Untitled - Awaken Video

Chapter 3. Midgard 75
driven out when Christianity came were not those of the pre-Christian dead
within the earth. . . . As time went on, the power of dead ancestors became
important in Iceland as it had been in the land from which the Icelanders
came.” 24
Folktale collections from Iceland contain a very large percentage of tales dealing with
different land- or nature-spirits. Greenland was a country which presented a similar
problem. However, by the time the Germanic peoples settled there, Christianity,
which took a dim view of the worship of ancestors and nature-spirits, was the dominant
religion. The Greenland colony under Christian rule lasted approximately 300
years before it failed. Perhaps one of the reasons for its failure as opposed to the
successful colonies of the Faroes, Shetlands, Orkneys, and Iceland was related to the
failure to establish a true relationship to the land. Certainly, there were other more
economically based reasons which satisfy the modern scholar, but the coincidence is
curious nevertheless.
One of the roles of an ancestor after death was to help maintain the familial
ties to power/ luck, but the example of Iceland also demonstrates that there were
roles played by other beings which had an effect on the luck of the land-holding as
well. These beings were often bound to a specific geographical area and were called
by tusse or huldrafolk. Such beings were non-organic (“never having been flesh and
blood”) but had a lineage which ran through a limited geographical area which
sometimes is described as “7 miles by 7 miles” 25 in modern folklore. In Scandinavian
Mythology Davidson writes more at length regarding these land-spirits:
“Such spirits do not seem to be regarded as ancestral, linked with particular
families, but rather as powers who resided in the very land itself. It was of
the utmost importance for settlers in Iceland, a new and uninhabited country,
to come to terms with them and win their favor. There are references in the
sagas to mountain or cliff-giants, who were linked with certain features of the
Icelandic landscape.” 26
24 ibid., p. 115.
25 In Scandinavian Folk Belief and Legend, Kvideland and Sehmsdorf relate several folktales
which talk of the importance of boundaries in Germanic folklore. Some boundaries were natural,
such as rivers or rocks, some were man-made such as roads or boundary-markers at the edge of
the farm and some seem to be a combination of the two, such as 7 mi. x 7 mi. or 3 leagues from
a particular point. Another curious feature of Germanic folklore is the more powerful the being,
the wider the area it roams. Land-wights, farm-wights, and ancestors are spot specific; heroes,
demi-gods, and ancestral leaders govern a region; and Gods travel the world over.
26 op.cit., p. 117, 1969.