There are documented cases of Scandinavians attacking traders, killing everyone, but taking no booty. Their religion forbade even the temptation of foreign goods and wealth. We just don't think like those people did anymore.
sean
sean
mythological figures
- Thread starter tshadowchaser
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Steel Tiger
Senior Master
You're right. At Ragnarok the gods and giants paired off for numerous single combats and most died. Then Surtur burned up the world. some of the gods survived. Balder, who had died earlier and come back to life (a sun god perhaps?), and the sons of Thor Vidar and Vili (Vidar, by the way, kills Fenris after he swallowed Odin by stepping on his lower jaw and ripping his head apart) all survived and went on to make a new world.
There is an interesting parallel between the story of Ragnarok and the Mahabarata of Vedic Indian mythology. Both are concerned with the destruction of the world through a catastrophic battle and both are told from the point of view of a story told to descendants of the survivors of the war.
Can you elaborate on that, ToD?
Unless we're talking at sixes and sevens, the Norse culture from which sprang the principle of going a-Viking, was very largely based on warrior cults for whom the idea of fighting and pillaging was sacred. Most of the large Viking settlements were packed to rafters with plundered materials. That's what gave them their start-up capital for the later trading/settling empire.
The whole era is a somewhat under-appreciated segment of European history and it only fell because of it's own success. In a grim warning to the Western powers of the present day, the Viking commercial empire was destroyed from within as the warrior cults that gave it it's toehold became marginalised and turned upon the culture that spawned them.
Unless we're talking at sixes and sevens, the Norse culture from which sprang the principle of going a-Viking, was very largely based on warrior cults for whom the idea of fighting and pillaging was sacred. Most of the large Viking settlements were packed to rafters with plundered materials. That's what gave them their start-up capital for the later trading/settling empire.
The whole era is a somewhat under-appreciated segment of European history and it only fell because of it's own success. In a grim warning to the Western powers of the present day, the Viking commercial empire was destroyed from within as the warrior cults that gave it it's toehold became marginalised and turned upon the culture that spawned them.
Ninjamom
2nd Black Belt
Isn't that....like..... an egg-laying porcupine????
http://www.nwf.org/nationalwildlife/article.cfm?articleId=763&issueId=61
I think I'd be Anteus, a son of the Earth, who drew strength from being in touch with the earth - give me a week away in a mountain retreat, in a dense forest, by a stream or a lake, any day!! Anteus was able to hold his own against Hercules, because every time Herc threw him down or nearly pinned him to the ground, he got stronger and got back up (I can relate).
Of course, Herc. ended up beating him by holding him overhead, away from the earth, until his strength drained. But such is the downside of mythology.
bydand
Senior Master
According to my wife, that about sums it up.
Actually though, I think it would be a refreshing change to not think about things so much, and just go with the flow. Sometimes it feels like it would be nice to be just smart enough to do your given job, but dumb enough to not know (or care) how much more there is out there to absorb and learn all the time. As it is though, I almost have an obsession for learning new things. If the wife brings home a book about Molecular Biology, I HAVE to read it; if I run across something I never heard of I have to research it out and find out all I can about it (newest was about Seiche in narrow bodies of water.) I wouldn't mind being a bit of a dim bulb for a bit.
Steel Tiger
Senior Master
Don't go up against those culture heroes, they win every time. Except Quetzalcoatl, he was forced to flee on a raft made of snakes.
Heimdall and Hercules were some of my favorites. But there are so many.
Yes! Now I remember those two guys (hard to tell them apart, lol!). But it does get a little vague so far as the last part is concerned, no? I had the impression that the ancient Norse weren't all that interested in the details of what happened after Ragnarok. It was almost as though their own identification was with the Asgaardians, and even though there was a new world to come, they really regarded the end of the Asgardian pantheon as the end, period. I found it very striking, because in many religions, it would be the new world after the destruction of Asgaard that would be the focus, but in Norse mythology, it was like, well, our best days are behind us...
This might have been a feature of the very ancient Indo-European ancestral religion, eh? The mythologies of the descendent groups did change substantially (though there are interesting details which recur throughout, like the `rope/sky' illusion that shows up in both Indian and Welsh mythology). But it would be surprising if there weren't certain elements preserved from the ancestral system...
Steel Tiger
Senior Master
I think that it is very likely that the story of the end of the world is very, very, very old in the Indo-European tradition. The parallels between Vedic India and the Norse are very noticeable; much more so than between the Vedic and the Greeks, for instance. Just think about this:
Vedic
Steel Tiger
Senior Master
I think that it is very likely that the story of the end of the world is very, very, very old in the Indo-European tradition. The parallels between Vedic India and the Norse are very noticeable; much more so than between the Vedic and the Greeks, for instance. Just think about this:
Vedic Norse Greek
Indra Thor Zeus
Mitra Teuw (?) Apollo
Varuna Wotan ?
These are the three main gods of the pantheon. The Indo-European tradition has a strong focus on the number three. Indra/Thor/Zeus is the thunder god, the monster slayer. Mitra/Teuw/Apollo is the god of light. Varuna/Wotan/? is the god of knowledge. It is interesting to note that the way Vedic names are pronounced is to say 'v' as 'w' and to drop final vowels. So Varuna becomes Warun. I just can't find the equivalent god to Wotan among the Greeks.
There seems to have been some rearrangement in the ranks, though... Odin occupies a place comparable to Zeus in the Greek pantheon, but as you imply, he's not the thunder godThor is (Mjolnir, the hammer, is the source of both thunder and lightning, I'd expect). Wotan/Odin is... hard to say, eh? Hangs out with ravens... almost more like a male Athena: she picks up wisdom from the owl on her shoulder, he gets it from ravens whispering in his ear. All in all, a bit spookey...
Steel Tiger
Senior Master
It a bit annoying really. Zeus is less a name than the word 'god' (deus). I like the connection between Athena's owl and Wotan's ravens. Then there's that whole, "died and hung on a tree for nine days to gain knowledge" thing with Wotan. Now that's seriously creepy.
I agree... really creepy!
The Welsh mythological hero figure Llew Llaw Gyffes, `The Lion with the Steady Hand', was killed and took the form of an eagle, sitting in a tree, his flesh rotting away from his wound, until his uncle Gwydion found him and restored him to life and human form... I wonder if there's a connection... I get the feeling that Odin/Wotan was a bit of an upstart, but how can you tell? There's no one really like him in any of the the other Indo-European pantheons, I gather. Where the hell did he come from??
Steel Tiger
Senior Master
I think Wotan is a serious hangover from a way earlier tradition. He is a shaman. He talks to the dead, visits the spirit world, and has an eye that can see spirits. His horse, Sleipnir, with its eight legs is considered to represent a funeral procession carrying a body to it final rest.
Though he is the leader of the Asgardians there are not that many stories about him. Somewhere along the line he has replaced the thunder god as the leader. The cognate figure in India, Varuna, is considered one of the trinity but does not get much attention. He is the Lord of Knowledge and the guardian of the law. Among the Norse this second job was handed over to Teuw/Tyr who is the third of the trinity among the Norse.
Though he is the leader of the Asgardians there are not that many stories about him. Somewhere along the line he has replaced the thunder god as the leader. The cognate figure in India, Varuna, is considered one of the trinity but does not get much attention. He is the Lord of Knowledge and the guardian of the law. Among the Norse this second job was handed over to Teuw/Tyr who is the third of the trinity among the Norse.
Your comment about shamanism is very suggestive, ST. It started me thinking... Indo-European mythologies look very different from each other in many respects, though there are also some deep resemblances that aren't shared with those of linguistically unrelated groups. One plausible factor that might account for the variation is syncreticism with figures from the religious/mythological traditions of the local, pre-IE people that the various subparts of the IE juggernaut encountered as they radiated out from their homeland and conquered pretty much everything in their path. We have pretty good reason to think that Dionysus was something along those line, a Phrygian, maybe even Scythian figure, who comports only very strangely with the standard IE pantheon (similarly with Hecate and various others); it's probably the case that the oddness of much of Celtic mythology relative to the rest of the IE population arises from the same roots.
So maybe Odin/Wotan is a hangover from one of the non-IE peoples that the early Scandinavians came in contact with. Shamanism is a characteristic feature of a lot of high-latitude groups in the northern hemisphere—the Inuits, Goldi, Samoyed, Chukchee and a bunch of others had them—and it wouldn't be all that surprising to find one of their intercessor figures who regularly travels between the world of the living and the world of the dead showing up in the cosmology of the upstart invaders at one point. What's strange is that he wound up displacing Thor/Tyr as the boss of the outfit...
It not so much the Vikings I am talking about. After all they were just groups of toughs that got together and did some damage. A history teacher once compare them to Motorcycle Gangs which usaly consisted of about thirty people. These cults you refer to came from the basic religion of the people in general and the religions were very backward thinking. Any Change was usualy a sign of future horrors to come; so they feared it. Loki was a god of craft, and to be "crafty" is still a negative term even in English. In that sense craft is to go against the gods and tradition. Athena on the other hand was also a goddess of crafts and in a western tradition she is good and wise; hence, western thought. Cool huh?
Sean
Xue Sheng
All weight is underside
yeah yeah yeah, whatever.... I would STILL rather be Sun Wukong
http://www.answers.com/sun wukong :uhyeah:
Impressive conversation there though about Odin/Woton, much I did not know and I thought I had a grasp on that stuff . Or at least I use to . Before I got old that is.
Let's not use the world `old' in this company, XSas someone who celebrated his 60th birthday more than 2 weeks ago, I'd prefer we apply it to, um... Odin, say. Odin is old. Anyone who is not as old as Odin is is not old!
There... we're all young, suddenly!! Don't you feel a lot better now!? I do...
Steel Tiger
Senior Master
This is a very interesting idea. I think I may have a parallel from India. The Hindu religion has a number of layers. It started with the Vedic gods imported by the Indo-Aryan migrants, but later they developed the Brahmanic tradition with its very important trinity - Brahma, Vishnu, Siva. It is generally believed that Siva is an indigenous god absorbed into the Vedic/Hindu tradition. He is quite different to his companions and bares many of the aspects one might associate with a shaman - all-seeing eye, ability to subdue beings from the otherworld, and such things.
Steel Tiger
Senior Master
Yeah, I kinda like Wukong too. Anyone who can become a Buddha through violent action has got my vote!
