I have been a little busy lately, my husband was just announced for elevation. BUT - shapeshifting. It was totally a thing, at least in sagas. This is what I find fascinating, though, it wasn't physical shifting like a werewolf. It was more like astral projection, but the soul sort of created a new body, usually an animal body.

The Impermanence of All Things

This is where I come from. I was raised Southern Baptist. I call it polite Southern Baptist. The convention would come around once a year, they'd issue their decrees about women being seen and not heard, and everyone would listen politely and life would go on. I was the granddaughter of the church's resident curmudgeonly pot-stirrer and the church choir's star soprano. So much so that I was labeled a soprano in jr. high and sang the wrong part until my 30's. In my 20's, I was confirmed in the Episcopal church. In between was a long period of experimentation with mysticism, a little dabbling in the occult. So I don't necessarily consider myself a blind follower of any one doctrine. I've read and studied some decidedly non-JudeoChristian things, like traditional Native American spirituality and Wicca, so I am worldly. Right? This is what threw me in a way I did not expect: the ancient Norse people didn't believe in a permanent afterlife. The old Norse religion had a lot of regional, local, even individual family variations, so it is difficult to pin down a unice real concept of an afterlife, but none of the ones I know of are permanent. For someone who goes to live in a nearby burial mound to continue living near family and community after death, the afterlife may have been part-time in the mound, part-time elsewhere. In this arrangement, you will live on as long as you are remembered by your descendants, but one day, nobody will remember your name. What then? Freya and Odin between them collect a lot of the dead to take to their halls. Hel has many in her realm, which, as I've already said, May not have been as good as Valhalla, but wasn't like hell, either. I kind of think of it like hotels, Four Seasons vs. Hampton Inn vs. Motel 6. Bottom line, though, nothing survives Ragnarok. Life in Valhalla goes until Ragnarok, and then game over. It feels like a cheat, what's the point in temporary afterlife? I guess the point is the only constant in life is change. Nothing is permanent, everything changes, and we should appreciate moments as they come for as long as they last, knowing that forever is a fairytale.

Hel is not hell

Snorri Sturluson is important as one of the primary sources of Norse mythology to survive, but Snorri is not necessarily a completely accurate source. Iceland was that last of the Nordic countries to convert to Christianity, and the older ways survived longer there than they did nearer to mainland Europe, but Snorri was still writing over 100 years after the Icelanders converted to Christianity, and its influence can be seen in his work. I found a paper online, Women in the Viking Age: Death, Life After Death and Burial Customs by Cristina Spatacean. It was written as part of the requirements for a Master of Philosophy degree at the Center for Viking and Medieval Studies at the University of Oslo in 2006. This was my first introduction to the extent to which what we know of Viking Age worldview was influenced by Christianity. The Christian view of the afterlife has a very strong dichotomy. The good go to heaven, the bad go to hell, which is a horrible place of punishment. This is reflected in the common view of the afterlife in Norse myth, where the brave who die in battle go to Valhalla, the bad go to Hel, the realm ruled over by Loki's daughter. And yet, the god Baldr went to Hel. Baldr was the shining god, the most beautiful, and beloved by his mother, Frigg, and pretty much everyone else. Frigg went so far as to extract promises from every plant, animal, god, and rock that they would never harm Baldr. Loki, of course, couldn't let this be, and if you don't know the story, you can guess what happened. The point is, Baldr was beloved. If Hel was a place of torment and punishment, why wouldn't Frigg pull all the strings in the nine worlds to make sure Baldr went to Valhalla? There are also references to Hel making preparations to spiff the place up in preparation for Baldr's arrival. She ordered a feast prepared, and treasure brought out. This doesn't sound like a cold, horrible, desolate place. Now, Hel herself is described as half beautiful woman, half corpse. In our modern sensibilities, and probably most others, half-rotting-corpse sounds horrific. I'm sure even people in the Viking Age were under no illusions that Hel was all attractive. In later years, I think baggage was attached to Hel that may not have originally been there. We tend to attribute bad qualities to ugly, unpleasant things and good qualities to attractive things. This is not always the case. I think Hel has kind of gotten a bad rap for being evil, ruling over an unpleasant realm of punishment, when in reality, Hel is honest. Death isn't pretty or pleasant. Our bodies fall apart in pretty gross ways, and Hel is very honest with the fact that her realm is a realm for the dead. It's not going to be just like alive, it's different. Not horrible, but different.

Let's start with Snorri

This isn't the beginning. I don't know what the beginning would be, but this is....not the end. Snorri, for all his flaws, saved the end. Snorri Sturluson was a poet, chieftain, politician, and lawspeaker of Iceland. He was J.R.R. Tolkein's inspiration for hobbits. He has been described as a round little man who loved books and sitting by his cozy fire with plenty of good food and drink and a pretty woman to serve it. Doesn't that sound like a hobbit? But wait, before you start picturing Viking Bilbo played by Martin Freeman, there was another side to Snorri. Snorri could be ruthless. He was a politician, after all. He sometimes had a tendency to cheat on deals. Most of all, he was ambitious. He wanted to be the uncrowned king of Iceland. He never quite achieved that ambition to his own satisfaction. His plan was to snap up as many chieftaincies as he possibly could. He was a major landowner and a very important man, but this somehow just wasn't enough for Snorri. I don't know if he wanted to be instantly obeyed, instead of an important man among equals who could be argued with, or if he wanted adulation he never got because, quite frankly, someone was always just about fed up with his crap. Maybe he just never quite felt special enough. He tried to get what he was looking for from the King of Norway, which still didn't really work, but ultimately, we are all the beneficiaries of Snorri's attempts to kiss royal ass. More on that in a second. Iceland had been stubbornly independent for a few hundred years when Snorri came along in the 12th century. Icelanders didn't want the power struggles and drama that accompanied the jockeying for position in the courts of kings. So they didn't have a king. Iceland was the the most democratic country in Europe at the time. It was also small, sparsely populated, lacking in several important resources, and kind of isolated in the North Atlantic, so it wouldn't be difficult for a more powerful neighbor to come in and take over if they wanted to without causing the ripples of "you're too close now, I can't have that, now we're fighting" that would come up if a country on mainland Europe got taken over. So, Icelanders were trying to keep from being absorbed by a bigger Royal Power, Snorri was trying to get the stamp of royal approval, a measure of prestige, recognition that even without a crown and throne, he was pretty much a king, or all of the above from the King of Norway. Possibly also making promises on behalf of Iceland that he was not authorized to make while doing so. Imagine Bilbo played by a Ferengi who keeps inviting himself to the Cardassian Empire, and you just know that the next time he comes back, you're going to be told you're all Cardassian now. Now do you understand why Snorri died (at a respectable old age nontheless) hiding behind a barrel of skyr in his storage room while his house was raided? But Snorri did do one great thing, he wrote the Prose Edda. This is our main source material for Norse mythology. Old Norse poetry is full of metaphors called kennings. A lot of them are references to particular stories, which in pre-Christian Scandinavia were commonly known. As the pagan Norse religion faded away in favor of Christianity, the stories that the kennings referred to were lost. Iceland was one of the last Nordic countries to adopt Christianity, and even then, it was kind of a half-hearted "we're all going to be Christian in public, but what you do in private is your own business," so the Icelanders held onto those myths longer than everyone else. Snorri was trying to get a job as a poet to the King of Norway. Snorri wrote in the old style, as was right and proper, but people in Norway wouldn't understand it because they had lost all the old stories. So first, he wrote down all the old stories so the King would properly understand how great Snorri's job interview poem was, then he wrote the actual audition poem. Snorri didn't get the job. But it really works out, because we still have the Prose Edda.