It seems almost ridiculous to be writing a post proving that Norse had a sun-goddess. After all, it’s right there in the sources that the sun is a goddess, either a human plucked from the earth to drive the sun’s chariot, or else a being who goes back to the time of creation.
Going abruptly into a starry night
It is ignorance we blink from, dark, unhoused;
There is a gaze of animal delight
Before the human vision. Then, aroused
To nebulous danger, we may look for easy stars,
Orion and the Dipper; but they are not ours,
These learned fields. Dark and ignorant,
Unable to see here what our forebears saw,
We keep some fear of random firmament
Vestigial in us. And we think, Ah,
If I had lived then, when these stories were made up, I
Could have found more likely pictures in haphazard sky.
But this is not so. Indeed, we have proved fools
When it comes to myths and images.
A few Old bestiaries, pantheons and tools
Translated to the heavens years ago—
Scales and hunter, goat and horologe—are all
That save us when, time and again, our systems fall.
And what would we do, given a fresh sky
And our dearth of image? Our fears, our few beliefs
Do not have shapes. They are like that astral way
We have called milky, vague stars and star-reefs
That were shapeless even to the fecund eye of myth—
Surely these are no forms to start a zodiac with.
To keep the sky free of luxurious shapes
Is an occupation for most of us, the mind
Free of luxurious thoughts. If we choose to escape,
What venial constellations will unwind
Around a point of light, and then cannot be found
Another night or by another man or from other ground.
As for me, I would find faces there,
Or perhaps one face I have long taken for guide;
Far-fetched, maybe, like Cygnus, but as fair,
And a constellation anyone could read
Once it was pointed out; an enlightenment of night,
The way the pronoun you will turn dark verses bright.
– William Meredith
(For the image at the top, click here.)
Vintage
I will mix me a drink of stars,—
Large stars with polychrome needles,
Small stars jetting maroon and crimson,
Cool, quiet, green stars.
I will tear them out of the sky,
And squeeze them over an old silver cup,
And I will pour the cold scorn of my Beloved into it,
So that my drink shall be bubbled with ice.
It will lap and scratch
As I swallow it down;
And I shall feel it as a serpent of fire,
Coiling and twisting in my belly.
His snortings will rise to my head,
And I shall be hot, and laugh,
Forgetting that I have ever known a woman.
Amy Lowell, 1874 – 1925
(For the image at the top, click here.)
In this post I have assembled all the written evidence I could find for sun-worship in pre-Christian Germanic and Scandinavian culture. I haven’t covered rock art or other visual evidence for the cult of the sun here as that is a post in itself.
“It was the hour of morning,
when the sun mounts with those stars
that shone with it when God’s own love
first set in motion those fair things”
― Dante Alighieri, Inferno I: 37-40.
(For the image at the top, click here.)
(This post is adapted from material in my new book on Njord and Skadi.)
One of the great puzzles of Norse mythology is the problem of Nerthus and Njord. The Germanic goddess Nerthus, whose cult is described by the Roman historian Tacitus, in the first century AD, is not attested in any other source, but her name is linguistically the same as that of the Scandinavian sea-god Njord, who appears in sources roughly 1 000 years later.
Since Snorri tells us in the Ynglinga saga that Njord had a sister who was his wife, the mystery seemed solved: Nerthus was his sister, just as Freyja was Freyr’s.
“O you, who in some pretty boat,
Eager to listen, have been following
Behind my ship, that singing sails along
Turn back to look again upon your own shores;
Tempt not the deep, lest unawares,
In losing me, you yourselves might be lost.
The sea I sail has never yet been passed;
Minerva breathes, and pilots me Apollo,
And Muses nine point out to me the Bears.
You other few who have neck uplifted
Betimes to the bread of angels upon
Which one lives and does not grow sated,
Well may you launch your vessel
Upon the deep sea.”
― Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, Canto II.
(For the image at the top, click here.)
A number of myths around the world related how the sun was once captured, and either fixed in its proper sphere or else made to stand still in the sky.
Then God reached out and took the light in his hands,
And God rolled the light around in his hands
Until he made the sun;
And he set that sun a-blazing in the heavens.
And the light that was left from making the sun
God gathered it up in a shining ball
And flung it against the darkness,
Spangling the night with the moon and stars. Then down between
The darkness and the light He hurled the world;
And God said: That’s good!
from The Creation, by James Weldon Johnson
(For the image at the top, click here.)
Chris Hadfield‘s recent year in space was a major media event here in Canada. I don’t know how much attention anyone else paid to it, but the Canadian media loved him. He tweeted pictures of the view from the space station, filmed videos of life in zero gravity and explained the science of space in an accessible, low-key way.
We are proud of our spacemen and women, though. One of them, Marc Garneau, is a member of Parliament and is considered an important member of the Liberal Party. (The LIberals also have my favourite hockey player, Ken Dryden.)
Despite this, I know how I want to go into space. I knew it the first time I saw a Green Lantern comic. (Don’t judge by the lame movie – they managed to miss everything cool about the comic.) One minute you’re just an ordinary person, the next you’re a member of a galaxy-wide organization with a ring that protects you in space and manifests your will as a three-dimensional “construct”.
At a time when it seems that space travel is going to be another perk for plutocrats, it’s nice to think that you could become a space-traveller through sheer hard work and merit – or magic.
(Thrusters wallpaper by Easterhands at Imgur.)
We Are Star Stuff 