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Chapter 7. At the Well of Urð 196
these titles are commonly translated as wizards and witches. With the New Age
titles of “witch” and “wizard” already being utilized for other practices, perhaps the
original ON forms are best left alone or, as has been done in this book, are translated
into something more meaningful to an English speaking audience such as “Cunning
wo/man” (emphasizing fjölkyngi) or Whole-maker (emphasizing the ideas that one
has access to knowledge of the “whole” and puts that knowledge into use to preserve
“wholeness”).
A curious tradition which further leads one to the inevitable idea that the
Whole-maker as has been described so far was common in the folk mind of the
early Germanic people can be found in a lengthy poem called The Heliand. 41 This
epic poem is an Anglo-Saxon re-telling of the New Testament. The story line is
obviously Christian, but the author of the poem to make this character of Jesus
seem believable in terms of strength, knowledge, courage, and power found
it best to present Christ as a powerful Germanic wizard with an entourage of twelve
“warrior-thanes” to whom He also taught the secrets of “sooth-saying” (divination
while lightly entranced. i.e., seiðr) and of healing. Apparently, in the author’s mind,
a person who had direct access to knowledge, power/ luck, and who functioned on
Middle-Earth as the physical arm of a God, i.e. by action alone, had to have been
a wizard or a Whole-maker hence Christ’s epithet of Heliand, the “Best of Healers/
Whole-makers.” 42 Oddly enough, this resetting of the tale of Christ is possibly one
of the most complete and detailed descriptions of the life and death of a Germanic
wizard, in spite of the obvious Christian intrusions, from this period of time.
In the epic, Jesus crosses cultural boundaries, and, although He had been born
into a community, He forsook the community life to follow a path which He felt had
been given Him. He negotiated between “clans,” healed by directly dealing with “evil
little creatures,” 43 and by manipulating or protecting “life-force,” 44 dealt with the
spirits of nature directly, 45 and because of His dubious position outside of community,
was eventually “killed” in a manner which the ancient author obviously parallels
to Óðínn’s hanging on the World Tree. To present Jesus to the Anglo-Saxons, the
poet needed to place Jesus in a role which was acceptable within Germanic culture.
He had to be depicted as somebody who understood the Germanic spiritual philosophy,
who understood the need for the staving off of the Ragnarök (Apocalypse),
and whose knowledge of all contained within the World Tree extended far beyond
the concept of any single community’s ¸orlög: the Heliand, the Whole-maker.
41 Murphy, G. Ronald, tr., The Heliand: the Saxon Gospel (Oxford University Press, Inc.;
New York, NY) 1992.
42 See Chapter 2 for discussions both of the epithet, Heliand, and of the ”kailo-complex.”
43 ibid., p. 55.
44 ibid., p. 126-27.
45 ibid., p. 74-75.