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Chapter 4. The Sky Connection 93
the sky lore of the North. Both writers about midway through the 19th century,
went about the rural areas of northern Europe collecting living folklore, and among
the variety of information collected was much pertaining to a Germanic concept of
constellations and their uses in a rural agricultural society. They did not find the
remnants of a northern European or Germanic astrology but they did find that the
yearly migration of heavenly bodies held special meaning for the farming, fishing,
and herding communities as important markers of time. They found that there
were approximately 17 constellations in use at the time of the writings and many
star names which were most likely not borrowed from the classical astronomical/
astrological systems in use during the middle of the last century. A couple of these
are very interesting and form a basis for the following discussion.
There are two sky features which are mentioned in the eddaic poetry; these are
the rainbow and the Milky Way. The rainbow has a long history in rural areas
from all over northwestern Europe up to the current century of being considered
the “brig’ o’ dread” or the Bridge of the Dead. The eddaic writings allude that
the Bifröst or the ”Shimmering Way,” as it is described in Sturluson, not as the
Bridge of the Dead but rather the Bridge of the Gods, ás-bridge, or the “Power’s
Way”. In England, Lapland (Finnmark; northern Norway, Sweden, and Finland),
the archipelagoes of the Shetlands, Orkneys, and Faroes, and many, if not most, of
the northeastern European localities, the Rainbow-Bridge leads to the Otherworld.
Rudolf Simek inThe Dictionary of Northern Mythology concurs with this body of
folklore and felt that Bifröst was the rainbow; 6 Jan de Vries, on the other hand,
in his Altgermanische Releligionsgeschichte assumes that the term Bifröst, in its
translation as “the Shimmering Way,” refers to the Milky Way, the bright strip of
starlight which progresses predictably through the night sky on a yearly basis, and,
in northern Arctic and subarctic cultures closely adjoined to Scandinavia, the Milky
Way is indeed considered to be the road to the Land of the Dead.
The World Tree and its associated “Homes” (ON = heim) is central to not only
ancient Germanic religion/ mythology, but also to both Indo-European and non
Indo-European religions as well. Cultures, diverse, and completely unrelated to the
Indo-European, such as the Lakota Souix in North America, the Auricanians of
Tierra del Fuego, the Mongolians of northern China, and some of the hindic subcultures
of India share the same theme as the center of their perceived Universes.
On the other hand, cultures as close as the Saamí, the Finns, the Ostiak, the Balts,
and the Cheremiss of eastern Europe share a very similar belief system to the ancient
Germanic peoples, yet many modern writers prefer to search through those
extremely distant (often not even related at all) cultures for comparative purposes.
6 In The Dictionary of Northern Mythology, Rudolf Simek, tr. by Angela Hall (D. S. Brewer,
Cambridge) p. 36, 1993.