388. Viking Mythology: Thor, Ragnarok, & Jesus Christ (Ep 6)

Who are Thor and Ragnarok in Norse Mythology? How did the Vikings fuse their own spiritual beliefs with Christianity? And how do Norse spiritual practices continue in some ways today through Scandinavian indigenous cultures? In Episode 6 of this series, Anita Anand and William Dalrymple are joined by Dr Eleanor Barraclough, author of Embers of the Hand, to discuss the sunset of this era, and how Vikings infused Christianity into their own spiritual practices. Try Attio for free at attio.com/empire Summer sale is here: get an annual Empire Club membership for an extra 20% off with code SUMMER26. That's ad-free listening, early-access, every bonus episode, and full access to our exclusive members' series. Sale ends August 31st, so grab it before summer's over. For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com. Email: [email protected] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Assistant Producer: Imogen Marriott Editor: Charlie Rodwell Social Producer: Charlie Johnson Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 2:05Speaker 03

  Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnim.

• 2:09Speaker 00

  And me, William Durumpur.

• 2:11Speaker 03

  So I want to start with the Gosforth Cross in the Lake District. Eleanor, what is it and what does it represent?

• 2:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, this is really the perfect start to what we're going to be talking about today. It's a cross from Cumbria. It's huge. It's it's a sort of probably first half of the 10th century. So it's a four and a half meter high cross. But what's really interesting about it is it has a mixture of Christian imagery. And then what appear to be scenes from Norse pagan mythology and particularly scenes associated with Ragnarok. So we've got who might be the god Vidar, who's Odin's son, tearing into the jaws of Fenrir, the monstrous wolf. We've got Loki bound with his wife, holding a bowl over the dripping poison of the snake above.

• 3:04Speaker 04

  We've got Thor trying to catch Jormungandr, the world serpent. And perhaps we've also got Heimdallir blowing his horn, signaling that Ragnarok is upon us.

• 3:14Speaker 00

  And this is all on a cross?

• 3:16Speaker 04

  This is all on a cross. It captures that central argument, that idea that there are two worlds meeting here. And it's not a case of one having to defeat the other. There's a sense of negotiation, but there's also, and obviously sometimes this is a very violent negotiation. We don't want to negate what we've been talking about in the last episode. There's a lot of violence here and early on in particular, a lot of violence directed at the monastic Christian communities of the British Isles and Ireland, absolutely. But by this point, by the time we reach the 10th century, there's something else going on, something that's more creative in terms of that negotiation and also something that demonstrates a recognition of similarity.

• 3:59Speaker 04

  There's a sense of these ideas that are chiming across the cultures and the religious ideas and the stories through that imagery.

• 4:06Speaker 03

  Can I ask first of all, some clarification questions? I mean, people, when they hear Ragnarok, they will automatically think of Marvel because they did such an extraordinary job of recreating sort of Thor and Loki and Asgard and Ragnarok is the destruction of Asgard. What is Ragnarok? I mean, from a scholar's point of view, what does it mean?

• 4:25Speaker 00

  How is it represented on a Christian monument in Cumbria?

• 4:28Speaker 04

  Right. So Ragnarok, Ragnarok. There's various versions of the word that can mean slightly different things because no one's going to make it easy. So it's basically something like the doom of the gods. Sometimes there's a version that's been interpreted as the twilight of the gods. You know, very famously, Wargana gets hold of these ideas in the 19th century and weaves them into his ring cycle. So often that's why we know about this idea of yet the doom of the gods, the final showdown, the reckoning. And there are various things that seem to be predicted to happen at Ragnarok involving the deaths of many of the gods that we know at the hands of these sort of chthonic, chaotic forces of,

• 5:10Speaker 04

  we wouldn't say evil, because it doesn't quite work like that, but destruction at least. And yeah, some of these end up certainly on the Gosforth Cross, but also in Thor Ragnarok. So there's that fabulous scene at the beginning where Thor's tied up and he's, he's being taunted by Surtur, the fire giant, isn't he? And my favorite bit of that is when, when he's turning around slowly and then he keeps turning and Surtur has to wait for him to rotate entirely before he can continue taunting him.

• 5:39Speaker 03

  Like, like a rotisserie chicken. It just has to, it has to sort of wait around, the sort of quipping. So just, just another observation, because people may not know what the Norse believed in. And, and you know, this is a cross, but they would have looked up at a tree. And I'm trying to remember from my old English, Idrasil. I mean, how, how do you say that the great tree?

• 6:00Speaker 04

  The interesting thing about Idrasil is that it contains there possibly one of the names for Odin, Igor, the, the terrible one, the fearful one. And it's this idea, because Idrasil being the world tree, let's, let's start with Idrasil and then we'll think about what's in it. It's this huge tree, its roots are down in Niflheim, this sort of the underworld, the, the world of ice and shadows and all the rest of it, possibly hell, the underworld where the dead who don't die in battle or at sea, they go if they die in their beds or of old age. You have this dragon gnawing at one of the three roots of Idrasil. You have other things down there like Mimir as well.

• 6:41Speaker 04

  Mimir is the head of the, the all, this incredibly wise being that Odin basically seeks advice from. And then you go up the branches and pretty much, you know, our ideas of it. Well, we can talk about the source material later, which will help explain why I'm being slightly cagey about the facts. But you have these nine worlds, you have Aosgard, the world, the world of the gods who are the ice here. You have Vanheim, the world of another set of gods, the Vanir. You have, you know, Midgarder, the world of humans. You have Alfheim, the world of elves, you know, all, all these different worlds, worlds of dwarves, all the rest of it. And you have my favorite character in the tree is the little gossipy squirrel, Ratatoskr,

• 7:26Speaker 04

  who basically runs up and down the trunk and along the branches, stirring up beef.

• 7:30Speaker 03

  He's an unreliable telegraph, isn't he? He goes from one branch to the other, just stirring up shit.

• 7:35Speaker 04

  Just absolute shit stirrer, exactly that. And I just, and there's, you know, deer living in there, there's an eagle at the top. And, you know, so yeah, Ratatoskr's going between, did you hear what the deer said about you? So there's all that. But there's also this idea that it is more, it's hard to sort of visualize how this could be the case. But we've been talking about Ragnarok and it's more cosmologically significant than that. Because when Ragnarok arrives, Idrasil starts to shake and shudder and collapse. And so it's this idea that it is, in a way, it is the central living artery that connects all those living creatures in all the worlds.

• 8:14Speaker 00

  So cool. That's wonderful.

• 8:15Speaker 03

  In very many ways, iconically, you know, it is, it is there like a cross. You know, it is the, the, the standing post of a religion, of a belief. Everything comes back to this thing that you can stand before and, and venerate.

• 8:30Speaker 04

  This is the interesting thing. I mentioned that Igor, that word for Odin, the terrible thing. Now Odin is often described.

• 8:39Speaker 04

  Sort of later on by Christian writers, I should say, as the Allfather. So we know Odin is the one-eyed god. He sacrifices one eye for wisdom. He is very much a god of sacrifice. He's not a very nice figure. He's quite a scary, controlling, he's always out there seeking wisdom. And one of the things he is said to do is sacrifice himself on Yggdrasil. He sacrifices himself to himself. He hangs there for nine days. He pierces himself with a spear. You know, it's absolute. And then he falls off the tree after nine days and he takes up the runes and he falls screaming. It's all incredibly dramatic. But anyone who has even

• 9:19Speaker 04

  a passing familiarity with the story of Christ's crucifixion will recognise some of those features very clearly.

• 9:26Speaker 00

  So Eleanor, take us, we're moving back now to Cumbria. And what are they trying to do on the cross? Because you've got on one image, you've got the crucifixion of Christ. And three faces outnumbering Christianity one to three is Ragnarok, the end of the Norse world, Odin, the one-eyed father of the gods, being swallowed by the Fenris wolf, and Loki, the Trexter, bound beneath the earth with a serpent dripping venom into his face. Now, this is being sculpted on a Christian monument in Cumbria. I mean, how does this all work? What are they trying to do on this thing?

• 10:01Speaker 04

  It's not always entirely clear who is on there. Sometimes it really is. It's like, hmm. But there's, for example, one possibility is that the one who's actually struggling with the Fenris wolf might actually be Vidar, who's Odin's son, who is actually sort of conceived to avenge Odin, basically. And so that is tricky, because that suggests that the Fenris wolf has already killed Odin, in which case Ragnarok is well underway, because Vidar is now struggling.

• 10:28Speaker 00

  But on the other side of the cross, Christ is already dead on the cross. And they're drawing a parallel.

• 10:33Speaker 04

  Exactly. This is the interesting thing, that there seem to be all these parallels going on. Now, one, for example, is in what seems to be the scene of Loki bound for doing one of his many horrible things. And he's got, the story is that there's venomous snakes dripping their venom down onto him. And his wife is catching them in a bowl and then getting rid of the venom. But every time she has to throw away the bowl full of venom, he shakes because the venom's coming down. And that's what earthquakes are. But then it's this idea that we're seeing what seem to be parallels to these sort of Christian theological concepts being this idea of sacrifice, this idea of, you know, sort of bowls full

• 11:16Speaker 04

  of liquid, this idea of the end of the world, in all being replicated in these quite mysterious ways. And so you say, well, what are people seeing when they look at this? It's possible that they are seeing familiar ways to understand something less familiar. So it's not necessarily that whoever did this is saying, look, all these beliefs are equal. It could be that they're saying, well, you know, the story of Ragnarok, let me now teach you the Christian story. So it might be finding ways to accommodate their worldview within the sort of the one god idea.

• 11:49Speaker 00

  So a priest or a monk is moving into a Viking community that's established there. And they're all talking every night about Yggdrasil and Loki and all these guys are familiar to us from Marvel movies. But to them, from far side chats and the evening stories being relayed. And the Christian is saying to these guys, there's another story alongside this, that's not completely different from what you're being, you've been taught. And you need to take an interest in this. And we're going to spend time making a big cross right in the middle of your community, which is going to pull you in and explain some of the stuff to you.

• 12:26Speaker 04

  Exactly. It may well be something like that. And we see examples, even in Old English, you know, old, so the Anglo Saxons convert centuries before the Norse. But there are some extraordinary poems. The Dream of the Rude is the famous one.

• 12:42Speaker 00

  On the Rathwell Cross, they have a wonderful version of it in the middle of Donfriesscher. Yeah.

• 12:46Speaker 04

  Exactly. Exactly. And the thing about the Dream of the Rude poem is, it's an Old English poem, it's very much written within a Christian context. And yet, Christ is there as a warrior. He's described as

• 12:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:58Speaker 04

  Here, yeah, he's a Germanic hero. He's naked, he's muscly, he like climbs the cross, he ascends it, he's active, he's not a sacrifice. In that passive sense, he's there as a warrior. And the cross itself, the rude, is set up as Christ's sort of retainer, his warrior, Germanic retainer. So we have to think very much, it's the ways to, it's not necessarily that those who are transmitting these stories are saying, all beliefs valid. You know, we were talking before with the Romans, it's like, we've got this long bench, room for a little one, everyone budge up, all the gods can be there. It's not necessarily that. It might be more to do with transmitting Christian theology. We just don't know.

• 13:40Speaker 03

  Okay. But do we know, like, say, in 10th century York, we talked a lot about Jörg, York in the last episode. Did you have people wearing crosses and or Thor's hammer? I mean, you know, were these things interchangeable? Did people wear both together? Or, you know, how did that work?

• 13:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, this is the really interesting thing, that the, the fashion for Thor's hammers seems to come, and not in Britain at this point, but sort of, you know, in Denmark, for example, at the point in the ninth century, when the Carolindians, the Franks in particular, are sort of pushing northwards and trying to sort of export Christianity into the, into southern Scandinavia. And of course, a Christian crucifix fits just as neatly on your, I mean, I hear, you see, this is a Valkyrie shield maiden from Hordby, Denmark. So that's my equivalent, my shield maiden. But of course, if it's that, if it's a Christian crucifix, it's a Norse Thor's hammer, it all has the same sort of function.

• 14:41Speaker 00

  And before this, in the early Christian period, in Egypt, the ank is brought in from pagan Egyptian religion and brought in, becoming a Christian symbol mixed with the cross.

• 14:52Speaker 04

  There's the, that's a coin from early 10th century York, that St Peter's coin, and it has a Christian cross, it's very much within a Christian context. And yet, there's a Thor's hammer embedded in the text there. And so we have that sense of fluidity might be a way of saying it. But then at the same time, some people are going to have very clear ideas about what they believe and are not going to like this. So we have to remember that there are going to be all sorts of variations of belief and practice.

• 15:20Speaker 00

  So last year, Eleanor, you and I met in York at the York Museum. We spent amazing hour in this Viking exhibition, where they brought together all this stuff from all over Yorkshire. And much of it was, was in that twilight zone between the two worlds. And afterwards, you went and saw these amazing crosses, which I used to look at as a schoolboy in Ryedale, where you've got these dragons, these very Viking dragons, covering one side of the crosses all over Ryedale, not just in one place, but in Sinnington, in Pickering, in Leversham. There's a team of sculptors that have clearly got a market there for mixing dragon imagery with Christianity.

• 16:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, I found that whole, that whole trip was brilliant and chaotic and wonderful. But do you remember that amazing cap that they had on display, woman's cap? It was silk and it was beautifully fitted over her head. But of course, it was this wonderful sense of these cross-cultural connections that we got through that whole exhibition. And the way that so many of those objects refused to fit into those neat categories. So you could have, you know, a 10th century comb made of sort of antler, very Norse, very sort of obvious Nordic item. And then, you know, interlace that could be Norse, or what we sometimes think of as sort of Celtic interlace. And then we've got these weights and these

• 16:45Speaker 04

  scales for trading silver and the little Thor's hammer pendant, as you say. So it's this sense of this moving between worlds. And not a mush, it's not a mush, it's not like it's necessarily a free fall, but just this sense of, yeah, fluidity. You know, when we started looking at the Vikings in this series, there is no accommodation. This is thanks, I'm nicking your stuff, I'm taking it over the sea, and I'll take a few of you with me as well. And by this point, we've got something so utterly different happening. It's not that there aren't tensions, there are still absolutely tensions. And there's some really awful things that happen because there are other waves of Viking invaders coming in. So we're not saying, oh, it's a lovely peaceful place now. But something else is definitely happening.

• 17:29Speaker 03

  Eleanor, I mean, what I'm really fascinated, we seem to know a lot about what the Norse believed and who they worshipped and how they worshipped. How do we know so much?

• 17:38Speaker 04

  So the interesting thing about The fact that we seem to know so much is because of the 13th century and because of Iceland. Now Iceland is officially converted to Christianity around the year 1000. And so by the time we get to these texts being written down, we have to remember they're being written within a Christian framework. But we also have to be incredibly grateful that these texts exist because without them, we would have so much less. We'd have stuff, but just nowhere near as much. So we've got two texts in particular. We've got the prose edda by an Icelandic politician, poet, saga writer called Snorri Stotlersen.

• 18:19Speaker 04

  And he writes in the 1220s and he's basically writing a handbook for young poets. And to be a poet in the Old Norse tradition, you need to know your mythology. And of course, they're now Christian. So he's writing it down so they don't forget and so they can still work within that tradition. We also have a collection of poems about legendary heroes and sort of the Old Norse gods. It's only preserved in one manuscript, the Kodaks Regius, that's from around 1270.

• 18:49Speaker 00

  Literally one, all these Marvel movies drawing on one.

• 18:52Speaker 04

  Pretty much, pretty much. There's a couple. So there's a version of Volusba that's somewhere else, but it's very bitty and it's like, but for the most part, we only have one version of each of these. Snorri is clearly drawing on that same poetic tradition. He knows some of these poems in some version. And certainly it looks like they're doing the rounds orally speaking in various forms. But without that manuscript, we would be screwed. So we have that. But then we have to remember that what those texts tell us can help us contextualize other sorts of evidence from the core of the Viking Age itself. So you know, if we have runic inscriptions or we have drawings like the Gosforth Cross, for example,

• 19:36Speaker 04

  it's those later texts that help us work out what they might be trying to do in those images. But we also need to remember that what Norse settlers, for example, in 9th, 10th century Yorkshire actually believed is going to be distinct from what 13th century Icelanders thought they believed. And that's a tricky, that's a really knotty issue. It's fun. I really love the uncertainty of that. But we need to remember it's knotty.

• 20:03Speaker 03

  Well, you know, the fun does not end because we're going to take a break. We're going to come back after the break. Because what I'm really keen to know, you know, is the traditions, that those Norse traditions that were unacceptable to the Romans, how did they fare in this new land with a Christian cover?

• 20:25Speaker 00

  What are you doing on the 4th of September?

• 20:28Speaker 03

  Oh, you're still free.

• 20:29Speaker 00

  Why?

• 20:30Speaker 03

  Haven't you heard that me and me?

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• 22:17Speaker 03

  Welcome back. So Eleanor, when we were talking about Romans and the Druids, what they hated about the Druids, apart from everything, was this sort of shamanic, you know, sort of trait that they had. And, and they, you know, kind of tried to stamp it out as much as possible. The Norse also had a shamanic tradition. So after having sort of the Druids kind of obliterated, you've got the Romans, you've got Christianity. And then what? Do they bring the shamanic tradition back? How does that work?

• 22:45Speaker 04

  So when we're talking about Norse sort of, yeah, we might think of them as shamanic traditions, communicating with other worlds, magical practices. We've got one word that we've got to remember and that's Seithir. And Seithir is, is really interesting because it's one of those places where what we think of as Norse religious tradition does connect to a more general shamanic world that stretches all the way from Siberia to the Arctic, even across to North America.

• 23:18Speaker 00

  Everyone that wants to get into this, read The Children of Ash and Elm by Neil Price, which he did all this. He started with anthropology, looking at the Inuit Indians, which have another kind of version of this tradition. And reflecting that back onto the evidence of the Vikings, doesn't he?

• 23:33Speaker 04

  He's fabulous. He is, I think, let's say he is the goat of Seithir and which basically I think would make him Hatherun, who is the Norse mythological goat. I think that, so Neil Price equals Hatherun. He has really interesting things to say about this Seithir practice. We have the figure of the Völvur, who's the staff carrying cirrus. There's an amazing exhibition at the moment in Copenhagen about the Völvur. She is the, we think, we think is the primary practitioner of Seithir in the human world and in the saga literature and in the Old Norse mythological poems.

• 24:14Speaker 04

  So the first poem in that Kodaks Regius, the first poem of that poetic edda is Volusba. It's the Völvur's prophecy. It's the prophecy of the cirrus. So she's a really important figure.

• 24:27Speaker 00

  Is she a witch?

• 24:28Speaker 04

  I mean, it depends on how we define witch. She's certainly, she's, the idea I think is that she can communicate with other worlds.

• 24:36Speaker 03

  So more like a Delphic oracle, you know, what we would recognise from the Greek tradition. If somebody talks to the gods or reads the signs that the gods are sending back to man.

• 24:44Speaker 04

  Yes, I think, I think there's definitely something in that. And there are points in the poems where, say, Odin goes to consult her and she really does seem to be a sort of oracle figure there. But then you have other versions that appear in the sagas where these Völvur is sort of almost like a hedge witch, a very posh, highly respected hedge witch. She's travelling between communities and she's helping. So for example, Erik Saga Reiva, the Saga of Erik the Red, there's this horrible famine in one of the settlements in Greenland. And so they call for this Völvur. She's called Thorbiog, Little Völvur,

• 25:23Speaker 04

  because she's the youngest of many sisters. And it's this incredible description of her. She comes to the feast.

• 25:30Speaker 00

  In a blue cloak trimmed with cat hair. Brilliant.

• 25:34Speaker 04

  Cats and cats are important. I want to just, and I think even like gloves and the cats are really important because cats we think of as being sacred to the goddess Freya. And Freya, I think, also gets an incredibly bad press in sort of modern ideas of Norse mythology. Because she's like this sexy, curvy goddess of love. No, she is completely badass. And she is the one that brings Seithir as a practice into the Norse world. She teaches Odin the practice of Seithir. We also have the famous Ossberg Ship burial from Norway, from, I think it's 834.

• 26:13Speaker 04

  Two women buried in this and they are surrounded. It's sumptuous. It's so bling. You know, they've got wagons that are carved with cat heads and they've got sledges. But they've also got a lot of what seem to be magical equipment. And I think hallucinogenic substances also there.

• 26:36Speaker 00

  Are they murdered or is this them laying to rest?

• 26:39Speaker 04

  So certainly there's two. She's probably in her 80s, the older one. She looks like she's died. She's got quite a few health conditions. The younger one is in her 50s and not enough of her body survives that we can say for sure whether she died at the same time naturally or was possibly sacrificed to join her mistress in the next life. Because certainly there are examples of enslaved people being sacrificed.

• 27:06Speaker 00

  And in the Arabic texts also.

• 27:09Speaker 04

  Exactly. Even if I'd like, yeah, exactly. She does have, the only bits of her body that survive, she does have a broken collarbone that had started to heal. So it's not killed her, but it maybe happened a few weeks before her death. So we don't really know what's going on. There's also a small chance, it's hard to know how much DNA survives, but they did one test of her DNA where it looks like she's got ancestors from around the Black Sea. And so if that's true, it's possible that she had travelled all that way. Maybe because she'd been enslaved, maybe not. But there's, there's a much bigger story going on that we, and the really coming back to Seithir, the wonderful thing is they're also buried with this tapestry.

• 27:53Speaker 04

  And on this tapestry, there are hanging bodies, human bodies hanging as sacrifices from the trees.

• 27:59Speaker 03

  I mean, that's horrifying, but, but also it's, I mean, you're taking hallucinogenics, communing with the spirits, sacrifice, all of this is very, you know, shamanic traditions wherever you go. And you've got a really interesting observation about the Sami people of Siberia, that there is a direct link, you know, a line you can draw between the Vikings and the Sami all the way off in Siberia. Tell us how that works.

• 28:25Speaker 04

  So the interesting thing is that the Sami, who sort of the, the sort of semi-nomadic peoples who traditionally occupied sort of across the northern stretch of Scandinavia, all the way, as you say, into what's now Russia, that whole area, Finno-Ugric peoples with very strong, what we would call shamanic traditions, but it's this idea of Noidi practice. And the thing is that there are Cultural links, strong cultural links between the Norse and the Sami, who they call the Finnar. And when the Finnar crop up in Old Norse sagas, they are often magical practitioners. There's that very, very strong link and they're able to send their spirits out of their bodies,

• 29:11Speaker 04

  go travelling far, predict the future, do all sorts of nasty things if people piss them off. And actually, the oldest written description of a Nwaidi shamanic practice that we have comes from a Norwegian text, 12th century Norwegian text in Latin called Historia Norwegiae, that describes how some Norse traders are up in Sami territory and they witness their hostess dies and so a Nwaidi is called for. And he goes into this trance and then he goes into the other world and he fights another Nwaidi, a sort of shaman, in the form, one of them is in a whale form, one of them is in the form of spikes

• 29:54Speaker 04

  and one of them, it's like battle of these sort of shamanic beings who are sort of inhabiting the other world and trying to get the spirit of the woman back. And that's all witnessed by the Norse traders there.

• 30:06Speaker 00

  And they have their minds blown by this. This is all stuff that completely shocks them, yeah.

• 30:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, this is a huge, huge deal. And we have to think as well that although we associate the Sami as a people who are living in the kind of Arctic reaches of Scandinavia and across, actually, there's plenty of evidence for them inhabiting, sort of as Lowndes, sort of Uppsala, I think Oslo. So we have to think, again, this is very culturally connected. We've talked about that in the sense of cultural connections with the British Isles and Ireland. But it's absolutely, if not more true, goes further back in time when we're looking at those Nordic homelands.

• 30:45Speaker 00

  And just before we leave these shamans and before we return to Britain, we have to talk about horse penises.

• 30:52Speaker 03

  Obviously, obviously. We do, we do. Okay, we do. All right, we do.

• 30:57Speaker 04

  There's a few examples of this. And again, we're talking about sagas, but in the poetry that is often embedded in the sagas, which is older than the sagas themselves. But this is from Scandinavia and it's a point where someone witnesses this, sort of this pagan ritual, they're worshipping, or they appear to be worshipping this horse penis and then there's all sorts of banter about what they're going to do with a horse penis later on and there's also, you know, so it's, but the interesting thing there, I mean, so many, where to even go with that?

• 31:31Speaker 00

  We might have to have a special bonus episodes on horse penises, I think, with Neil Price.

• 31:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, you leave Neil Price to that one. That's his problem, yeah.

• 31:41Speaker 03

  I should say how thrilled he'll be, that phone call. Neil, we want you to talk. Neil, Neil, hugely admire your work, really love you, love your work. Could you come and talk about?

• 31:53Speaker 04

  If you look at the front cover of Embers of the Hands, have you, have you clocked the little erect penis on there?

• 32:00Speaker 00

  I haven't seen your penis, no. Where's it?

• 32:03Speaker 03

  Where's Alan's penis?

• 32:05Speaker 04

  The interesting thing there is that is probably the god Freyr, who is the fertility god, hence why in some sources he's depicted as having an enormous erect phallus.

• 32:15Speaker 03

  Can I just say how very filthy you, it all is when you come on. I mean incredibly filthy. But, you know, it's great and clearly we love it because we keep asking you back. You said that was one story. What is the other story? Is it cleaner? What is the, what is the other story?

• 32:30Speaker 04

  The other story is, it is, and this is actually an important, I'm trying to make a serious scholarly point here that gets me away from penises in all forms.

• 32:38Speaker 03

  Push through, push through. No, wrong phrase, wrong phrase. Abort. Carry on, carry on. Yes.

• 32:43Speaker 04

  You know, these seather practices that are often associated with women, in the Norse mythological stories, they are associated with the men as well. And so there's this sense of, again, the edges blurring and of course the figure for that, Odin, yes. And there's this little, oh gosh, I think it was found at Lyra, this little silver figurine. It's this humanoid form on a chair, wearing what looks like a dress and this very elaborate beaded necklace, but also has only one eye and has two ravens or two birds on either. So the idea is this is Odin, sort of in the middle of practising seather.

• 33:26Speaker 04

  And of course, the other character from Norse mythology who shape shifts in this sort of magical way is Loki, who can also transform himself into a, into a female horse. There's one story where he lures away a giant's horse while he is in the form of a sexy mare for a bit of sexy time in order to stop the giant from building a wall and therefore sort of winning a bet that the gods have had with him. And the offspring of this union between Loki, the horse mummy, and the giant's horse daddy is Slipnir, that eight-legged horse, famous of Norse mythology, who, you know, Odin is said to ride. So there's a lot, it's, it's really, I think it's a fascinating type of magic.

• 34:11Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, all of this sort of rich and smutty content that we have in Norse belief, how much of it gallops on its eight legs to Britain? I mean, what, what does, what does Britain embrace and what does it reject?

• 34:25Speaker 04

  Right. So this is a really interesting thing because to, as far as I know, and I think this is true, I can't, I can't think of any obvious examples of Norse burials where we would see a sort of vulva or serous figure in a way that we do get from elsewhere. And usually they're buried, well, either like the Aarhusberg Ship burial, which is very obviously something is going on there, but also you have some where they're buried with staffs.

• 34:48Speaker 00

  It's your broomstick or your, I mean, yeah, your magic wand.

• 34:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, and it does sort of go into that later on, exactly. In terms of, of Britain, there are some interesting things. So place names, we can come back to again.

• 35:00Speaker 00

  Roseberry topping.

• 35:02Speaker 04

  Does not that sound like a dessert? A sort of creamy berry dessert, right?

• 35:07Speaker 00

  Mr. Kipling makes exceedingly good roseberry topping.

• 35:11Speaker 04

  So that's a really interesting one because when that name first appears, I think it's the 11th century is the first recorded appearance of that. It's Aarhusberg, so Odin's Hill or Odin's Rock. In the same way that if anyone's familiar with Denmark, you have Aarhusæ, Odin's Vie, Odin's sort of holy place is the middle of smaller islands. So here we have Odin's Rock, Odin's Hill, plus topping, which is just the name of the hill. I think it's very likely there were magical practitioners working within sort of Norse cultural context within Britain. There aren't, there isn't a lot of evidence, but in the sagas, what's interesting is that the Hebrides in particular become associated with magical practitioners.

• 35:55Speaker 00

  To this day, I've met people talking about the Seven Sight and the Isle of Barra and all this sort of stuff. And it's absolutely common. People see funerals before they happen, all this sort of thing.

• 36:05Speaker 04

  Exactly. And the same is also true in Sami culture. There's still that magical connection, absolutely. I have a friend who's of Sami heritage and she always says very proudly, I knew you were pregnant before you did. It's my Sami eye. You know, she knew, she absolutely knew. So it's, there is, there is this sense, these traditions keep on travelling. In the case of the Hebrides, Leif the Lucky, very famous for being one of the first Norse sort of explorers to, to reach the edge of the North American continent. There's a part in the Saga of Eric the Red, which is also the one that has this amazing vulva figure, where he hooks up with a woman from the Hebrides and she is a magical practitioner and they have a baby together.

• 36:50Speaker 04

  And then we mentioned many moons ago, possibly in the, in the last episode, Eric Bladax, ruler of York, his wife, Gunnhildur, and she, according to the saga tradition, is said to have learnt her magical skills from Sami magicians up in the Arctic. That's where she's found.

• 37:07Speaker 00

  This is a woman who's effectively the queen of York, has learnt her magic from Sami. That's so cool.

• 37:15Speaker 03

  Amazing.

• 37:15Speaker 00

  That is so cool.

• 37:16Speaker 03

  It is very, very cool.

• 37:17Speaker 04

  And then when you have, because of course this is a broad cultural diaspora and so there's people from the British Isles and Ireland moving out, for example, to settle Iceland. And again, we've got Hebride, a Hebridean family who've settled in Iceland, who are horrible magic makers. They do all sorts of nasty things. Lots of people get killed. And so these traditions are very far travelling.

• 37:40Speaker 03

  We started the, the episode looking at the Gospeth Cross, you know, the one that has Christianity on one side and three sides of Norse tradition. It isn't the only cross though. Tell us, what else have we got?

• 37:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, so we've got, well, we've got the Vale of Pickering ones. And then Middleton Cross, very famously where it's, yes, a cross, but something else is going on. The most interesting example in a way is the Isle of Man. There's all these crosses where you can see almost the fullest extent of this kind of cultural syncretism. So you have crosses with runes, runic inscriptions. I think you've got a few with Ogum, not Norse, sort of more Irish and Welsh.

• 38:18Speaker 00

  Celtic, yeah.

• 38:19Speaker 04

  Celtic, exactly. Those kind of scratches on the side. But you've got families commemorated on these stones that have very mixed Celtic language names and Norse language names, for example. But you've also got theological imagery that again suggests this difference. So the Andreas Cross, for example, has scenes from the Norse legend of Sigurdur, the hero who's sort of the dragon slayer. And it's, it's that bit where he's roasting faf near the dragon's heart. And they're still being found. This is the interesting thing. So at Jorby, Again, B, nice sort of Old Norse farm name there. And it looks like what they've got there is possibly the figure of Heimdall, who's got the horn.

• 39:01Speaker 04

  And he's blowing it before that final battle to signal that Ragnarok is about to start. I love that particularly because, you know, back in the mists of time, when we were looking at Lindisfarne. And we remember there's the Raider Stone, where you have the seven figures with their axes raised and their swords raised on one side. The other side of that stone depicts Judgment Day. You have the cross, the hands encircling, the figures praying at the cross. Here we have another version, but it seems to be incorporating Ragnarok instead.

• 39:30Speaker 03

  I'm just so thrilled with this synchronicity. And part of me thinks, is it, you know, frighten people covering all their bases? And the other part, which I hope is the right part, is that all of these things can live together. If the supernatural is different, mysterious and, you know, slightly above our understanding, then why can't all these things be true altogether?

• 39:51Speaker 04

  Yes, and I think it depends on whose point of view we're looking at. Because from a Christian point of view, it's very much one God, everyone else out. Ecumenically speaking, you cannot be a Christian if you also have lots of other gods sitting on the bench behind. But from a Norse point of view, it's a bit, we're coming back to the Romans, you know, again, it's this idea of

• 40:11Speaker 00

  Everyone's welcome.

• 40:12Speaker 04

  Everyone's welcome, hence these wonderful stories of repeated baptism. You know, Nokka the Stammerer is my favourite, this is now sort of Carolingian. But there's all these Danes lining up to be baptised and they're running out of baptismal robes because there's so many bloody Danes waiting to be baptized. And the missionaries are thinking, great, everyone is really into our Christianity. But the baptismal robes are getting scabbier and scabbier and dirtier and dirtier as they're like trying to pull out anything. But finally, one of the Danes gets to the front and he's given this rubbish little piece of cloth for his baptismal robe. And he says, look, I've been baptized 20 times and I've always had a really nice What is this piece of shit?

• 40:52Speaker 04

  What does this synchronicity mean for different communities coming from different religious traditions? It's quite tricky. And that is, there's a really important point there as well, which I say religious traditions. The Norse don't actually have a word for religion. They have a word for tradition or custom, which is seður, not say that, the magical practice, but seður. But they don't have religion as a separate entity. So we have to remember, this is where the limits of our knowledge start to blur because we would have to be looking inside people's heads to understand what's actually going on here.

• 41:26Speaker 00

  That's so wonderful. I love it. So let's come to the end of this period. By the ninth century, we've got these guys, the leaders beginning to be baptized. They're beginning to get absorbed into the Christian world of England. How, how long does it take for Christianity to stamp this stuff out? For the world of the Goss for the cross, where people are, you know, you have the death of Baldur or Odin and the death of Christ placed side by side. How long is it before that all disappears and we're back properly in a, in a Christian world? Or are we never quite completely free of it?

• 42:03Speaker 04

  That is a question because we don't, we don't know what we don't know is incredibly annoying. But so, so I always think sort of if you're leaving out offerings to the local spirits. A saucer of milk for the cat is not going to look any different from a saucer of milk to some supernatural entity, you know. So it's not clear and you say stamping out. Well, we have to remember those St Peter's coins from York from the early 10th century. They are literally stamping Thor's hammers onto Christian crosses. So who knows? But of course, we talked about the Vale of Pickering. And one of the wonderful places you sent me is also one of the ones that I close embers of the hands with. And it's that incredible

• 42:44Speaker 00

  Cuckdail?

• 42:45Speaker 04

  This is so special.

• 42:46Speaker 00

  This is this wonderful sundial.

• 42:48Speaker 03

  Tell us about it, tell us.

• 42:49Speaker 00

  We've got the Beowulf Tapestry in London now with opening at the British Museum. And one of the key figures in that story, Tostig, is the Earl in this, in this sundial.

• 42:58Speaker 03

  Can you just sort of end this visit with you, the way you started the whole series with us? We were red with passion. Come on.

• 43:07Speaker 04

  Okay, so now we're in Old English and that's crucial. Because we're looking at how someone who has a Norse name, who has a Norse dad, who is, is doing something that is extremely Christian and he is writing it in Old English. We're around the year 150, something like that.

• 43:25Speaker 00

  It's a few years before Battle of Hastings, isn't it?

• 43:27Speaker 04

  This is the important thing. This is sort of, this is the sunset of what we might think of as the period we're looking at. And it's this sundial and it's now in the porch, isn't it? So the sun can't actually shine on it, which I was already, I feel a bit sorry for it. It's incredible and it says Orm gamal sinner, but sanctus gregorius minster, dona hit was all to broken on to fallen.

• 43:51Speaker 00

  To broken and to fallen. Love it.

• 43:53Speaker 04

  And hey, hit let make new from grinder on and sanctus gregorius in Edward dagum kining and in Tostig dagum eorl, which means, and I agree, to broken and to fallen has become a phrase we use in our household because we were a household of nerds, right? So it's Orm and that's very Norse word, Orber literally means snake, right? Son of Gamal, again, very Norse word, means old. Brought, brought St Gregory's minster when it was completely ruined and collapsed to broken and to fallen. And he recently had it built from the ground for Christ and St Gregory in the days of King Edward and in the days of Earl Tostig.

• 44:38Speaker 04

  And so there we have someone who's clearly of Norse heritage, doing something that is so extraordinarily Christian.

• 44:45Speaker 03

  Utterly Christian.

• 44:46Speaker 00

  And yet you're still getting, every time I go to Hay on Wy for the festival, I stop off at Kilpak. And that is way after the Norman conquest. That's early 12th century. And it's pure Viking, it's Urnes style. It's a church in Herefordshire, it's got a shilling a gig, it's got one of these sort of very sexy Celtic women showing up, all her, all her bits. And it's got these, what looks like a Viking warrior, entangled in, in a, in a kind of dragon.

• 45:13Speaker 04

  And that's it because the stories don't disappear, none of this, this, it's, it's not just about belief. It's not just about ritual. There is something, when we're talking about religion, there was just something so much deeper. And so it's this idea that, you know, the gods of the north may retreat, but they don't disappear. Exactly as you say, they become the dragons on church fonts, you know, they, they keep going because all this stuff, it's too good to lose.

• 45:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, and you know what? You are too good, Eleanor Baraklaff. We just absolutely adore having you. It's absolutely wonderful. Textured, gallop, rude, smutty, hilarious.

• 45:52Speaker 00

  You are this podcast in one incarnation.

• 45:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, literally, yes, made flesh. Thank you very, very much. That is all from us. Till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arndt.

• 46:05Speaker 00

  And goodbye from me, William Durumpo.

• 46:17Speaker 02

  Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way. Because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claud.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claud.ai/spotify.

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