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Subscribe to this list via RSS Blog posts tagged in Yggdrasil

 

 

Did the Runes Originate With an Act of Gay Sex?

 

James Kirkup's scurrilous, and surprisingly tender, poem “The Love That Dares to Speak Its Name,” in which a Roman centurion makes love to (and with) the dead body of the crucified Jesus, has been twisting the nuts of pious Christians since 1977.

Behold, the heathen iteration.

 

If you've been pagan for more than 16 minutes, you will no doubt be familiar with the famous Rúnatál (“Song of the Runes”) from Hávamál, in which Óðinn discovers the runes in a heroic act of literal self-sacrifice, cited here in Carolyne Larrington's 1999 translation:

 

139 I know that I hung

on a windy tree

nine long nights,

wounded with a spear,

dedicated to Óðinn,

myself to myself,

on that tree of which none man knows

from where its roots run.

 

140 No bread they gave me,

or a drink from a horn,

downwards I peered;

I took up the runes,

screaming I took them,

then I fell back from there.

 

In the standard reading, Allfather hangs himself from World Ash Yggdrasil (“Steed of the Terrible [One]” presumably Óðinn himself), and runs himself through with a spear: the standard manner of human sacrifices offered to Óðinn. It is this terrible sacrifice which enables him to discover, and seize, the Runes, those mystic building-blocks from which what is, is made.

But how if what the Rúnatál describes is no literal hanging, with branch, rope, and swinging corpse?

What if Rúnatál is actually describing (in a very graphic sense) an act of impalement?

What if the destructive-creative act that gave us the Runes was also an act of ergi?

 

In the surviving literature, ergi (noun) and argr (adjective) are terms of abuse, in a semantic field encompassing translations like “shameful”, "unmanly", “effeminate”, and “cowardly.”

As any web-search will show, in our day the terms are not infrequently associated with receptive male-male intercourse, the assumption being that, to those über-butch vikings—as in machismo cultures to this day—it would have been shameful to be (willingly) penetrated.

Whether the Norse-speaking ancestors saw it this way or not has yet to be proven. Still, for the sake of argument, let us grant the premise.

What, then, are the implications that—as anyone conversant in Norse literature knows—Óðinn is himself not infrequently accused of ergi?

Might it be for this that he became known—surely one of his more enigmatic heiti, or by-names—as Jálkr, "eunuch"?

 

Certainly we can say that the Norse found the practice of seiðr by males to be argr: presumably because opening oneself to be a “passive” receptacle is analogous to permitting sexual penetration.

Óðinn, of course, is also said to have (transgressively) practiced seiðr.

 

That the act of receptive intercourse can be an initiatory experience, generating profound, transformative insights, I would be the last to deny.

Did it also—possibly even historically—give us the runes as well?

 

The remaining question here can only be: granted the rest, on whose “tree of life” is Óðinn “hanged”?

To anyone conversant in the lore, there can really be only one answer: whose else but that of his ettinish oath-brother, whose argr credentials—as himself the mother of Sleipnir—are surely ungainsayable? thus rendering their joint act doubly transgressive.

Last modified on

Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 

Och, it's the same every year.

The Yule house-cleaning, though not finished, is well under way. The gifts, though yet to be wrapped and sent off, are all bought. Now arises the prospect of the next job-lot of work, and the annual question: to Tree, or not to Tree?

Every year, I remind myself: this is a choice.

Every year, I remind myself: it will still be Yule without it.

And every year—so far, at least—I do it anyway.

Oh, the Yule Tree: that indoor Yggdrasil, that heart and axis of the season, that island of light and color in a bleak white winter sea.

Long ago, I settled in my own mind the ethics of the matter: these, after all, are farmed trees, born for this sacrifice. (Still, though, I try each year to see at least one tree planted in recompense: the traditional life for a life.) Cutting the tree, I make the wonted prayers and offerings.

Oh, but the work involved.

Decking is the least of the matter. That's a joy, seeing again after nearly a year the old well-loved treasures, some of which have been in the family for more than a hundred years. (There's not much room in the steamer trunk of an immigrant, but somehow for these they managed to find a place.) Each ornament bears a memory, if not a story. Each ornament is a prayer.

The lights, that's the issue. Putting them on will be the work of several hours, taking them off again the same, with the added prickly discomfort attending the fact that invariably I leave the Tree up too long. Is it really, I ask myself, worth all the work?

Then there's the expense. Trees hereabouts this year are running $10 a foot. Seven or eight foot's-worth of Yule tree could buy a lot of groceries.

Last modified on

Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Did Odin Hang from Yggdrasil?

It's a truism of modern mythography that Odin, Lord of the Runes, hanged himself from the branches of Yggdrasil, the old Norse Tree of Life.

But did he?

According to the famous passage from Hávamál:

I know that I hung

on the windy meiðr

all nine nights:

Last modified on

Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Tree Rune

Soon a dark stranger will come to stand in the living room, and the house will fill with the smell of the forest.

It's an odd custom, fraught with mystery, and equally mysterious is the fact that the decked tree—for all its iconic status as the veritable embodiment of the holiday—has inspired so little music.

Forthwith, a meditation on the mysteries of what novelist Richard Grant calls the “seedling of Yggdrasil.”

And if someone should feel inspired to write a tune, so much the better.

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Recent Comments - Show all comments
  • Steven Posch
    Steven Posch says #
    Quick work, Mabnahash; I can't wait to hear. One moment while I consult the technomeisters.....
  • Mabnahash
    Mabnahash says #
    I wrote a tune for this, but I can't figure out how to post it here. Maybe it's not possible with the site?

Posted by on in Culture Blogs
A World of Trees and the World Tree

One of my homework assignments for my shaman class was to talk to a tree.  That is, go stand next to or sit under or hug a tree and let it speak to you in your mind.  Commune with the tree. 

...
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