Wolf Time, Part III

I wanted to discuss the nature of Odin. The character in the book is not, exactly, Odin; he is manifesting some of Odin's qualities. I'll put this discussion beyond the jump so that you can avoid it if you are going to read the book and haven't yet.

In the meantime, those of you who have enjoyed Wolf Time may want to look at more of Lars Walker's work. If you also enjoyed the discussion, you might want to look at some of the previous discussions we've had of some of his pieces, either now or after you've read the works.

Hailstone Mountain is reviewed, and discussed, here.

Troll Valley is discussed here. It also occasioned a number of other moments of comment, including here, here, and here where it was mentioned because I found a house that reminded me of it while on a motorcycle ride near the Savannah river.

Now, for the mythology discussion.  I don't think it'll be as interesting to most of you as the other two discussion sections, but who knows?
So the part about Odin's treatment in Wolf Time that interests me is the way he is pictured as a part of what Chesterton described as circular paganism. It's most obvious when Oski gives this speech:

"Ah! The tales are many!... You cannot know -- you cannot guess -- how it was in those days. And yet you shall know, and soon. For the great Truth -- the truth which has been lost, but cannot be forgotten -- is that Time is a wheel. Birth, death, spring, winter, good fortune and bad -- they come and come again, in small circles or large, like the comet above us.

"The Christians say not so. The Christians say Time is a straight road, starting here and ending there.... But that circle turns over too. Soon all of you will learn the true wisdom born of earth -- Earth, our common Mother. She is a mighty goddess, wiser and kinder and crueller than you can conceive. She teaches in rhythms and cycles, with no law but the law of life and death and rebirth.

That, I think, is roughly what the Vanir were about. Freyr and Freya were doing that. It's a mode of thought that Chesterton criticizes as basically hostile to humanity because it entraps and stifles. There is no progress, and no real potential for progress, and thus the point of life -- Chesterton speaks especially of Buddhists here -- is simply to learn to endure the cycles, in the hope of eventually escaping them into oblivion. For Chesterton, the only thing that breaks the circle is the cross:

The mind of Asia can really be represented by a round 0. if not in the sense of a cypher at least of a circle. The great Asiatic symbol of a serpent with its tail in its mouth is really a very perfect image of a certain idea of unity and recurrence that does indeed belong to the Eastern philosophies and religions. It really is a curve that in one sense includes everything, and in another sense comes to nothing. In that sense it does confess, or rather boast, that all argument is an argument in a circle. And though the figure is but a symbol, we can see how sound is the symbolic sense that produces it, the parallel symbol of the Wheel of Buddha generally called the Swastika. The cross is a thing at right angles pointing boldly in opposite directions; but the Swastika is the same thing in the very act of returning to the recurrent curve. That crooked cross is in fact a cross turning into a wheel.

Before we dismiss even these symbols as if they were arbitrary symbols, we must remember how intense was the imaginative instinct that produced them or selected them both in the cast and the west. The cross has become something more than a historical memory; it does convey, almost as by a mathematical diagram, the truth about the real point at issue; the idea of a conflict stretching outwards into eternity. It is true, and even tautological, to say that the cross is the crux of the whole matter.

In other words the cross, in fact as well as figure, does really stand for the idea of breaking out of the circle that is everything and nothing. It does escape from the circular argument by which everything begins and ends in the mind. Since we are still dealing in symbols, it might be put in a parable in the form of that story about St. Francis, which says that the birds departing with his benediction could wing their way into the infinities of the four winds of heaven, their tracks making a vast cross upon the sky; for compared with the freedom of that flight of birds, the very shape of the Swastika is like a kitten chasing its tail.

In a more popular allegory, we might say that when St. George thrust his spear into the monster's jaws, he broke in upon the solitude of the self-devouring serpent and gave it something to bite besides its own tail.

Odin also at least equipped dragonslayers, and perhaps did more than that. I will return to the idea of Odin as monster-killer in a moment. What I want to say here is that Odin also breaks circles: not with the cross, but with the arrow.

The thing we know about Odin from the surviving mythology is that he was interested in the movement of time towards a conclusion. Odin's association with death comes chiefly in his claiming, through the Valkyrie, of some of the great slain for the war at the end of time. Toward this end, he brought men to the end of their lives: the poem about the death of Erik Bloodaxe is built around Odin's assertion that he had allowed Erik to lose not because he wasn't a great enough warrior to deserve victory, but because of Valhalla's need for the greatest warriors to defend it from 'the grey wolf.' Odin seeks knowledge from the dead, riding to the underworld to consult a dead seeress to try to avoid his son Balder's death. He consults with the dead at other times, especially the hanged, as he tells Lodfaffnir. He knows also of his own death.

He puts the knowledge he gains towards the task, not of ensuring the cycle of rebirth, but of preventing it. It is his business to try to delay, if he cannot stop, the coming of Ragnarok. He is not promising anyone who listens to him the Vanic cycle of death and rebirth, that you might die secure in the knowledge that you will return to light and life. Rather, Odin is offering a temporary feast in Valhalla -- a feast that will be accompanied by daily training for a great war to try to stop the end of the world.

In terms of monster-slaying, I am partially persuaded by John Grigsby's account of the Beowulf as an Odhinnic tale that has been Christianized. He proposes that Beowulf's name is another one of the kennings for Odin, "Barley-wolf," related to Odin's theft of the ritual drink of the earlier (and, Grigsby shows via archaeology, genuinely ancient) fertility cults. Grigsby paints the story of Beowulf as being a surviving tale of Odin/Wotan's replacement of fertility gods like the Vanir by surviving their murder-rituals. The old story is of a god who was king, is cut down by the goddess in a hidden place beneath the earth or water, and is then reborn; Grigsby suggests, very plausibly and with significant supporting evidence, that this story is based on the life cycle of barley or other grains; and, just as well supported, that it was associated with ritual human sacrifice in the northern European areas where the Vanir were worshipped.

If he is right about the Beowulf, the story is of a god who isn't killed during the murder-ritual -- he goes down into the cave below the lake, is mounted and strangled, but kills the goddess and returns alive. This part is more speculative, but there is a mythological sense to it. The Aesir cult seems to have been in competition with the Vanic cult, and indeed the myths themselves refer to a war between these groups of gods. The Aesir cult won, somehow, and Odin ascended to leadership over the Vanir as well. He is also credited with stealing the 'mead of poetry,' and of assuming the role of the leading mythic figure relating between the gods of the North and the dead. Grigsby's explanation may not be quite right, but it is plausible that a move of this sort happened.

As a god of the arrow rather than a god of the circle, Odin could be said to have prepared the way for the cross. The idea of breaking out of an entrapping circle is established; the idea of defying the logic of the circle is established. Why wouldn't a priest of the old faith who encountered the Christian arguments consider that here was potentially a way of conquering the circle once and for all?