Watchful Eyes
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0Odin is such a sentimental guy. Everyone knows that murder demands retribution, but Odin’s got class. He’ll kill someone you love, pluck out their cold dead eyes, hurl them into the night sky, and make them stars to watch over you forever.
Did I say he’s got class? I meant to say that he’s a goddamn psychopath.
The story of Thiazi and Odin is an interesting (and fairly long) one, contained within Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda (and more easily read in Kevin Crossley Holland’s The Norse Myths). The tale tells of the aging of the gods and the theft of the apples of Idunn, the fruit that gives the Gods everlasting life and one of the things that separate them from mortal men and women. The myth begins with Loki getting himself into trouble after harassing an eagle with a pole. After poking the great bird, Loki finds himself attached to it and unable to escape. It doesn’t take long for the bird to reveal that it is, in fact, the great giant Thiazi, a menace to the gods. To save his own life, Loki agrees to bring Idunn, the keeper of the apples that grant youth to the gods, as well as her store of fruit outside the walls of Asgard. The giant sets him free and Loki does as he is asked only to witness the terrifying bird abduct the beautiful young goddess and carry her off to Jotunheim, realm of the giants where Thiazi dwells.
When the gods realize what has happened, they too threaten the life of Loki who promises to make everything right if they would just spare him. Without the apples of Idunn, all the gods would age, including Loki, so there’s a bit more to his offer than selfless heroics here. In the end, Loki retrieves Idunn and her apples from Thiazi and carries her away as a great falcon, but not before Thiazi realizes and gives chase as an eagle. Seeing Loki and Idunn in trouble, the gods lay a trap, waiting for Loki to fly over the walls into Asgard. After the two are safely within the walls, they light fire to wood they’ve stacked against the wall. Thiazi, in his eagle shape, is incinerated, his wings are burnt off, and he comes crashing to the ground where the gods easily slay him.
Later, the giantess Skadi, a strong and beautiful huntress, arrives at the walls of Asgard and demands compensation for the murder of her father. This is, to my knowledge, something that actually happened in Norse culture. Murder and violence happened and the perpetrators were expected to pay for their crimes, often literally. The gods, being proper Norse figures, agree to a number of conditions including allowing Skadi to choose her husband from among the Aesir (the gods) themselves. Being tricky bastards, they obviously throw in a caveat: she must choose her husband by his feet. All the eligible male gods are lined up and veiled but for their feet and Skadi picks the man with the most beautiful extremities thinking they must belong to the totally gorgeous Balder. Unfortunately for her, the man she chooses is Njordr, a really swell guy and a fairly attractive one as well, but her heart was set on the one man the gods would never give her.
As an additional gift to help heal the damage between the giantess and the Aesir, Odin plucks her father’s eyes out and sets them in the sky to watch over her.
I’m sure the whole thing was meant to be nice, but there’s just something eerie about throwing a dead man’s eyes into the night sky.
I guess this goes to show, you don’t go messing around with Norse gods. Nothing good comes of it. You end up with a husband you don’t love and your father creepily staring down at you forever.
Girls with overbearing parents, you think your dad is annoying and weird? Try being in Skadi’s position!
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First yay~ I think my dad would do the same thing. I wonder what Thiazi would say if his mouth was up there, too.
Yeah, ’cause that’s an even trade:
I’ll kill your dad and leave you fatherless in a time when your lineage is all you’ve got. BUT, I’ll in return for you letting me mash him like a bug on a windsheild, I’ll turn his eyes into stars, so that he may stalk you, just as he would have wanted.
Also, who carries eyes of the people they’ve killed? I mean, it’s not like he could have embalmed them and kepy them as souvenires (sp?). Was he saving them for a midnight snack?
Creepers.
I love it.
xxxxxx
Gah! The typos!
BUT- (scratch the I’ll)
Kept*
hunny lets go inside where your dad cant see us get busy
When does this story date to? I’m curious about the connection between the Idunn’s apples of life and the tree with fruit of everlasting life found in Genesis.
As far as I know, the story was recorded by Sturluson in the Prose Edda around 1200 AD, at a time when Christianity was starting to make a presence in Norse lands. However, there is evidence that this particular story was first told several hundred years before that, anywhere from 300-400 years earlier, in fact. Because of the lack of written records for Norse myths before Sturluson, it can be difficult to trace exactly how old certain myths were or where they come from. There is a lot of evidence to suggest that many of the Norse myths we know and love today have roots in much much older traditions that existed for a long time before the Viking invasions.
So to examine this further, it seems like the Christian myth and the Norse one existed simultaneously without necessarily influencing each other, they are both, very likely, influenced by many older myths from around Europe including the Greeks and the Celts, cultures that both had strong symbolism about fruits, particularly apples.
Studying this stuff a bit, it seems like many many different mythologies all spring from the same roots, so to speak. Christianity didn’t come up with anything amazingly new (though the garbage spouted in movies like Zeitgeist isn’t quite right, either) but neither did Norse mythology or even Greek myths before them. There are SOME new takes on things, some new twists, but there is a great deal borrowed from older (or other, coexisting) cultures in every civilization.
I can’t help but wonder what situations spawned the original oral traditions that turned into written traditions in cultures. Maybe one day we’ll invent some sort of time machine TV thing and we can find out. =) Thanks for taking the time to explain further.
Sorry, but you’re wrong. about that whole ‘the Christian myth and the Norse one existed simultaneously without necessarily influencing each other” thing.
It’s true that the fundamental basics of both religions were well established by the time when they made contact and that both stole much of their mythology and myths from much older civilizations, but what we know of Norse mythology originates from a grand total of TWO books (the Eddas), both of whom written several centuries after the religions made contact and more importantly LOOOOOOOOONG AFTER the Norse religion had been more or less been supplanted by Christianity.
You can see this influence in the stories involving Ragnarok (the ‘end of the world’ scenario in norse mythology which ONLY sprung after contact with the concept of the Apocalypse in Christianity) and the remarkable shift in Loki’s characterization wherein Loki transforms from a hazardous, selfish and well-meaning trickster god (it’s complicated) into a satan-like figure directly responsible for every ill in the world.
That’s not to say that there’s elements of truth to what you say, but nothing in culture that exists a inviolable vacuum, least of all religion.
I mispoke, I was speaking about the specific connections between the garden of eden/forbidden fruit of Christianity and the golden apples of Norse myth. I wasn’t very clear about that.
You’re right though, and I’ve said this in the comment above and elsewhere several times, that it can be hard to pin down specifics on Norse mythology due to the nature of where our knowledge comes from (AKA Sturluson). I did say (with regards to both Norse and Christian myths, and every mythology in the world) at the end:
“There are SOME new takes on things, some new twists, but there is a great deal borrowed from older (or other, coexisting) cultures in every civilization.”
Thanks for the comment though! I definitely agree with you on the shift in Loki’s personality and the Ragnarok thing, for sure.
It’s true, at least in records we have from Iceland, essentially, if someone killed someone in your family, you could bring a suit against them at the Althing and demand compensation and punishment. Tricky thing was, the Icelandic parliamentary system had is legislature, and a judiciary, but no executive, so you had to have enough support from kin to be able to enforce the ruling, and you had to go do it yourself, typically by force.
Ha! I literally just read this myth last night! I love it.
Maybe that’s why Skadi and Njord kept going back and forth to each others houses, because Thiazi wouldn’t stop staring.
That, and the fact that they hated living at the other one’s place.
I read somewhere- might have been cracked, admittedly not the most reliable source- that norse myth was a fabrication and that noone ever really got into the wacky adventures of odin and friends…
i found it- scroll down- http://www.cracked.com/article_19283_7-ancient-forms-mysticism-that-are-recent-inventions_p2.html
you’re about the most myth-knowledgable guy on the net, what say you to this?
Great comment! Cracked actually tends to be -pretty- good about their articles but they certainly don’t use citation or read extensively. While their facts are generally correct, there are nuances they’re missing here and it’s causing them to leap to conclusions.
While they’re largely correct about the timeline of the christianization of Scandinavia and the Norse cultures, they’re incorrect on what exactly that means. Christianity first made its way into scandinavia around 900 to 1000 AD, a little after the start of the viking raids. Choosing this as our starting date for when Norse people became Christians would be incredibly incorrect, however. Christianity met heavy resistance in Scandinavia, both physical and spiritual, with evidence of serious violence against Christians by the Danes and others. Iceland, it is said, adopted Christianity sometime around 1000-1100 AD, but even there it wasn’t very strongly adhered to by the local people. Where Scandinavians DID start to adopt Christianity, it was often alongside the religion of their forebears, and the Christianity of western Europe doesn’t seem to be entirely adopted until anywhere between 1300-1500 AD depending on where we’re talking about.
This brings us to Sturluson. There is some debate over what, exactly, his biases were when recording the stories of his grandfathers. We do know that he was a Christian, but we also know that he had great respect for the old religion as literature. There is little to suggest that what he recorded is inaccurate and that some of the oddities we experience while reading the tales of the Norse religion today are simply a natural part of a tradition we’ve never experienced. The fact that many of the gods had very human qualities is not altogether unexpected, the old traditions of Scandinavia differ greatly from other parts of Europe and had hundreds, if not thousands of years to develop, largely free from the influence of their southern neighbors (namely the Romans).
Is it possible that Sturluson made everything up or that he changed things in his recordings of the old ways to help adapt his people to Christianity? Maybe. Is it likely? No. Historians and folklorists seem fairly certain that what we know of Norse religion is accurate, though we can never be entirely certain of just how far back its roots extend.
Cracked IS correct in their assertions that Sturluson thought of the gods as men who lived extraordinary lives but he never asserts this in the Prose or Poetic Edda, always referring to them as gods, as the Aesir, which makes ME think that he did a pretty good job of keeping his personal bias out of it.
Hopefully I’ve got all that correct, it’s a muddy business and it can be confusing to keep track of all the dates and events happening that surround the recording of myths!
Either way, I hope that offers a little insight!
muddy it remains, but I am not disappointed with your response in the slightest.
the mythology bookworm kid in me died a little after reading that article, but you’ve helped him make a comeback. thanks for taking the time, K.
you forget her demand they make her laugh, which they also pawn off on loki, who ties a rope to a billy goat’s beard and the other end around his tensticles for a tug of war.
that’s the best part f the whole thing!
Whoops you ninj’ed me
Wasn’t that the same story where Loki got his testicles tied to a billy goat’s beard?
You didn’t mention the goat…