interpret the word óþola as obviously being composed of privative ó, followed by the verb þola, the
whole is said to mean “non patient.” Here is a second case where I oppose the
academic world: This interpretation seems totally absurd to me. Here is my
argument for this out of the way position.
Firstly, the etymological dictionary of de Vries, and
Kock und Meissner give only one
meaning to þola: dulden, i. e., ‘to suffer’. Gering adds
the possibility ertragen (to bear),
as does Kuhn who finds in the Codex
Regius three instances of ‘to suffer’ and one of ‘to bear’ [Note 2]. Cleasby-Vigfusson
gives ‘to bear, endure, suffer’ as a first meaning and ‘to feel at rest’ as a
second one. Nevertheless, a parent word þol is
translated as ‘patience, endurance’ by Cleasby-Vigfusson. This word is attested
in several sagas but is absent from the poetic texts, this is why it is ignored
by the authors cited above, except Kuhn who, significantly, cites it without
providing an actual instance of it in the Codex
Regius. The meaning of ó-þola (ó privative) is thus most certainly ‘to suffer not’ (expressing
a kind of blessing) of rather than ‘to bear not’ (expressing a kind of mild curse).
As we shall see, the double meaning itself is enough to preclude the
interpretation ó-þola.
Secondly, Erik the Red saga (chap. 8) describes a
particularly impatient person by using a privative form, ódæll. This form is based on the adjective designating
someone of good temper and happy in life, the adjective dæll.
Thirdly, the interpretation ó-þola assumes
thus that the skald, who could express impatience in at least one unambiguous
way, used an ambiguous word meaning something like ‘you will not suffer’ and
‘you will have no patience’ formulating in this way a curse that looks also
like a blessing? Moreover, is this ridiculous clumsy curse supposed to have
convinced Gerdhr on the
spot? All this is absurd.
This is why I propose to return to the more obvious
meaning of the ancient rune Othala (or may be Othola … if we follow the Skirnisför). This meaning was not
accepted by the academics, I suppose, because they could not make sense of a
meaning like óðal. They should have though,
because the text itself explains why óðal or even aðal
are quite possible. Gerdhr is giantess and it is her giantess nature (her aðal) to couple with a giant. Skirnir
uses this destiny to threaten her in the verses 31 and 35. If this takes place,
then her genetic inheritance (her óðal)
will show in her children. The malediction simply states that she will fully
inherit of her giantess nature, with all the consequences she is well aware of.
In contemporary society, this would be equivalent, for example, to predict that
a person whose family tends to show cancers will die young from cancer. Sorcery
tends to be very efficient at this kind of foreseeing!
Skirnir then gives Gerdhr another chance: We
understand that these runes, although already carved, have not yet been
hallowed, Skirnir can still make them disappear.
svá ec þat af-ríst, then I ‘un-carve’
sem ec þat á-reist, what I have ‘already-well-carved’
ef gjöraz þarfar þess. if this becomes useful.
It is
almost impossible to know what ‘to un-carve’ exactly means. It certainly
implies a complex process we shall now try to decipher.
At first,
note that rísta means ‘to cut, to
carve, to scratch’: The runes have been written by Skirnir on his gambantein by scratching them on its
surface. The prefix af before a verb
usually introduces the same opposition as the prefix in the couple ‘to do / to
undo’. Skirnir thus says he is able to cancel the effect of the runes he has
just carved. At the end of this section I will provide a detailed explanation
of what this ‘uncarving’ process is, and its implications for magic.
It is easy
to conceive how Gerdhr admires the powers of these Gods who handle the runes so
well, and she is seduced by at the idea of sharing this power with Freyr. However,
she knows magic herself, therefore she does not give in because she weighs her
benefits in the marital status. What, I believe, goes strikes her heart is the
huge risk accepted by Freyr when he dares to use such ‘black’ runic magic to
force someone he loves to change opinion. It may be that she gives in before
the runes are hollowed forever. Then, the ‘white’ or ‘positive’ rune magic will
merge them into one unique being in a kind of mad love where Freyr himself loses
part of himself. It may be that she refuses, and there are again two cases: The
curse either succeeds or fails. If the curse succeeds, then Gerdhr will indeed
become a three headed Thurse’s wife and she will get nothing else but goat’s
piss to drink, and she will bear monstrous children – she is then completely
lost to Freyr. If the curse fails, this is because Gerdhr, or some of her kind,
brings to the fore enough magical power to counter this curse. We have very few
observations of a sorcerer’s failure; all of them, however, bear witness that to
the death of the failing sorcerer, as Freyr will, in this case. To summarize,
this rune magic might succeed or fail, in both cases Freyr puts his life at
stake for Gerdhr’s love. All this is said in a very compacted way and the poem
leaves unsaid some of the steps I just described. We understand nevertheless
that Gerdhr is deeply moved by the intensity of Freyr’s love. As long as Freyr
did not go as far as a runic curse, a real life commitment, Gerdhr could be
dubious about Frey’s sincerity since so many of the Æsir already dealt with
giantesses as sexual toys. I assume that Gerdhr was not so adverse to marry
Freyr as she cunningly claims at the beginning of the poem, and that she
outmaneuvered him in pushing him to this extreme decision to ‘dirty his hands’
in rune magic for her sake.
In
conclusion, that Freyr uses here the rune of the ancestral inheritance is not
at all surprising. Inversely, ó-
(privative) þola is a nonsense that
does not take into account the magical role of the runes. It then seems clear
that the óþoli found in verse 29 has the same meaning: Skirnir threatens Gerdhr with
furious madness, isolation (by speaking of teasel) and of an upsurge of her
genetic inheritance.
We find in
this poem the unique example of rune magic in which rune names are explicitly
given. Besides, by some in-between reading, we can guess how to carry on a rune
based galdr, as we have already seen
and as we shall make more precise after the analysis of the
if there the
moot [or the ‘thing’] holds,
and that he
enjoys justly and often the convenience of his sweet home.
Put aside
the somewhat preaching form of this poem and listen to its muffled growling of a
riot in response to the abuse undergone by the ‘modern’ human beings living in
Europe ever since the Middle Ages. It claims that we must love our country
provided it holds free men’s meetings, that is, the Icelandic thing [Note 3]: “Native country [or ancestral home] is loved by each
human, if there the moot [or the
‘thing’] holds.” It also says implicitly that on the contrary, if no thing ever takes place, as is the case
in tyrannies and rotting democracies, then loving one’s country is meaningless,
and a riot is legitimate. In other words, it tells us that our most precious
inheritance is the moot among free human beings. Under a softer form is thus
hidden that eþel, the most precious
ancestral property, is this unbreakable stubbornness of saying no, no and still
no to that which oppresses our freedom. This tyranny may be exerted by brute
force, blackmailing our family, by smothering social constraints or by a subtle
propaganda: None of them can happen in front of a free assembly of human
beings.
Again, in a
perhaps too naive style, the second sentence claims that the second precious
inheritance is our right to lead an easy and happy life. With a quiet
self-confidence, it rejects all those life theories that claim the contrary. I
mean those that consider that our primary ancestral inheritance is a flaw, an
“original sin.” On such a basis, we can build nothing but remorse and guilt in
a way that poisons all kinds of human relationships. That is what is rejected
by this apparently naive OERP.
This
Anglo-Saxon poem, in spite of all the softening it certainly underwent in the
course of time, goes on to deliver us an assignment of freedom and of
self-acceptance.
What
exactly means Skirnir when he speaks of ‘ungraving’ some runes? In order to
better understand what this af-rísta
process might mean, we shall analyze in depth a famous example provided by
chapter 73 of Egill’s saga.
This saga
tells us of a youngster who was willing to seduce a young maid and who carved
for her clumsy runes, only succeeding in making her sick. Egill is called to
help. We shall detail the successive steps of the process he undertakes. Each
step must be seen as a part of a complex process; each step does not become
efficient until the whole process is completed.
Step 1. He
finds runes engraved whalebone under the maid’s pillow.
Step 2.
Egill catches their meaning (“Egill las
þær”, the proper meaning of the verb lesa,
preterit las, is ‘to catch’), and he
…
Step
3. “telgdi hann af rúnarnar (undoes
notches in the shape of runes) » where the form ‘telgja af’’ is grammatically identical to the af-rísta we already analyzed. This undoing is similar to Skirnir’s
one since telgja means ‘to hew wood
or stone with a knife’. Egill thus “undoes notches in the shape of runes”, as
Skirnir did.
Step 4.
After that, he “scratched them while they were falling in a fire.”
Step 5. He
burns the bone on which the runes were carved and airs the sick lady’s clothes.
Step 6. He voices
a poem, usually seen as a simple poetical piece, while it rather a step of the
magical undoing he is presently performing. It amounts to a galdr as he has
already done several ones during his life. In this case, it is a healing galdr
instead of being a cursing galdr (as in the ‘poem’ where he calls the ‘landalfr’, the country elves, to curse
king Erik, ch. 58 of Egils Saga) or a
protection galdr (as he did to expose the poison in a drink, Egils Saga ch.44).
This poem
is very famous:
Skalat maðr rúnar rísta, This human
should not carve runes
nema ráða vel kunni, unless he
can properly read them,
þat verðr mörgum manni, this happens to
many human beings
es of myrkvan staf villisk; to be lost because
of these dark letters;
sák á telgðu tálkni I saw in the hewed whale bone
tíu launstafi ristna, ten
secret letters engraved
þat hefr lauka lindi which of
the lauka lindi
langs ofrtrega fengit. the long
sufferings arose.
Immediately
after, the saga continues:
Egill reist rúnar og lagði undir hægindið í hvíluna, þar er hún hvíldi;
Egill carved
runes and placed them under the pillow of the bed where she was lying.
Egill
explains how dangerous it is to use runes that you are “not able to read.” Dear
readers, I hope you realize that the goal of this chapter is to teach us how to properly read the runes, how
to properly understand their meaning. You see that it amounts often to see them
as teachers of a philosophy of life and of ethics. You also see that, even when
no rune poem is available, we track their meaning in ancient Northern texts and
in the old folklore.
This poem shows one main translation difficulty with the meaning of lauka
lindi. The problem has two causes. For one, the translators visibly find
cumbersome this lauka (plural
genitive of laukr, that is ‘of the
leeks’ – refer to rune Laukaz). For two, the word lind ou lindi can take
two meanings. It is a lime tree or a girdle. We can thus call the sick maid a
‘lime tree of leeks’ or a ‘girdle of the leeks’. All experts translate by ‘lime
tree of leeks’ or even forget this annoying ‘lauka’, and directly translate by lime tree, and feign to find
obvious that it means ‘a woman’. The cause of these choices is so complex that
I had to explain it in [Note 4]. Anyhow, this ‘lauka’ cannot be forgotten by the honest reader, and it alludes to
this young maid’s internal strength, her viridity [again: see rune Laukaz]. She also imparts this viridity to her
surrounding – the sexual side of it is obvious but not primary. This viridity
enables to efficiently fight aggressions and we have seen that rune Laukaz is
in charge of magical fights against all kinds of aggressions done with a poison.
Egill cleverly adapts general kennings for a woman to the particular case of a
recovering one by hinting that she ‘carries a belt of leeks’. In order to
explain why, I need to recall at first that all kennings for a woman are
clearly laudatory and even often enthusiastic (see [note 2]: this attitude is
illustrated in some one thousand ways by the skalds). For a modern mind, this
‘belt of leeks’ is at best funny, which perhaps explains why the academics have
been so standoffish toward this meaning. When I explained rune Laukaz, I almost
heavily insisted on the point that, in the context of ancient Germanic
traditions, the word laukr is also
always clearly laudatory. It is exact that poetical kennings describe a woman
as a carrier of gold rather than as carrier of vegetables! Egill, who lives in
a civilization where ‘girdle of the leeks’ is laudatory, boldly contrives
creating an unusual picture, valid for a galdr duration. Note that this kenning
calls for both the maid’s viridity and the leek’s healing power. Forget your
prejudices against the poetical use of vegetables, and feel awe in front of
Egill's magical poetry!
Step 7. As
the above citation shows, immediately after this galdr Egill carved (new) runes
(Egill reist rúnar cannot mean
something else) that we can assume to be healing runes. This text keeps silent
about which runes he carved.
Step 8. He
puts them under the sick maid’s pillow and she then recovers.
This
completes the eight steps of a healing ceremony as described by Egill’s saga.
This
healing ritual is described with outstanding precision, so well hidden under
simple words and such a beautiful poem that it tends to be ignored. Note how a
great sorcerer as Egill scorns all kind of hocus-pocus and runs his ritual in a
humble and efficient way. Note also that no blood magic is used here: runic
magic is not systematically bloody as claim those I believe to over-react to
the sick fear our civilization toward blood.
This shows
that the hallowing of the runes does not need to be bloody: A galdr can also
mark out the exact role of the runes. In Egill’s case, his
galdr is a healing galdr. This is not fixed, and depending on the galdr, the
rune power can be neutral (it is an undirected call to its power), it can call
for acceptance (what is called ‘white’ or ‘positive’ or ‘protective’ magic), it
can call for rejection (what is called ‘black’ or ‘negative’ or ‘aggressive’
magic). In Skirnir’s case, when he proposes to erase the runes, he claims to be
able to pronounce an acceptance galdr, which has been unfortunately forgotten.
In other words, the runes have been carved and Skirnir says to Gerdhr: “Here
are the runes I used, should I keep them or scrape them off, and write new
ones? If you accept Freyr, then these new runes will be hallowed by an
acceptation ritual. This means that, if you accept Freyr, he will also formally
accept you.” We have to understand that Gerdhr does not change her mind as fast
as the poem makes us believe: The skald speaks to people who were knowledgeable
in magical rituals and they obviously knew better than we do the ritual that
took place between verses 36 and 37.
I cannot explain all this better than by proposing to
listen to a galdr I partially put on my website (the whole galdr is not made
public), where the runes Mannaz and Ingwaz are used in three different ways. As
another examples, you will also find three different galdr for Naudiz,
depending on which Norn is called upon. Consult the page
http://www.nordic-life.org/nmh/ChanteDansSingDance/SingDance.htm.
Insofar as
Othala is the rune of ancestral inheritance, it directly concerns those who
wish to ask something from their ancestors. Several poems describe how the
heroe visits his or her ancestors in search of a magic sword. We have just seen
an example of this behavior with rune Dagaz, when quoting the poem Hervör’s
Chant where the young maiden Hervör goes in the hillock where her father is
buried in order to ask him for his sword. There are several Danish versions of
this myth, found in the popular Danish songs collected by Sven Gruntvig (1853-1883),
where a boy recovers a precious object. In the same vein, there are many tales
where children, deprived of their heritage, will ask for justice from a dead
relative who had tenderly liked them. These tales are always strongly
Christianized but remain obvious stories of necromancy. A very touching version
of these myths is the one of the mistreated children who go on their mother’s
grave (Puymaigre’s 1885 Folk-lore,
Walloon version).
|
Quand
c’est v’nu à la fosse, à deux genoux s’ sont mis. -
Douce Vierge Mari’, not’ mèr’ n’est-elle point ci ? Aussitôt
la parol’, la terre s’est ouvrie ; La
mèr’ prend le plus p’tit, à son écour l’assit, … - Reva-t-en, mon enfant. Va
t’en servir ton père et ta marâtre mère, … Et
si ell’ te demande qui t’a si bien appris : -
C’était ma pauvre mèr’, qu’elle est en terre pourrie. |
They came to
the pit, on their two knees they set. - Sweet Holy
Mary, is not our moth’r around?” At once the
word, the earth open’d. The moth’r
holds th’ smallest, sit him on her lap, … - Go back my child. Go serve your
father and your mother stepmother … And if she
asks who taught you so well: - T’was my
poor moth’r, (‘that’) she is rotten in earth. |
In general,
however, the dead accommodate their visitors curtly. For example, Léon Pineau (Vieux chants populaires scandinaves,
1898) gives us a Breton version of the woman who finds back her husband in his
grave. He rejects her with a mere hint to tenderness.
|
Elle a poussé de si hauts cris … (qu’elle) s’en fut trouver son
mari. Ma femme, ma femme,
retire-toi : Ta bouche sent le souci, Et la mienne le pourri, … |
She howled so loud (that) she could join her husband. My wife, my wife, withdraw: Your mouth smells marigold, And mine stinks rotten, … |
The Edda shows
us that even when the necromancer is a God, Ódhinn or Freyja, the awakened dead
are hardly pleasant with whoever disturbs them. Saxo Grammaticus gives us an
example where a giantess magically awakens the dead, but in this case one she
does not know and whose reaction is much more aggressive!
Then it
happened that, during the travel undertaken by her companion [Hadingus, saxonized
in Hadding by the English translators], she [the daughter of the giant who has been foster father to Hadingus. She
also took care of him, and she later became his enthralled lover] had to
spend the night in a house where the funeral of a deceased host was celebrated
in sorrow and sadness. She grasped the opportunity to practise magic: she
wanted to evoke the dead’s soul, and had Hadingus place under the dead one’s
tongue some horrible verses carved on wood, and thus forced the dead one to
speak this unbearable song: “Be shamed
and be cursed whoever has torn me from Hell! Who brought me back from
darkness … that one, for price of her lack of consciousness will bitterly cry. Be shamed and be cursed whoever has torn me
from Hell! When the black plague of a monstrous swirl will have forcefully emptied
your entrails… [your] articulations torn off by a wild nail, you then Hadingus,
you will preserve your life… but your wife, being soiled by her crime, will
alleviate my ashes, herself becoming ashes… Be shamed and be cursed whoever has torn me from Hell!”
There remains a
popular practice of this ancient testimony, reported by P. Deichman (1794)
(quoted by Pineau):
When
Icelanders wish evil on somebody, they take a rather long piece of wood, from
two to three fingers wide. They carve magic letters in which they make their
blood run. After that, they go to a grave and insert this stick down to the
corpse. They believe that the dead one comes to them and they then order him to
do which evil they wish upon their enemy. It is however necessary to hasten
stating your wish to the dead, otherwise they could speak at first, and would
kill you.
This practice
enables us to understand what happened to the giantess described by Saxo. She
has been a bit too slow in speaking first and, instead of “forcing the dead
one” to submit to her will, she has “forced the dead one to speak an unbearable song.” The “magic characters” engraved by the necromancers
in order to compose their “horrible verses” are probably the runes dedicated to
the magician Gods, Ódhinn, Freyja and Freyr. When addressing one’s own
ancestors, rune Othala can certainly also be used.
To summarize,
either you do not believe in the reality of necromancy and see it as a
ridiculous ceremony within which desires and reality are confused, or you
believe in it, and then you have to see it as powerful magic which does as much
evil to whom ever practices it as it does to whom it is directed. I want to
stress that the innocent children described above, who will kneel on the tomb
of their mother, actually use the explicit magic of an invocation to the Holy
Virgin, and they as well will ask their dead mother to act against someone,
namely their stepmother. I realize quite well that it is a so-called ‘defense
magic’, but I do not think it possible to draw a clear line between defense and
attack when personal relations are concerned. I do not especially put anathema
on necromancy, but I wish to denounce the false good faith of the false
innocent ones, I wish that we all be conscious of what we undertake.
This is why I
believe that it is necessary to be extremely careful in our behavior as a
practitioner of the worship of the ancestors. The Greek and Latin pagan
religions, the dominant religions and even the Wicca, have got us used to begging
for favors from the Spirits or from the divinities, instead of honoring them
for what they are, asking them nothing but accept our reverence. It follows
that a ceremony at first intended to honor the ancestors can turn very quickly
to necromancy, as soon as favors are required from the ancestors. The myths
tell us that, in this case, it may not always be dangerous, but that it is very
often perceived by the dead as an undesired intrusion. Homage turns to
confrontation.
There also
exist many testimonies of the voluntary returning of the dead, in particular of
parents, visiting the living. In general, these visits do not announce anything
good. The tradition wants that, for a certain period of the year, Samain among
Celts and Yule among the Scandinavians, the two populations can mix without
danger. The popularity of the festival of Halloween shows that the sharpest of
oppositions of the Christian Churches could not break down the popularity of
the bond between the living and the dead.
Othala opens
the doors between the world of the dead and that of the living.
[Note 1] There exist several
versions of the runic words used in this text. I’ll give you the main ones. The ON text I propose to
you is Rask’s (1818) Skirnisför. When
it is significant, I put between [ ] Möbius’s (1860) emendations as [Mö: ‘emendation’], for example [Mö: Skirnismál], and Gering's (1922),
for example [Ge:
[Note 2] Cleasby-Vigfusson: Richard Cleasby,
Gudbrand Vigfusson, William Craig, An
Icelandic-English dictionary, 1874-1962.
de Vries: Jan de Vries, Altnordisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch,
Leiden, 1961.
Gering: Hugo Gering, Glossar zu den Lierdern der Edda,
Paderborn, 1923.
Kock und Meissner: E. A. Kock und R. Meissner Skaldisches Lesebuch (Teil 2: Wörterbuch), Halle 1931.
Kuhn: Hans Kuhn, Edda, Die Lieder des Codex Regius, (II. Kurzes Wörterbuch),
Heidelberg 1968.