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Chapter 4. The Sky Connection 105
of non-Germanic people living immediately to the north (Saamí) and to the east
(Finns, and various small tribes living just east of the Ural Mountains). However,
direct evidence is sorely lacking.
By the time that the Germanic peoples had moved into the historic era and had
committed their own beliefs to parchment, many changes had taken place which were
the result of foreign influences being brought in by the Church and by importations
made by the Vikings themselves who traveled extensively between the years of 700
CE to 1100 CE. What is missing from the body of evidence is clear information that
the Celtic peoples, who also had a fairly large body of lore pertaining to the night
sky, also understood the role of the Milky Way. Also lacking are vestiges of this folk
belief in modern Scandinavian folklore although it still exists in Saamí folklore. As a
consequence, the above information can only be presented as a series of coincidences
with some degree of probability of it being fact.
During the last century and continuing through the 20th century, there has been
a move to reduce all religions in their “reconstructed form” to sun-moon worship. The
theory was made popular with the publishing on Frazer’s The Golden Bough 23 and
has been used as the basis for interpretation since that time. Storms in Anglo-Saxon
Magic, 1948, was also caught up in this theory when attempting to interpret the
Anglo-Saxon charms from the manuscript called the Lacnunga; however, eddaic
literature relegates both the sun and the moon to demi-Gods who play only a minor
role during the creation of the World Tree and, according to the Völuspá, at the
end of the World, the Ragnarök.
Although the sun (ON Sunna = a Goddess) and the moon (ON Maani; Máni =
a God) were described in the eddaic poetry, complete with their lineages and their
¸orlög, there is no indication that they have ever been worshipped as anything but
minor demi-gods and markers of the passage of time. In the Norse mythology as it
exists today, these two were destined to be chased across the sky by the wolves Sköll
and Hati until the final battle when they will be killed and devoured. There is much
folklore and folkscience pertaining to the two in their roles as “markers of time,” and
this is discussed quite in depth by O. S. Reuter in Germanische Himmelskunde
(Germanic Skylore), but even in the Anglo-Saxon charms they do not play as large
a role as many wishful modern scholars would like.
As stated earlier, astrology only began to appear in the north in conjunction
with ancient medicine after the Roman and Christian invasions. Prior to that, it
appears medicinal herbs were picked according to their own timing and ripeness with
twilight and dawn being the most propitious times, according to common folklore,
because “the sky was lit, but there were no lights in the sky;” it was an “in-between
23 Frazer, Sir James G. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. MacMillan
Publishing Co., Inc., New York, 1963.