AMALTHEA
According to one story she was a goat on whose milk the
infant Zeus was fed. According to another she was a nymph who owned the goat.
She was said to have a horn which was always full of whatever food or drink
anyone wanted, the Horn of Plenty (in Latin Cornu
copiae—also known as “the Cornucopia” in Latin mythology). But the Latins
said the Cornucopia was the horn of Achelous which Hercules broke off when he
conquered that river-god, who had taken the form of a bull to fight him. It was
always magically full of fruits and flowers.
The world of Norse mythology is a strange world. Asgard, the
home of the gods, is unlike any other heaven men have dreamed of. No radiancy of
joy is in it, no assurance of bliss. It is a grave and solemn place, over which
hangs the threat of an inevitable doom. The gods know that a day will come when
they will be destroyed. Sometime they will meet their enemies and go down
beneath them to defeat and death. Asgard will fall in ruins. The cause the
forces of good are fighting to defend against the forces of evil is hopeless.
Nevertheless, the gods will fight for it to the end.
Necessarily the same is true of humanity. If the gods are
finally helpless before evil, men and women must be more so. The heroes and
heroines of the early stories face disaster. They know that they cannot save
themselves, not by any courage or endurance or great deed. Even so, they do not
yield. They die resisting. A brave death entitles them—at least the heroes—to a
seat in Valhalla, one of the halls in Asgard, but there
too they must look forward to final defeat and destruction. In the last battle
between good and evil they will fight on the side of the gods and die with
them.
This is the conception of life which underlies the Norse
religion, as somber a conception as the mind of man has ever given birth to. The
only sustaining support possible for the human spirit, the one pure unsullied
good men can hope to attain, is heroism; and heroism depends on lost causes. The
hero can prove what he is only by dying. The power of good is shown not by
triumphantly conquering evil, but by continuing to resist evil while facing
certain defeat.
Such an attitude toward life seems at first sight fatalistic,
but actually the decrees of an inexorable fate played no more part in the
Norseman’s scheme of existence than predestination did in St. Paul’s or in that
of his militant Protestant followers, and for precisely the same reason.
Although the Norse hero was doomed if he did not yield, he could choose between
yielding or dying. The decision was in his own hands. Even more than that. A
heroic death, like a martyr’s death, is not a defeat, but a triumph. The hero in
one of the Norse stories who laughs aloud while his foes cut his heart out of
his living flesh shows himself superior to his conquerors. He says to them, in
effect, You can do nothing to me because I do not care what you do. They kill
him, but he dies undefeated.
This is stern stuff for humanity to live by, as stern in its
totally different way as the Sermon on the Mount, but the easy way has never in
the long run commanded the allegiance of mankind. Like the early Christians, the
Norsemen measured their life by heroic standards. The
Christian, however, looked forward to a heaven of eternal joy. The Norseman did
not. But it would appear that for unknown centuries, until the Christian
missionaries came, heroism was enough.
The poets of the Norse mythology, who saw that victory was
possible in death and that courage was never defeated, are the only spokesmen
for the belief of the whole great Teutonic race—of which England is a part, and
ourselves through the first settlers in America. Everywhere else in northwestern
Europe the early records, the traditions, the songs and stories, were
obliterated by the priests of Christianity, who felt a bitter hatred for the
paganism they had come to destroy. It is extraordinary how clean a sweep they
were able to make. A few bits survived: Beowulf in
England, the Nibelungenlied in Germany, and some stray
fragments here and there. But if it were not for the two Icelandic Eddas we
should know practically nothing of the religion which molded the race to which
we belong. In Iceland, naturally by its position the last northern country to be
Christianized, the missionaries seem to have been gentler, or, perhaps, they had
less influence. Latin did not drive Norse out as the literary tongue. The people
still told the old stories in the common speech, and some of them were written
down, although by whom or when we do not know. The oldest manuscript of the
Elder Edda is dated at about 1300, three hundred years
after the Christians arrived, but the poems it is made up of are purely pagan
and adjudged by all scholars to be very old. The Younger
Edda, in prose, was written down by one Snorri Sturluson in the last part
of the twelfth century. The chief part of it is a
technical treatise on how to write poetry, but it also contains some prehistoric
mythological material which is not in the Elder
Edda.
The Elder Edda is much the more
important of the two. It is made up of separate poems, often about the same
story, but never connected with each other. The material for a great epic is
there, as great as the Iliad, perhaps even greater,
but no poet came to work it over as Homer did the early stories which preceded
the Iliad. There was no man of genius in the Northland
to weld the poems into a whole and make it a thing of beauty and power; no one
even to discard the crude and the commonplace and cut out the childish and
wearisome repetitions. There are lists of names in the Edda which sometimes run on unbroken for pages. Nevertheless
the somber grandeur of the stories comes through in spite of the style. Perhaps
no one should speak of “the style” who cannot read ancient Norse; but all the
translations are so alike in being singularly awkward and involved that one
cannot but suspect the original of being responsible, at least in part. The
poets of the Elder Edda seem to have had conceptions
greater than their skill to put them into words. Many of the stories are
splendid. There are none to equal them in Greek mythology, except those retold
by the tragic poets. All the best Northern tales are tragic, about men and women
who go steadfastly forward to meet death, often deliberately choose it, even
plan it long beforehand. The only light in the darkness is heroism.
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