THE HOUSE OF ODIN.

Otago Witness, Issue 3149, 22 July 1914, Page 79

THE HOUSE OF ODIN.

By Jessie Mackat.

Some time ago I wrote of the wise, remembering ravens, Hugin and Miigin (Mind and Memory), who perched on the -shoulders of Odin and brought him memorials of the deeds and destinies of menbirds,- regarding whom the old Scandinavian cherished none of the sinister associations linked with their dark kind in later days, but rather invested them with the idea of just and grave oversight and governance, in keeping with the strong, balanced Teutonic consciousness—a symbol as characteristic as the resplendent peacock of Juno and the twittering doves of Venus in the vivid South. But the cavalier Aryan, of which race the Scandinavian has been accepted by scholars as the most certain type, was bound to invest the All-Father of the North with another attendant, whose mystic powers were mirrored in the dumb creatures who served the Teutons on earth. No tale of Valhalla is complete ivithout reference to Sleipnir, the eight-footed grey horse of Odin, which could carry the god over sea as easily as over land. There is an alien idea of monstrosity here that seems to point the myth of Sleipnir back to an archaic past, long before the graceful stories of the solar steeds we meet in the sister mythologies were evolved in their distant centres. For the horse plays a high part in the Aryan traditions. The steeds of Indra draw his chariot across the burning Indian sky, just as the steeds of Apollo haste across the celestial track that Hellenic fancy discerned so many ages ago. In “Tithonus” Tennyson gives us a flash of that old dream of the Aryan cavaliers —this time, the attendants of the delicate Dawn Goddess herself : Thy sweet eyes brighten slowly close to mine. Ere yet they blind tlie stars, and the wild team "Which love thee, yearning for thy yoke, arise, And shake the darkness from their loosened manes. And beat the twilight into flakes of fire. No less poetic is the story of the seahorses, common alike to Celt and Greek, _ to whom the flowing lines of foam pre- ' sented the same familiar image. Poseidon, the Greek Neptune, creates the horse and makes it his gift, or rather bribe, to man, for the hoped-for lordship of Athens, and his white team is paralleled by “Splendid Mane,” the glorious creature that bears Manannan, the Sea God of the ancient Irish, who rides the waves when not steering his enchanted boat, the Ocean Sweeper. And although Ltugh, the Irish Apollo, seems not to -vaunt- the fiery team that pertained to the Greek Sun Gcd, yet he borrows “Splendid Mane” from Manannan, in the. easy fashion of quasi-tribal Celtic divinity, whenever he has most need to assume martial state before the foes of his radiant house. It may well be imagined that the eight-footed bearer of Odin exhibits a kind of primitive grotesquerie, despite his lightning speed and tireless endurance. This primitive, yet forceful idea, is maintained in that strange poem, the “Descent of Odin,” a portion of the Norse Edda, where Odin, after grieving in vain over his loved son Balder’s evil, and threatening dreams, “flings the saddle on Sleipnir’s back,” and goes down to Hela’s dark realm to learn from the arch-vala or prophetess the impending fate of the young Sun God, which even the Lord of Valhalla cannot foresee for himself : Then on rode Odin; the earth made moaning Till he reached the lofty mansion of Hel. The duel of cunning between the disguised father of the Gods and the. disguised Goddess of Death, who answers as the unwilling spirit of the long-dead prophetess, is roughly, hauntingly dramatic. The doom of Balder is unsparingly foretold by the dark Mother of Shadows, who then taxes her questioner with double dealing: Thou art not Wegtam as erst I deemed; But thou art Odin, the all-prevailing. And thou art no Yala, no wise woman thou; Nay, thou art the mother of giants in hell. The gloomy goddess sends him back to the halls of light mocked and frustrated: Ride home, O Odin, and make thy boast, That never again shall a man visit me Till the twilight of gods brings the end of all things. A curious fragment of archaeology in a recent issue of a Chicago magazine puts a new light upon the eight-footed horse of Valhalla and his divine rider. Lately, some ancient tombstones were discovered in the island of Gothland, in the Baltic yea. These are significant as recalling the paganism that quietly lurked in these world-forgotten islands long after their wholesale and peaceful conversion, which •nvas many centuries after the new faith had reached everv part of the old Roman Empire. On these stones are graven rough pictures of the dead riding on an eightfooted horse. This is undoubtedly the horse of Odin, but the conjunction of the • strange creature and the funeral emblems has suggested a new idea of Odin to some American scholars. It has recalled to them that mounted Destroyer which is so common a conception in - old legend, culminating in that verse of the Apocalypse regarding “the pale horse Avhose rider was Death.” The Teutonic idea is traced in an old German ballad—the same “Denote” which Scott translated as “"William and Helen.” The line erroneously given as “The dead ride fast” is more correctly, or perhaps more plausibly, rendered as the ■echo of an ancient proverb, “Death rides fast.” The speculations reared on bases like these point to Odin as primarily a god of death, a bearer away of the souls of men, riding a horse of lightning swiftness. This Teutonic idea lived on in the legend of the Wild Huntsman, and in pagan times the 12 nights at the end - of the year were sacred to the hosts of the dead”, who rode all night upon the storm, Odin, mounted on Sleipnir, leading the ■way. This points to Odin being at the first himself the God of the Underworld, till the deepening religious consciousness of the people began to count him lord of

light, and father of the gods. In the fulness of time, another and more simj® meaning superseded the idea of Uclm s celestial battlefield. The 12 days once vowed to Odin’s grisly hunt were now consecrated in pious gladness to e Nativity, and their gloom was dispelled in the memory that they signalised - tlie coming of the Light of the World.