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Chapter 5. The Underworld 111
only the tradition of the Underworld that has survived into the 20 th century as part
of the living folk culture of the northern countries in spite of attempts at eradication
by the church fathers. If a gloomy life-after-death were all the tradition had to offer,
it most likely would have been dropped from folk memory long ago; however, it has
survived, and, if probed deeply enough, the Underworld of the ancients yields forth
vast treasures which forms the very foundation of many ancient and modern folk
traditions and holidays.
Germanic tradition apparently did not depict the Underworld as simply the
Land of the Ancestors but held that it was already populated by various races in a
manner similar to the Celtic belief system. The Underworld was home to Giants,
Elves, Gods, and a variety of otherworldly beings both beneficent and malicious.
Although the ancient Germanic religion was officially laid to rest by approximately
1200 CE, the beings of the Underworld tradition continued to play a large role in the
so-called “fairy-tale literature.” This genre of literature, however, was originally not
meant as moralistic teachings for children, as is generally now the case, but was an
integral part of folk-culture dealing with life in rural areas and had much to do with
the oral transmission of information pertaining to farming, fishing, hunting, birth,
healing, and death. Folklore was the “science” of the rural north, and fairy-tales
were the “science fiction.”
Christians have an interesting way of handling the concepts of death and life
thereafter. Originally , in the Old Testament, there was an Underworld called Sheol
or Gehenna. Without belaboring the point, Sheol or Gehenna (both mean basically
the same) was a place where souls went after leaving the jewish version of Midgard.
There were apparently no other places like Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory as there
are now in some branches of modern Christianity. About the time when Jesus is
supposed to have walked the earth, there began a change in the way of thinking
about the afterlife so that souls would no longer be loosed into an Underworld but
would return to Eden or Paradise, later called “Heaven” (from OE pl. heofenum
= “heavens”); however, those gates were closed to any but of the line of Abraham.
People from other cultures obviously experienced death, but by jewish proscription
were not to be allowed within the Gates of Paradise which was reserved for jews
only. They had to go some place else, which from the jewish point of view of the
time, must have been somewhat less than. The Underworld, Gehenna, (now emptied
of the Heaven-bound jews) fit that description in the Abrahamic cosmology–the new
home of the gentile dead.
When Christians (a modified version of the the Judaism) began their all out
effort to redeem the northern world around 600 CE, the Underworld became a
rhetorical weapon for convincing the Heathen. By this time, demons, and all other
spooky critters which gave any good Christian the chills were also relegated to the