Published in 1959, this post-doctoral thesis level work of comparative mythology shows French professor Dumézil's thoughtful expansion of the study of Norse lore from the mostly associative philology it was into a functionalist sociology, which invites easier comparisons with the Hindu gods and thus backtracks their migration to the Indo-European.
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| [Spanish edition cover featuring Icelandic Thor.] |
Dumézil's trifunctional hypothesis posits that the functions of the gods reflect a society's factional roles, with Odin, Thor, & Frey being the major triumvirate and thus classifying that society's members into rulers, warriors, or farmers, respectively.
Also if modern Indian society is made up of castes, then Dumézil follows that this is a hold-over from Indo-European roles represented by the deities Varuṇa, Indra, & Nasatya, who also have similar functions as Odin, Thor, and Frey, and therefore correspond to those post-migration deities.
Supporting this association, Dumézil shows additional parallels between the tales of Kvasir (a being turned into the intoxicating drink of poetry) and the vedic Mada (a giant who's name means drunkenness), both importantly figuring in the end of a war between factions of the gods (Aesir versus Vanir & the Indian sky versus nature gods), and the Mahabharata's inter-familial struggle of Shakuni tricking Yudhishthira into exile compared to Loki's catspawing of Hodr to kill Baldur among the Aesir (which of course presages Ragnarök, and for the former, the Kurukshetra War).
The author also casts some grim light on the Vanir goddess Nerthus, who according to Roman historian Tacitus' Germania was in a veiled cart and given a procession to visit and bless all the towns before returning to her sacred island. Just before that return however, slaves who bathe the cart & see the goddess are drowned in her lake (!):
"From there comes a mysterious terror, the sacred ignorance of the nature of a secret that is seen only by those who are going to perish." (Tacitus, ch40)
Another reveal mentions the nail in Thor's head depicted in statues (p70), which we'd never run across until finding this illustration online:
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| [God pole engraving of Sami storm deity Horagalles ("Thor-Man") with nail in his head hung with whetstone. By Bernard Picart, 1725.] |
Dumézil likens the stuck hone from Thor's first formal duel to legendary Irish hero Cu Chulainn's hone-like shaped head "emanation" after his first battle, and would guess that there's a representation of a warrior's rite of passage in this striking similarity.
And Dumézil works out an impressive mental somersault into a what seems to be correct identities for Byggvir & Beyla, two mysterious companions to Frey passingly mentioned in the Lokasenna. From clues in retorts made by Loki, the former male is Barley, and the latter female is the Bee (this conclusion expanded in Dennis Schmidt's erudite & entertaining re-imagining of the Eddas, Twilight of the Gods), both appropriate offerings & personified associates of harvest god Frey.
Heimdall, a god with so many inexplicable epithets, also gets the acute eye of Dumézil's associative reasoning by figuring out that the "whitest of the gods" (compare to Baldur, "brightest of the gods") probably connects with another name for Freya: Mardoll (note the suffixes -dall & -doll), which means sea-light. Heimdall's sea origins come from his nine mothers, the waves, who are the nine daughters of the sea jotuns Ægir & Rán. Sailors say the ninth wave is the roughest, and therefore the most decisive of action, and that many cultures liken the foamy tops of waves to charging white animals. In the case of the Welsh and the sailors' saying, the first eight are ewes, but the strongest is the forceful ram, which gives Heimdall his godly connection with the ram, applicable to his last mother. This is but a few of the explorations Dumézil pulls together on this deity.
Parisian Georges Dumézil (1898-1986) could read Latin by age nine, served as an artilleryman in WWI, earned his doctorate in classics by comparing the Greek divine drink ambrosia with the Indian immortality drink amrita, taught in Istanbul, Uppsala, & France, achieved membership in the prestigious Académie Française, and through most of that time published many, many works on comparative mythology.
Flying in the face of the above curriculum vitae and after reading this study, we feel the tripartite theory is a simplification, an academic's need to place people in boxes using the roles of their major gods to do so. While this mirroring looks great on paper, societies have specialists (i.e. craftspeople, seers, clergy, merchants, scribes, et cetera) that do not fit in such cut & dried classifications. Yet without a time machine or further accounts one cannot discount Dumézil's trifunctional theory. We do note that in old Nordic societies the farmers were also the same warriors who went on viking raids, so while those functions were separate the same individuals did both, as per need or season. Despite this critic's disagreement with the core thesis, there's so much depth & perceptiveness that Dumézil has to teach that even the most hardcore of mythology mavens never knew of, which makes this book so worth learning from.
While there are bilingual side-by-side translations of Icelandic quotations to English, there are also many parts where German, Greek, Latin, French, and others are used but not translated, author & editor expecting their audience to know them. We should be flattered by this presumption, but instead find ourselves quite stymied, and suspect most monoglot readers will be too.
In sum Gods of the Ancient Northmen isn't so much a progression as it is a collection of papers & combined lectures, which leaves no great conclusion, but its amazing examinations can only make us scrutinize & broaden our search for answers.
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[One wonders at what other insights could've been discerned if Georges Dumézil had a search engine for his library.]
The individual chapters & exploratory passages all contain great points that are provocative & illuminating. Dumézil's reasonings within Gods of the Ancient Northmen's an impressive thought exercise to get us to continue to think of our divinities in different ways in order to learn more about them -- an intellectual pursuit of insight Odin would totally approve of.
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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.
