6 - The Goddess and Her Lover

Summary

Æ trúði Óttarr á ásynior.

‘Óttarr always trusted in goddesses.’

Hyndluljóð 10,7–8

When we turn to myths associated with goddesses of the Vanir type, the male protagonist is almost unavoidably a human ruler. Simple inversion of the god's marriage with a giantess would have been intolerable, since it would have implied the subjection of a divine wife to a giant husband and her removal to a frozen, infertile giant world. This would have been to give away the principle of fertility to the forces of chaos; it is a constant desire of the giants, but one which the gods must at all costs resist (see Chapter 1, and as Clunies Ross's idea of ‘negative reciprocity’, Chapter 2).

1. Þorgerðr Hõlgabrúðr

The role of priest to the goddess was probably the hereditary right of successive rulers, and this may provide an explanation for the use of gubber (see Chapter 4). One goddess whose cult flourished in western Norway and southern Iceland in the tenth century is Þorgerðr Hõlgabrúðr, who is mentioned in a variety of prose sources.

According to Skáldskaparmál, she was the daughter of Hõlgi, after whom Hálogaland was named; they both received sacrifice, and Hõlgi's mound was made of alternate layers of gold and silver (which were sacrificial offerings) and of earth and stone. A verse is then cited in which Skúli Þorsteinsson (c. 1000) calls gold and silver Hõlga haugþõk ‘thatch of Hõlgi's mound’. This sounds like a mythicised account of the use of gubber as offerings. There may be another allusion to Þorgerðr in Tindr Hallkelsson's Hákonardrápa 1, where Hákon's battle with the Jómsvíkingar (c. 986) is said to be ‘not as if the beautiful gims Gerðr (“jewel's Gerðr”) made a bed for the jarl in her arms’; however, this may be no more than a peculiarly apt woman-kenning.

In Njáls saga Víga-Hrappr enters the temple owned by Hákon jarl while the earl is away, strips the idols of Þórr, Þorgerðr and her sister Irpa, plunders their gold rings and Þorgerðr's headdress, and sets the temple on fire. When the jarl returns, he says that the man who has done this will never get to Valhõll; he goes off by himself, falls on his knees and covers his eyes.