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Chapter 5. The Underworld 129
into the community. If wergild was not paid for some reason, or if the crime was too
serious to allow for reintegration of the criminal into the community after payment,
then a sentence of outlawry was commuted, which basically condemned the outcast
to the wastelands outside the bounds of society, and the price of the wergild was
removed from his own “head” at the same time which essentially condemned the man
to death. He literally was free to be killed. If the term of outlawry was survived,
the crime had been paid for, and the former outcast was re-enfolded into society.
There were certain deeds which could not be atoned for in this life, and, therefore,
greatly affected life, in the Germanic way of thinking, as it continued in the
Underworld community. These were the betrayal and breaking of a formal oath
to a comrade, friend, relative, or king, or the killing of a relative since wergild
could not be paid within the same family. 25 (Note: the payment of wergild was
an agreement between families, a negotiation.) A family could not pay itself for
something it had done to itself; this is no payment at all. In these cases, after
death, the individual was outlawed by members of the ancestral community in the
Underworld which meant banishment to the northern wastelands, the Niðstrond.
He was considered unfit to live within family or community, and being deprived
of family, companions, or a means of sustenance, there was only suffering, but no
death or end to it all. Punishment after death in the Northern sense, then, is not a
judgement or proclamation of the Gods, it is simply being rejected by the family/
community.
The Underworld was viewed as a primary source of energy for the land, the community
and the family, but it was also the source of power/ luck for the individual.
Luck or the individual’s or the family’s source of personal power flowed out from
the Underworld and was disseminated throughout Midgard and the upper worlds
as the result of an individual’s actions. One of the individual’s roles in life was to
function as a distributor for that power, for the Waters of Life.
According to tradition, there were three personal connections to the Underworld:
the hamingja, the fylgja, and the body. Names for these connections exist or existed
in traditions from other cultures as well usually associating the hamingja with the
ancestral line, the familial connection to the source of power/ luck, the fylgja as an
individual spiritual connector or guardian spirit, and the body or body/ soul complex
as being fed bilaterally from the land (physical body) and the Underworld (ON hamr
= “moldable spirit pattern for the body-shape”). Also, according to tradition, these
25 Wergild involved terms of payment of a price prescribed by the existing legal system for
physical damage caused to an individual. The terms of payment were agreed upon in front of
witnesses by the families of the individuals involved. Payment of the wergild restored the individual’s
rights under the existing legal system. It should be noted, however, that restoration of rights
legally was not the same as restoration of social standing in the eyes of the community. Foote and
Wilson discuss this system in depth in their The Viking Achievement . . .