Afterword

Summary

There is no doubt that we had all heard the story in different ways, that it brought us different insights depending on our own life-experiences and central concerns.

My first aim in this book has been to establish what is typical in the various patterns of cross-gender encounter between gods or men on one side and giantesses or prophetesses on the other. It is clear that different types of encounter were consistently associated with particular gods, and that gods and men usually represent the human, civilised and rational world, while giantesses are associated with chaos, wild nature or the irrational. Beyond that, ‘meaning’ is a shifting target, changing from one period to another and capable of being adapted or contradicted to fit the particular concerns of individual poets and saga writers.

Most of the patterns I have considered may have either a god or a man as the male representative of This World, but the relationship between the god and the human being varies from one pattern to another. In those connected with the Vanir, the human protagonist is typically a ruler descended from the Vanir or the lover of a goddess who is one of the Vanir. The fullest versions of these patterns concern human rulers. The names Njõrðr ?‘Strength’, ‘Power’ and Freyr ‘Lord’ may be connected with political authority, and the Stentoften stone probably shows an ancestor being venerated as guarantor of crop fertility (see Chapter 4). These things may suggest that these gods originated as mythical ancestral kings, though probably at a very ancient period.

Myths and legends associated with Þórr produce human protagonists of two different types. The older is undoubtedly the ‘Bear's Son’ hero. He shares Þórr's features of unique physical strength and ultimate selfsacrifice against overwhelming odds, and his parallel fights against a male and a female ogre. But he differs from Þórr in that he has animal (notably bear) characteristics himself, sometimes resembles the ogre against whom he fights, and is to some extent an outsider in the society he defends.