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Chapter 6. The Sky 152
Heathen kings often traced their lineages back to one of the Gods in the northern
pantheon, to Ingvi-Frey in Sweden and to Woden in Anglo-Saxon England,
and because of this relationship to the Gods, they were the inheritors of the most
powerful lineage of the kingdom. They stood at the center of the community’s or
the kingdom’s access to power/ luck. Interaction with subjects and the land were
part of their function, their role as a king 14 . After the coming of Christianity
to the northern lands, a king’s power was deemed granted by an omnipotent, but
impersonal, God, and, as a consequence, the role of a king changed so that he was no
longer considered to be an integral part of the kingdom but a ruler over it. Personal
interactions between king and subjects became less and less frequent and more of a
formality. By the 1300’s, kings were viewed by the people as earthly embodiments
of the “new” God, Jehovah. Kings were now worshiped out of obligation rather
than out of respect. Anything less was now a legal form of heresy, commonly called
treason.
Because of the Germanic sense of the cosmic flow of time and order, and because
life in the Underworld was considered to be but a continuation of life on Midgard,
the Heathen focus was more towards the here and now and less time, if any at all,
was devoted to the idea of life-after-death. In fact, the only time that life after
death is mentioned as a concern in the classical northern literature is when it affects
the present, i.e., for the making of funeral preparations or for tapping into the flow
of luck coming up through the line of ancestors. Some warriors expected to go to
Valhalla after death, but the Underworld tradition was by far the strongest of the
two and was most likely the older. Dying into Valhalla as part of the warrior’s way of
life (discussed in Chapter 5) was a phenomenon which seems to have been a late development
in Scandinavian thought and a product of the Viking Age. Turville-Petre
discusses this briefly in his Myth and Religion of the North:
“It could be said that the name Óðínn was purposely avoided in some
districts because the God was revered so deeply as to be unmentionable. But
there is a more natural explanation. If those of the western districts knew
Óðínn, they had neither respect for Him as a God nor love for all He stood
for. I have suggested that the cult of Óðínn spread widely and rapidly in the
ninth and tenth centuries.” 15
Besides, the warrior still needed to pass through the Underworld on his way to
Valhalla as can be seen by the need for “Hel-shoes” so that the warrior can “walk
the Hel-way” on his journey to the Hall of Óðínn (see Chap. 5).
14 Turville-Petre, pp. 190-95.
15 Turville-Petre, op. cit., p. 69.