When the Thunder Had a Name
A personal article about a way of reading the world that began with the nature around: the thunder that drove across the sky, the trees that people were made from, the horses that drew day and night. And about what we cannot follow.
Anyone who has stood outside as a thunderstorm rolls in knows the feeling. The air turns heavy and still, the birds fall silent, and then comes the rumble, first far away and then right overhead. I know what thunder is: electricity discharging between cloud and ground. Still I count the seconds between the flash and the crack, as everyone does, and feel small.
The people who raised the runestones had no meteorology. They had the thunder, and they gave it a name. The Old Norse word þórr means thunder, and the god and the sound were the same word. Swedish tordön, thunder's din, still carries his name, and åska, the Swedish word for thunder, is usually explained as an old word for the god's drive across the sky.
In the Eddic poem about how Thor fetches back his hammer, we hear what it sounded like when he drove:
Senn váru hafrar heim of reknir, skyndir at sköklum, skyldu vel renna; björg brotnuðu, brann jörð loga, ók Óðins sonr í Jötunheima.
“At once the goats were driven home and hurried to the shafts; they were to run well. Mountains broke, the earth burned in flames, Odin's son drove to the land of the giants.”
It is a thunderstorm, seen by someone standing in the middle of it: mountains that split, ground that burns where the lightning strikes. It is not an explanation in our sense. It is a way of turning something beyond understanding into someone you can relate to, a force with a name and a will.
People made of wood
What strikes me most in reading the old poems is how close people stand to the rest of the world. In Völuspá the first humans are not made of clay or from a rib. The gods find them on the shore, as two trees:
Unz þrír kvámu ór því liði öflgir ok ástkir æsir at húsi, fundu á landi lítt megandi Ask ok Emblu örlöglausa.
“Until three came out of that host, strong and loving Æsir, to the house. They found on land, nearly powerless, Ask and Embla, without fate.”
Ask is a tree, and Embla has been read as another. Only when the gods give them breath, spirit and the warmth of life do they become people: önd gaf Óðinn, breath gave Odin. We are, in that story, made of the same wood as the forest around us.
And the world itself is a tree. The next stanza tells of the ash Yggdrasil:
Ask veit ek standa, heitir Yggdrasill, hár baðmr, ausinn hvíta auri; þaðan koma döggvar, þærs í dala falla, stendr æ yfir grænn Urðarbrunni.
“An ash I know standing, it is called Yggdrasil, a high tree, drenched with white clay. From there comes the dew that falls in the valleys. It stands ever green over Urd's well.”
The morning dew comes from the world tree. Adam of Bremen, who wrote about the Swedes in the 1070s, tells that by the temple at Uppsala stood a huge tree that was green in winter and summer alike, and that no one knew what kind of tree it was.
The trees also spoke of people. Hávamál says:
Hrörnar þöll, sú er stendr þorpi á, hlýr-at henni börkr né barr; svá er maðr, sá er manngi ann. Hvat skal hann lengi lifa?
“The fir withers that stands on the bare hill; neither bark nor needles shelter it. So it is with the one whom no one loves. How long shall such a one live?”
Anyone who has seen a lone pine on a rock knows what the poem means. Nature was not only something to explain. It was also something to explain oneself by.
Horses, hawks and hounds
In Grímnismál, Odin lists the foremost of every kind:
Askr Yggdrasils, hann er æðstr viða, en Skíðblaðnir skipa, Óðinn ása, en jóa Sleipnir, Bilröst brúa, en Bragi skalda, Hábrók hauka, en hunda Garmr.
“The ash Yggdrasil is the foremost of trees, and Skíðblaðnir of ships, Odin of the Æsir, and of horses Sleipnir, Bifröst of bridges, and Bragi of poets, Hábrók of hawks, and of hounds Garm.”
I like that stanza. The tree, the ship, the god, the horse, the bridge, the poet, the hawk and the hound stand in one row, each the best of its kind. The world is not divided into the holy and the rest. The horse has a place beside the god.
Day and night were horses too. Skinfaxi draws the day across the sky, and his mane lights up the earth. Hrímfaxi draws the night:
Hrímfaxi heitir, er hverja dregr nótt of nýt regin; méldropa fellir hann morgin hvern; þaðan kemr dögg um dala.
“Hrímfaxi is the one who draws each night over the good gods. Foam from the bit he lets fall every morning; from there comes the dew in the valleys.”
Here the dew is the foam of the night's horse. A moment ago it came from the world tree. No one seems to have needed to choose between the explanations. It was not a doctrine to be held together, but attempts to understand, side by side. The ravens Huginn and Muninn, which I wrote about in The Raven Called Memory, flew out over the world every day and came back with what they had seen.
It shows on the runestones too. Of the 2,321 runestones in Vitki's Swedish corpus, 521 name someone who carried an animal in their name, more than one stone in five: a Björn or a Torbjörn (bear), an Ulv or a Gunnulv (wolf), an Arnfast (eagle), an Orm (serpent), a Hrafn (raven). About one stone in seven names a bear. People gave their children the names of animals, and perhaps something of their strength.
Thor on the stones
When most runestones were raised, many people had already become Christian. Still, 310 stones, more than one in eight, name someone who carried Thor in their name: Torsten, Torbjörn, Tora. And on a stone in Västergötland, at Velanda, the text ends with a prayer to the thunder:
Þyrvi ræisti stæin æftiR Ogmund, bonda sinn, miok goðan þegn. Þorr vigi.
“Tyrve raised the stone in memory of Agmund, her husband, a very good thegn. May Thor hallow.”
A woman has raised a stone for her husband and asks the force that moves in the storm to protect it.
What we cannot follow
I do not want to make this world more beautiful than it was. Adam of Bremen tells that at Uppsala, every ninth year, nine of every kind of male creature were sacrificed, people too, and the bodies hung in the grove by the temple. Adam never went there himself and wrote from what others told him, and scholars read him with care. But the sacrifice, the blót, was real, and it cost lives.
The world was also unjust in a way that was built in. In Rígsþula the thrall's son is born, and the poem describes him like this:
Hann nam at vaxa ok vel dafna; var þar á höndum hrokkit skinn, kropnir knúar, fingr digrir, fúlligt andlit, lotr hryggr, langir hælar.
“He began to grow and thrive well. On his hands the skin was wrinkled, the knuckles crooked, the fingers thick, the face ugly, the back bent, the heels long.”
The poem explains why some are born to toil and others to power, and it seems to find that right. There I cannot follow.
But I can understand where it came from. It was a hard and unforgiving world. A poor harvest meant hunger, a hard winter death, a storm at sea that someone never came home. No one knew why sickness came or why the rain failed. Against forces they were powerless before, people tried the one thing that seemed as strong: to give something of value, even life, to appease them.
What I take with me
We know more today. We can forecast the storm, explain the dew and cure many of the sicknesses. I am grateful for that. But perhaps we have lost something along the way: attention.
Those who lived here before us looked at the thunder, the tree and the horse and asked what they meant. They gave them names and places in the world, beside the gods and not beneath them. They let several explanations live side by side, and they measured themselves against the fir on the hill. It was a person's attempt to read the world around them, with the tools there were. That is where I find them most sympathetic.
Next time the thunder rolls, count the seconds as usual. But stay a while afterwards and listen. Once it was a god driving across the sky.
Sources
- The Poetic Edda, after Guðni Jónsson's edition (Eddukvæði, 1949), via heimskringla.no: Þrymskviða 21, Völuspá 17–19, Hávamál 50, Grímnismál 44, Vafþrúðnismál 12 and 14, Rígsþula 8. The translations are made for this article and are as literal as possible.
- Adam of Bremen, Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum, book IV, ch. 26–27, with the note on the tree by the temple at Uppsala (1070s).
- Hellquist, E. 1922. Svensk etymologisk ordbok, under åska.
- Scandinavian Runic-text Database, version 3.1 (ODbL): Vg 150 and the names on the runestones.
- Images: see the captions.