The Viking Gods Are Better Than Yours
The Vikings were pretty badass.
Long haired, bearded monstrosities that came across the sea to maraud, steal and rape (safe to say they didn’t know a damn thing about chivalry).
They made cracking ships, navigated their way across the world, from the Americas to Russia and gave us that History Channel Show full of tits, blood and dodgy barnets.
The term “Viking” comes from the Old Norse “Víkingr” which means roughly “one who travels off on an adventure”.
Basically, they were just guys who went off to kill some dude and take his shit. It was only later that it became a term to refer to the Scandis of the time as a whole. Most of these raiders weren’t trained warriors, but farmers and other such regular dudes who fancied a bit of fame and fortune and bloodshed.
The British Isles has a tumultuous history with the Vikings. I mean they were kind of dicks. After their first raid on Lindisfarne, where people were pretty shocked these guys just came and killed all the priests and took their shiny Jesus-toys, some snooty monk called Alcuin wrote a letter to King Æthelred, blaming the Anglo Saxons themselves for their sinful ways — he reckoned these naughty Northmen were a plague from God.
There was a bunch more run ins, at one point the Danes were offered gold to leave England alone, so they happily took their gold, set off home in their longboats, and then came back next year for some more killing and taking — these guys really liked their gold. Almost as much as the Chinese like their money.
The men of England weren’t too happy either. When the Vikings came back as traders, started to settle and integrate with society, they found their wives were rather taken by these beastly men.
Though they’re often given the unfair label of being filthy barbarians, turns out the Vikings were quite the opposite.
These men would bathe and wash their hair at least once a week and English chicks were really digging these guys who didn’t smell so bad. Instead of showering more, they just started to tell everyone that it was sinful to wash that often — that it went against God.
Eventually the Vikings decided to become Christians, and like it does to all good things, Christianity ruined them, and they stopped being quite so badass, and a bunch of them even became French, poor sods.
The most fascinating part about the Vikings for me was their religion. Their gods were similar to the Ancient Greeks’ — they weren’t pious metaphors to be worshipped and emulated, they were capricious and mean-hearted bastards, as undependable as the humans who invented them.
Odin, the King of the Gods, was the god of both War and Poetry — how fucking badass is that? The Vikings were so taken by fame and having their great deeds recorded that they thought poetry was just as important as war.
Thor, god of War (yeah they had a few of those), Thunder and of recent Marvel fame, once lost his hammer to a giant who refused to give it back unless he could marry the lovely Freyja, goddess of love, sex and beauty.
She wasn’t so keen and swiped left.
Thor still wanted his hammer back though, and with the help of perennial trickster Loki, they decided on the most sensible plan of action — Thor dressed up as Freyja, went to the wedding ceremony (refusing to lift up his veil, playing the part of the coy bride excellently), stole back his hammer and executed every last motherfucker in the room.
These stories are absolute corkers for sure, but the best has to be their creation myth. I’m 95% sure that when Olaf or Ragnar or Beowulf Dickbeard or whoever it was came up with it and convinced the others that’s what probably happened, everyone was gurning their faces off on some grade A Nordic mushrooms.
It all starts at the beginning of time obvs, where there’s a bunch of Ice at one end of the universal nothingness called Niflheim, and a bunch of fire called Muspelheim. In fire-land there was some fire demons and fire giants, ruled by Surt. What they were doing there at the beginning of time and how they managed to bring about a monarchy before the universe had even got around to starting is anyone’s guess.
One day the Ice and Fire met in the big old gap in the middle, and from the drips of melting ice, two creatures were born. So we’ve got Ymir, first of the Jotun (aka Ice Giants, but you know that from the movie), and then we’ve got Audhumla.
Out of his sweaty pits, Ymir grew a son and a daughter; then one of his legs mated with the other (standard), and he had another son.
These guys were all breastfed by Audhulma, who incase I neglected to mention was a giant space cow.
If you were wondering what she ate (the first question that springs to mind I’m sure), she just licked on a block of salty ice.
As she was eating this totally nutritionally balanced food source, one day a human emerged from it — turns out this dude was called Buri and he becomes the first of the gods. Horny little bugger that he is, Buri bangs an Ice Giant and they have Odin and two other kids.
Odin is a bit of a brat and likes getting all the attention. He’s kinda pissed that Ymir is just popping out kids out of literally inconceivable orifices all day long, and they’re all Ice Giants, not humans like him. Again, being Viking gods they decide on the most sensible plan of action — grand-patricide and genocide.
They kill Ymir while he sleeps (sorry gramps), and most of the Ice Giants except two all drown in his blood. They didn’t have to worry about police in those days, so the three murderous musketeers dragged the body into the middle of the big gap between the Ice and Fire, and using his bits they made the world. Blood for oceans, flesh for land, teeth for mountains and hair for trees. They chucked his brain into the air to make clouds and used his skull as the sky.
Of course, being the logical creatures they were, they didn’t want the sky falling down — but luckily for them, some worms crawled out of Ymir’s remains and turned into Dwarves. Four of the maggot-dwarves were sent to the four corners of the earth to hold up the sky — the rest went underground and made cool shit like Thor’s badass hammer, Mjölnir. And thus, the world was born.
In most religions and most creation stories you can see why certain things are done or said.
They’re there to impart a moral, to warn us of a danger or encourage us towards certain behaviours.
There are only two things I’ve learned from this story.
First — don’t trust your kids, they will murder you in your sleep and make gristly statues out of your remains.
Second — the Vikings were batshit insane. Maybe even more insane than the Ancient Greeks — but that’s a story for another time.
What are your thoughts — do you know any other crazy creation stories from obscure religions? Or do you have any favourite Viking stories you want to share (you bunch of nerds)? Like, comment and share and remember to follow The Banterbury Times to fill your head with all sorts of useless information that will never come up in a pub quiz.
