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Chapter 4. The Sky Connection 97
the use from a neighboring culture or had even developed the use in this fashion
themselves. The Lapps (the Saamí), the indigenous people of northern Scandinavia,
call the Milky Way Lodde-raidaras, that is the “Path of the Birds” 11 (the ‘souls’), or
the Jakke-moerka, the Year-Mark and definitely use the starry strip in this fashion. 12
The night was obviously important to the ancients; they reckoned time by nights.
Tacitus in his Germania says that
“they do not reckon time by days, as we do, but by nights. All their
engagements and appointments are made on this system. Night is regarded
as ushering in the day.” 13
Heathen holidays which have been passed down into the modern era are started in
celebration the night before: Christmas Eve, Halloween, May Eve. Additionally,
they reckoned annually by the number of winters. For them the word “year” implied
“season.” The importance of the night sky as a marker of the passage of time is also
reflected in their use of the word “moon” to mean month which was equal to two
“fortnights”–note the measurment using ‘nights.’
During the historical period, many of the sky lore traditions seem to have fallen
by the wayside. The Roman calendar was used by the church (although runic
calendars continued to be used fairly commonly in the rural areas until well into
the late 1800’s). Whether the Milky Way, in fact, played the role as a sky-marker
as well as being a candidate for the path to the Land of the Dead for the ancient
Teutons is not known for certain but it can be surmised without much effort. In any
case, even though the ancient lore has been lost over the centuries to be replaced by
other, more accurate, systems, the names of the ancient measurements of time have
been retained and are still in use in virtually all the Germanic languages today.
There is a third set of curious features about the Milky Way. This galaxy, from
the point of view of the earth, is “forked” like a large letter “Y,” and the single-legged
bottom of the “Y,” near one side of the horizon, is in a compass direction 180 from
the forked top, which touches the horizon at the opposite end of the sky (see Figure
4). Reuter gives the names Vil and Van for each side of the ”fork” but the source of
his information is not given. Both supposedly were the names of mythological rivers;
Van is usually translated as “hope” 14 (although the translation is highly speculative,
at best); Vil has never been truly translated at all. These “rivers” flow around either
11 It is a common belief in many northern cultures (not just the Germanic) that the ’soul’
leaves the body and travels to the underworld in the form of a bird or a butterfly (see J. Grimm’s
Teutonic Mythology pp. 828-829).
12 In Turi’s Book of Lappland by Juhan Turi (Anthropological Publications, the Netherlands)
p. 289, 1966.
13 Tacitus, p. 110.
14 See Simek, p.350.