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. . CHAPTER
XII DEATH AND IMMORTALITY . In
the unity between the individual and his kin, all
thoughts of death likewise meet. For the Northman, a
name, a reputation was enough to take away the
bitterness of death, because fame after death was a real
life, a life in the continued luck and honour of
kinsmen. There
has entered a touch of something modern into the
Northmen's cry for life; we feel a new time through it.
The word fame has acquired a spiritual ring in the
viking age, and it cannot be denied that fame after
death has bought its delicate sheen at the cost of
inner, substantial life; it is risen so high as almost
to rend the roots which gave it earthly nourishment. And
as always happens when a culture begins to purge its
values to super-spiritualism, the ideals ended in
something overstrained and vacillating; the cry for fame
becomes more and more strenuous, as if the crier were
trying to outcry himself. In place of the old-time
heroes of honour, we have now athletes in the field of
honour, who rush about the country seeking renown, and
groan in weariness of life when they can find none with
whom to measure their strength. The strained tone in the
cry for fame during the centuries verging on the Middle
Ages suggests that the roving warriors had partly lost
touch with the realities of life. And yet they were not
so modern as to grasp the idea that the true and only
immortality consisted in people's speaking of one after
death. The fame and honour that was to console a man in
death must have a compelling force, not only to beget
songs, but also to beget a successor in whom the honour
shone out anew. Another
trait of the viking ages is the budding anxiety for
individual re-birth. In the opening of the Vatsdoela
saga we are told how the famous family of Ingimund was
founded by the welding of a Norwegian clan with the luck
of a royal race of Gautland farther east. The union is
dated from a fight between the Norwegian youth Thorstein
and a scion of the Gautland kings called Jokul; before
dying, Jokul requests his slayer to marry his sister and
revive the name in the offspring of this alliance,
“and I look for blessing to myself from this”, he
adds. Thus it comes that the name Jokul runs in the
Vatsdoela family. The same theme occurs in another saga,
the Svarfdoela, where Thorolf, a brave youth from
Naumudal, who on his very first viking expedition
receives a mortal wound, in his dying moments asks his
brother Thorstein to transmit his name to posterity:
“My name has lived but a little hour, and thus I
should be forgotten as soon as you are gone, but I see
that you will increase the family and become a great man
of luck. I wish you would let a son be called Thorolf,
and all the lucky qualities (heillir) which I
have had, those will I give him; then I think my name
shall live as long as men dwell in the world.” And
Thorstein answers: “This I will gladly promise you,
for I look that it shall be to our honour, and good luck
shall go with your name as long as it is in the clan.”
He keeps his promise, and the new Thorolf becomes like
his kinsman. These
tales are conventional romanticism, and as far as the
Vatsdoela is concerned the story is nothing but an
afterthought to explain the actual alliance between a
Norwegian and a Gautland house. But this romanticism
reflects some tendencies of the saga age. There is
undoubtedly in Thorolf's and Jokul's longing to have
their name and fame restored to the light an egoistic
passion, something approaching the anxious hunger for a
future and a hope, which we know from other times and
places. But their greed of life is satisfied in the
assurance that their honour and luck will not be
suffered to 'wither away. They are fully content to
re-live their life in another man, and the question of
their own identity simply cannot penetrate through the
mass of the old premises. In Thorolf's words: “To him
(his namesake that is to be) I will give all the luck I
have had; then I think my name shall live as long as men
dwell in the world,” we have in a way two different
modes of thought laid one above the other; the old ideas
of luck and soul form the pattern into which new
thoughts about the hero's personal immortality
involuntarily fit when they come to demand expression. Immortality,
accordingly, consists in remaining in luck and honour
and knowing it safe; let the thought of one's own
well-being arise as potently as it will, it cannot take
this form: what is to become of me? As long as
life is inseparably bound up with a whole, so that the
individual cannot exist at all as individual, the sting
which should set the thought of one's own incarnation in
motion is lacking. The dead as well as the living
kinsman lives in his kin; he thinks their thoughts and
their honour, he wills their will, he feels their
feelings, he is their body. He is warmed through by the
heart-refreshing honour founded by himself, he is fed
with luck, and he acts with them, thinks and counsels.
And thus the dilemma: to be or not to be, is disposed of
beforehand. When
a man has received the assurance that his luck and
honour are in safe keeping, and he closes his eyes, he
sets off to the place where his kinsmen dwell, —
“sets forth to visit his kinsmen” as Egil says of
his son — and arrives there in his whole, full person,
with body and soul and entire equipment. Not as a spírit
which has laid its case aside and comes with chattering
teeth stealing down the road to Hel, but as a human
being, with human nature. The whole man simply continues
his life, under somewhat different conditions, but
always in luck, probably somewhat less than before,
perhaps also in certain respects a little stronger. He
rides his horse and carries his sword, which he flashes
at the armed council where the dead assemble, and for
his restless goings about he has need of a solid
equipment, a well forged weapon nicely balanced to the
hand, such as he is used to. He is a solid person, that
one can feel and fight with. We should not, it is true,
characterise him altogether from the comically dreadful
ghosts which go haunting about in several of the
Icelandic sagas, fellows who twist people's necks, or
perhaps even run about with their own head in their
hands, using it for banging at people's doors.
Indirectly, however, these ghosts do reveal something of
the nature of the dead; this Glam, who rides on the roof
of a house till all the beams creak, and comes near to
breaking Grettir's arms and legs; this Thorolf Boegifot,
who runs after the herdsmen and beats them black and
blue, have little reality about them, but they have a
reality behind them; they are descended from tangible
departed ones, who were quite capable of coming to grips
with living men, and perhaps would not give in until
their backs were broken or their heads cut off. On
a single occasion — in the story of Hermod — we read
that the dead tread far more lightly on the bridge of
Hel than do the living. When Hermod is despatched to
fetch the god Balder from the dead, his firm steps on
the bridge leading into the valley of death fill the
bridge keeper with wonder. “Yesterday,” she says,
“four hosts of dead men rode over the bridge, but they
made less noise than your single horse's step; nor is
your face like a dead man's face.” But this
observation is probably only relatively valid. Judging
from the experiences of the living who have ventured
into the underworld, both roads and bridges were fine
and solid, evidently built with a view to good sound
footsteps, as against the true spirit-worlds, where
everything is a-quiver. The poet of the Lay of Eric
attains his introductory effect by perfectly legitimate
means, when he lets Odin start up from sleep at the
resounding steps of Eric Bloody-axe and his men: “What
dreams are these? Methought it was in the dawn, when I
made room in Valhal for those dead in arms; I woke the
einheries, bade them arise, spread straw on the benches
and rinse out the ale-mugs; the valkyries should carry
wine around, as if it were a king that had come.” The
dream was not an illusion, this he knows from the way it
warmed his heart, and he cries out: “What is this
heavy sound, Bragi, as if a host of a thousand or more
came moving forward?” “The walls groan from gable to
gable,” comes the answer, “as if it were Balder
returning to the halls of Odin.” In
the verses where dead Helgi is visited in his burial
mound by Sigrun, the idea of the viking age as to the
reality of the dead has found its ideal expression.
Sigrun's slave woman went one evening past the barrow,
and saw Helgi riding to the mound with a host of men.
She told Sigrun what she had seen. Sigrun went into the
mound to Helgi: “Lifeless king, a kiss first, ere you
cast bloodstained mail. Your hair is thick with rime,
Helgi. You are soaked through with the dew of blood.
Your hands are clammy and cold. Tell me what I must
do.” — “Now we will taste the cup, though I be
driven from lust and land, and none to sing a plaint,
though the wounds gleam red on my breast; now is the
woman come — and closed the door behind her —into
the burial mound to me who am dead.” — “Here I
have spread a good couch, Helgi, sorrowless; I will
sleep in your arms as gladly as were you alive.” This
Helgi and this Sigrun personify, in poetic
transfiguration, the thoughts of viking times as to the
relation between death and life. Men thought of the dead
as like Helgi, and like Sigrun men maintained a
practical footing towards them, even though of course it
would be only the exceptions who felt any call to go to
bed with them. All that these two say to one another is
marked throughout by the romantic, anything but Germanic
love tenderness which brings them together. It is, one
might say, a new feeling which gives colour to the
words, but that which gives them life, and which renders
the meeting of the pair so natural and straightforward,
is the poet's unreflecting ideas of the dead. There is
nothing in these verses to suggest that he is outwardly
repeating a literary lesson. A
man remained the man he was in regard to form and shape
— somewhat reduced, perhaps, but not changed. And in
the same way, of course, he would retain his freshness
of soul, as surely as he was an honest dead man; he
remained like himself, with the same full honour, the
same prejudices, the same family pride and the same
family restrictions, as well as the same respect for the
realities of life. Here lies the weakness of the comical
Icelandic ghosts — they differ from their forefathers
in having lost something, and this something is nothing
else but humanity; the honour and luck that shut up the
activity of the dead in the circle where surviving
kinsmen move, and attune the doings of the dead to the
aspirations of the living, have faded in them. The
author of the Eyrbyggja saga is on surer ground. He
tells how a body of men that had been drowned out in the
fiord, incommoded the living by coming nightly to sit by
the fire. At last a wise man hit upon the device of
using the force of law against the intruders. The dead
men quietly heard out the son of the house while he
brought the summons for unrightful entering of the
house, but as soon as judgement had been passed upon
them one by one they rose from the warm seat by the fire
and walked out into the cold. — The dead man retained
his loyalty to the home and his interest in all that
went about the homestead. Quite naturally then, he would
choose himself a good dwelling place with a wide, free
outlook over the neighbourhood and his home. Or he might
wish to be as near as possible to the house, so as to be
able constantly to attend to his customary work. Thorkel
Farserk was a very powerful man, both in spirit and in
body; he had voyaged with Eric the Red to Greenland, and
once, when Eric came to visit him at his house and no
seaworthy boat was in at the time, he swam out to an
island in the fiord to fetch a sheep for food. No wonder
that he went peaceably about his homestead after death,
and made himself useful. A
good illustration of the dead man's unity with his past
is found in the one-sided but clear light of the
humoresque, when we read in Grettir's saga of Kar the
Old's activity after death: he dwelt in a solid barrow
strengthened with baulks of timber, and from here led
the little war with the peasants of the district, so
that, in company with his living son, Thorfin, he
extended the family property from a single homestead
until it covered the entire island of Haramarsey, near
South Moeri. Naturally, none of the peasants who enjoyed
Thorfin's protection
suffered any loss. Kar was pursuing an exclusive family
policy, only with the higher means now at his disposal. And
that which was the free man's mark of nobility, his
“gladness”, went with his luck into the higher
existence. One might hear the dead man singing from his
barrow or his ship about his wealth and his renown, in
verses such as that known to have been sung by the
barrow-dweller Asmund of Langaholt. This distinguished
man had been buried in his ship, and the family had with
thoughtful care given him a faithful thrall to share the
grave, but this company proving by no means to his
taste, he begged to have the grizzler taken out. And
then he was heard to sing with the proud boastfulness of
life: “Now I alone man the ship; room better suits the
battle-wont than crowding of base company. I steer my
ship, and this will be long in the minds of men.” We do not find, among our forefathers, any fear of the ending of life. They passed with a laugh of defiance through the inevitable, we are told; or they faced the thought of an earthly ending with a convinced indifference, plainly showing that they did not attach great importance to that event. Life was so strong in its reality that death simply could not count against it, and could not in any way exert the slightest pressure upon its demands. Defiance was part of honour and of what was demanded of a man, and we are thus constrained to seek the roots of this contempt for death deep down in the soul. And the Northern appreciation of life is fully and entirely shown in the picture given by Tacitus of the young men: “If their fatherland grow idle in long peace and inaction, then most of the highborn youths seek their way to such peoples as are at war, because these men are not by nature given to peace and quiet, and because it is easier to win renown where perils play one against another — undoubtedly one of the least romantic of Tacitus' psychological descriptions, and most genuine as to its contents. These “high-born youths” then, would hardly have lived in an environment where death was regarded as an object of dread, a thing that stole up behind men and breathed coldly down their necks. When a man had received his final wound, and realised that his time was come, he strode with firm steps to the barrow, and settled himself there for the future, well content with the equipment his kinsmen had given him there. But is he not after all become a man of less moment than he was in the flesh? Naturally, he would need to have his luck unimpaired in order to continue his life within the portals of the grave, but this does not imply that he took it all with him. Does he after all become weaker in bodily strength? Will his wisdom, his foresight, sink? Will there be less activity in him? The answers to our questions are perplexingly contradictory. We find indications that death could give a man deeper wisdom and higher insight in the future. Why should Odin go out and question the dead sybil, as he does in the Eddic poem Vegtamskvida, if it were not that the dead at times stood at the highest stage of insight? And Odin's voyage to the kingdom of the dead was undoubtedly modelled on real life. Old Kar seems to have increased his vitality after settling in his grave, but at other times it is clear that a strong man shows a rather marked falling off after his decease. Sometimes life in the transit fell to a decidedly lower measure of happiness. When Helgi meets Sigrun in the barrow, he speaks as if this meeting with all its joy were something he stole from life; he will have happiness, even though he be driven from lust and land. But on the other hand, the pictures of Valhal suggest a tendency to reverse life and death, and regard the after-state as an enhancement of the sense of life. On the fields of death there grows an inexhaustible crop of honour; this must be the meaning of the daily battle outside the gates of Valhal, and thus we have the clear and strong expression of the conviction that existence does not lose in quality. In the halls of death the joyful intercourse is continued, life in honour and frith with gladness; all that we have found that life, in the eminent sense, depended on, the hero takes with him through the doorway of the grave. Valhal belongs to a particular sphere of culture. The active, boisterous life of the einheries is hardly imaginable without the exalted and over-hasty pace of life in viking days, where such ideals as honour and fame after death were forced up to such a degree that the root could no longer support them, and they flowered to death. But Valhal could not be built up loosely above the earth, it must have its foundation deeply laid in popular feelings. Prior to the poetical consecration of a heaven of battle there must be a direct faith in the future, and this not a faith vaguely in the clouds, but a sure conviction that man finds himself again in the burial mound. From the story in the Eyrbyggja of the end of Thorstein Cod-bite we can form an idea as to how the einherie dogma appeared as a family myth. It is told that the same evening Thorstein was drowned, a shepherd saw Helgafell open: in the interior of the hill burned great fires — as in the hall, of course — and there came a sound of merriment and the rattle of drinking horns; listening carefully, the man could distinguish voices bidding Thorstein and his companions welcome, and inviting him to be seated in the high seat opposite his father. This herdsman brings us a message from an everyday world and an everyday habit of mind, which but for him would have been lost without a trace. He gives us at the same time the means of understanding what it is that makes the einheries such powerful figures, and the stories of their life with Odin myths instead of poetry. But on the other hand, it is easy to see why the belief in Valhal came to be something entirely different from its premises. The confident faith has become conscious of itself. Before the joy of the warriors in fighting and drinking in the hall of death — mandream —could become an enhanced enjoyment of life, there had to come a reflection whereby the value of life was loosed from life itself, and regarded independently. The undismayed attitude towards death has undergone the same process as honour and posthumous fame; from being realities, they became ideal values, and ended as qualities of a virtuoso. And now on the other hand, Helgi's touching lament for what he has lost! The scene belongs rather to Germanic Middle Ages than Nordic antiquity, we may fairly say. The hero's sentiment, his wistful dwelling on his loss and longing is mediæval in its tone. But the wistfulness is nevertheless warranted in the thought of the old régime. The modern element lies in the fact that the contrast between past and present breaks out into a lyrical mood. The contrast does not come in with the Helgi poet, but it takes on a new aspect, because men become conscious of themselves and their feelings. We cannot dispose of the contrast altogether by arranging the stories into historical perspectives. In reality the brighter and the darker view of the state after death are not so wide apart that they can face each other in hostility; they supplement each other, they take it in turns to overlap each other. The difficulty which we feel does not lie in the answers, but in the question. It is natural to us to put the problem generally: is death a boon or a calamity? will death improve the condition of a man or not? and we transfer our problem into the discussion of primitive and ancient peoples and their “view of death”. The Teutons had no permanent ever-valid solution, because they had no everlasting problem; death is to them only a variety of life dependent upon the forces which act in the light of the sun. The dead man lives in his kinsmen, in every sense of the word: his luck is incorporated in those who survive him, and the life he leads in the grave and in the neighbourhood of the grave has now as formerly its source in kinsmen's luck. It means a difference, certainly, if a man loses “land and lust” so to speak without compensation, and merely glides over into the shadow, or on the other hand, fills himself with honour, luck, and life in the very moment of death, falling in a circle of down-stricken enemies, with whose warm blood he has sprinkled himself, and whose honour he has used as food for his own. But when all is said and done, the hero who takes a host of enemies with him into the grave cannot himself determine whether he is to enjoy his wealth. His power of utilising the abundance gained depends on how far the surviving kinsmen can assimilate the surplus and save it from rotting in stagnation. A man, then, died as his power of life enabled him. The great man of luck slid with a little bump across the reef, and sailed on. Inferiors, poor folk, might find themselves stranded, to sink and disappear. He who had great store of soul could, according to human calculations, live for ever; the poor in soul stood in sore peril of using up his stock in this world. The faith in the luck running in the clan can lead to a class organisation, as soon as external circumstances direct the human tendency to draw conclusions towards a social system. The proud men of luck find unity in a common feeling of kinship in life, the lower types join, or are thrown together, in a spiritual middle class, and midway between the two there may perhaps arise a buffer estate of intermediate nobility, aiming upward, but moving inevitably downward. And with this class organisation follows a fair distribution of life here and life hereafter for both high and low, in close agreement with the qualifications of birth. Along this road it is possible to arrive at a system firm and clear as that which obtained among certain of the South Sea Islanders, before European democracy stepped in and ruined it. Among the Tonga
Islanders, immortality ceased midway between the first
and third orders of rank; that is to say: the first
class, the chieftains' families, would be fully entitled
to life in the underworld; the second class of life
hereafter would depend upon a sort of personal nobility
in the case of the male head of a family in actual
service at court, with succession vesting in the eldest
son after the father's death — almost in the English
fashion. Our authority states, it is true, that among
the excluded there were some who preferred the
uncertainty of trusting in themselves to the safe and
ordered exclusion; the old system, then, was not
altogether overcome. The king sits as a king in his burial mound, and rules in all probability as king from there, just as in life he sat in his hall and by virtue of his kinsmen ruled from there, at the same time letting his clan-luck act upon the neighbours about him. He is king in death by virtue of what he is, not of what he was. And what he is depends entirely on the activity of his kinsmen.
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