Norse mythology survives in scraps: a few Icelandic manuscripts, some runic inscriptions, odd lines quoted from poems that are otherwise lost. Wagner, Sigur Rós, Enslaved and Heilung have each found their own way of dealing with what is missing.
On 22 June 1970 Led Zeppelin played Laugardalshöll in Reykjavík as part of the city’s Arts Festival, to a crowd of around 5,000. The visit is said to have sparked “Immigrant Song”, which opened Led Zeppelin III that October with a raider’s-eye view of the Viking North. It is a thrilling piece of romance, and for plenty of us it was the first Norse anything we ever heard.
Greek myth tends to arrive through school, already tidied into a canon. Norse myth comes in pieces, most of it written down in Iceland more than two centuries after the island’s conversion around the year 1000: Snorri Sturluson’s handbook for poets around 1220, the poems of the Codex Regius around 1270. Anyone who sets this material to music has to decide what to do with the holes.
Wagner’s Icelandic workshop
Richard Wagner‘s answer was to fill every hole himself. Der Ring des Nibelungen is usually filed under German legend, after the medieval Nibelungenlied. Yet Árni Björnsson, whose Wagner and the Volsungs (Viking Society, 2003) follows the cycle scene by scene, reckons that about eighty per cent of the motifs Wagner borrowed come only from Old Icelandic writing and about five per cent only from German sources, with the rest found in both. Wagner said he read the Eddas and Völsunga saga in 1847–48, mostly in German translation, and he went back to the myths when Karl Simrock’s new translation of both Eddas appeared in 1851.
The borrowings are everywhere once you look. In ‘Das Rheingold’ the giants have built the gods a fortress and demand the goddess Freia as payment, a bargain struck on Loge’s advice. In Snorri’s Gylfaginning (chapter 42 in Arthur Brodeur’s 1916 translation) a builder offers to fortify the gods’ home in three seasons for Freyja, plus the sun and moon, and it is on Loki’s advice that the gods let him use his stallion, the help that very nearly wins him Freyja. Wagner’s Loge is Loki welded to Logi, the figure in Snorri’s Thor story who beats Loki in an eating contest because he is fire itself. In Siegfried, the disguised Wotan stakes his head on a question game with the dwarf Mime, a scene Björnsson traces to the Eddic poem Vafþrúðnismál, where Odin and a giant wager their heads on their wisdom (stanza 19 in Henry Adams Bellows’s 1923 translation). Even the potion that makes Siegfried forget Brünnhilde comes, Björnsson notes, from Völsunga saga alone. The Nibelungenlied lent many names, in German forms, but hardly any episodes outside the closing stretch of Götterdämmerung, and most of those also turn up in the Old Norse Thidreks saga.
Wagner never hid his reading, but he joined the pieces so smoothly that the seams disappeared. For many listeners since, his version simply is Norse myth.
An Edda from the seventeenth century
Sigur Rós came at the problem from the other side. In 2002, for the Reykjavík Arts Festival (the same festival that had brought Led Zeppelin over in 1970), the band made Odin’s Raven Magic with Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson, María Huld Markan Sigfúsdóttir and Steindór Andersen, a fisherman and one of the great performers of rímur, Iceland’s chanted narrative verse. The sculptor Páll Guðmundsson built them a marimba of stone. A live recording made in Paris finally came out on 4 December 2020, on Krunk through Warner Classics.
Their text, Hrafnagaldur Óðins, looks like an Eddic poem and was long printed as one. In 26 stanzas Odin, troubled by omens, sends Heimdallr, Loki and Bragi to question the goddess Iðunn about the future; she can only weep, the gods feast and go to bed, and at daybreak Heimdallr starts to blow his horn. Editors were already suspicious in the 1840s, and in 1867 the Norwegian scholar Sophus Bugge called it a learned imitation, no older than the seventeenth century. That became the general view. Then, in April 2002, the very spring Sigur Rós first performed the piece, Jónas Kristjánsson argued in the newspaper Morgunblaðið that it was a fourteenth-century poem after all.
Annette Lassen, who had once made the case for a medieval date herself, tipped the balance back with her 2011 edition of the poem. It contains a proverb, roughly “night brings counsel” (my paraphrase), that no medieval Icelandic text records and that, she argues, reached Iceland through Erasmus’s Adagia, first printed in Paris in 1500. She puts the poem, probably, in the middle of the seventeenth century and in the learned circle of Brynjólfur Sveinsson, bishop of Skálholt, who had acquired the Codex Regius in 1643. A metrical study by Haukur Þorgeirsson independently points to the same century, and reviewing the edition in The Medieval Review, Jonas Wellendorf judged her case conclusive. What Sigur Rós set, then, is a fan’s response to the Eddas, most likely written in the excitement that followed the manuscript’s rediscovery. A rímur voice suits it well: the chanting tradition began in the Middle Ages and was still thriving when the poem was written. Nor was the poem ever easy listening: Lassen cites an old report that the poet Eiríkur Hallsson (1614–1698) spent ten years on it and gave up, having understood only a little.
A god made of scraps
That dawn horn is where Enslaved begin. Heimdal (Nuclear Blast, 3 March 2023), the Bergen band’s sixteenth album, opens with lapping water and a horn blown by Wardruna’s Eilif Gundersen on a replica of a 3,000-year-old bronze horn found in a Danish bog. Heimdallr has been with the band from the start: Grutle Kjellson told Prog that a song named after him was on a 1992 demo before it reappeared on their 1994 debut, Vikingligr Veldi.
He is a god assembled from fragments. Snorri (Gylfaginning, chapter 27) calls him the White God, son of nine sisters, a watchman who needs less sleep than a bird and “hears how grass grows on the earth or wool on sheep” (Brodeur). For the nine mothers Snorri quotes two lines from a lost poem, Heimdalargaldr, which also told, he says elsewhere, how Heimdallr was pierced by a man’s head; that story is gone. A stanza of Hyndluljóð names nine giantesses who bore a mighty god, usually taken to be him (stanzas 37–38, Bellows). In Þrymskviða he is the “whitest of the gods” who suggests dressing Thor as a bride (stanza 14, Bellows). At Ragnarök, Snorri says, he and Loki kill each other.
Enslaved do not pretend otherwise. Ivar Bjørnson told Prog that having so little to go on made for “a more liberal way” of writing, and he has likened the project to going down a rabbit hole. Much of the album, he said in comments on Nuclear Blast’s album page, rests on a theory that Heimdallr becomes the chief god after Ragnarök, which no medieval text states and Snorri’s mutual killing rather contradicts. Calling him the god of dawn, as Bjørnson does, is likewise a modern reading. And the bronze horn is far older than any poem about Heimdallr; Kjellson described its sound as reconnecting with an “unknown past”. Unknown is the honest word. This is speculation offered as speculation, which is exactly what the gaps invite.
Words from the ground
Heilung, the trio of Kai Uwe Faust, Christopher Juul and Maria Franz, skip the stories altogether. The notes to their debut, Ofnir (self-released in 2015, later reissued by Season of Mist), say its lyrics contain original texts from rune stones, spear shafts, amulets and other artefacts. In a 2024 article for the journal Ensovoort, Burgert Senekal set out to trace every line of its song “In Maidjan”. It opens with a call taken from the Negau helmet B, found in Slovenia in 1811 and inscribed in an Etruscan alphabet: often counted the oldest written Germanic text, though estimates of its date run from the late fourth century BCE to the early first century CE. Then come words from an amulet, a scabbard fitting, a comb, gold pendants and the Eggja stone in Norway, averaging around 350 CE by Senekal’s count. One line invoking Wodan matches no inscription he could find, and the chanted rune names are reconstructions.
Heilung leave all of it untranslated. In an interview quoted by Senekal, Juul said the band does not give exact translations because scholars are still debating them. Where Wagner melted his fragments into one story, Heilung keep theirs as fragments: words that someone once cut into an object, whose meaning is still partly out of reach.
Showing the seams
None of these is the authentic approach, because Norse myth has always reached us second-hand; Snorri was already arranging and explaining in the 1220s. What makes these records last, where so much Viking décor doesn’t, is how openly they work. Sigur Rós gave a seventeenth-century poem a voice from a living tradition. Enslaved say plainly when they are guessing. Heilung won’t translate what nobody can fully read. The gaps in the sources are part of the story, and the best of this music lets you hear them.
Sigur Rós: Website / Instagram / Facebook / Bandcamp
Enslaved: Website / Instagram / Facebook / Bandcamp
Heilung: Website / Instagram / Facebook / Bandcamp
Articles by Calogero Nicosia
Header Image: The Negau helmet B and its inscription, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
Photo: Peter1936F, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International
Calogero Nicosia writes Mythic Harmonies, an independent site on Norse mythology that sets the medieval sources beside their modern retellings. His guide to Heimdall, the watchman god with nine mothers, is at https://www.mythic-harmonies.com/norse-mythology/heimdall-gjallarhorn-meaning-viking-war-horn/
Keep up to date with all new content on Joyzine via our
Instagram | Facebook | Bluesky | Mailing List