4 - The Vanir Patterns: Ritual Origins

Summary

Four of the patterns outlined in Chapter 1 are associated with the Vanir. They are those in which:

A god or hero has a troubled marriage with a giantess.

A goddess helps her lover to gain vital information from a giantess.

A prophetess makes hostile predictions or works magic against a god or a human aristocrat.

A prophetess predicts the glorious career and eventual death of a young man who is unwilling to listen to her.

In this Chapter I shall consider the evidence for the pre-Christian origins of these patterns.

The earliest literary source for the worship of the Vanir is ch. 40 of Tacitus's Germania (AD 98), where he is describing seven northern Germanic tribes (including the Anglii – the first literary reference to the Angles, who were to give their name to the English). These peoples, he says, share a common worship of Nerthum, id est Terram matrem ‘Nerthus, that is, Mother Earth’, whose shrine is in a grove on an island. At a particular season, the goddess and her one male priest go on procession in a sacred waggon drawn by heifers. The period of the processions is a time of peace, when all iron objects are locked away. When she returns to her shrine, the idol of Nerthus and everything else associated with the processions is washed by slaves in a secluded lake, in which the slaves are then drowned.

The name Nerthus corresponds to Njõrðr, the oldest of the Vanir, but some critics have questioned the value of this account, partly because Nerthus looks grammatically masculine and partly because the manuscripts (which all date from the fifteenth century or later) have many different readings of the name: Nerthum, Nertum, Neithum, Nehertum, Necthum, Herthum, Verthum. The usually accepted stemma has three families, and readings shared by the best manuscripts of any two of them are thought likely to be correct.