Baldr, Ymir, and the Myth of the First Death in Old Norse Mythology (Part 1)

Abstract

This study examines the myth of the death of the Norse god Baldr in a comparative framework. Scholars working in the fields of comparative mythology and religion have long argued that a myth concerning the sacrificial killing of the first man is represented in the ancient and medieval literatures of several languages in the Indo-European family. In the reconstruction of this myth, the first priest sacrifices his brother, whose corpse is integrated into the structure of the cosmos, and who rules the realm of the dead. It has long been argued that Ymir’s death and dismemberment and the use of his body to construct the world in Old Norse sources is a reflex of this myth; this study argues that the myth of the death of Baldr is also a cognate version of this myth. This article is the first part of a two-part study.

Acknowledgements

I am deeply indebted to the editors and anonymous peer-reviewers of Folklore for their generous comments and guidance, which have greatly improved my arguments. I am also grateful to Richard Cole, Thomas D. Hill, and Joseph Harris for discussing these ideas at earlier stages.

Notes

1 For a detailed discussion of earlier scholarship on Baldr, see the comprehensive overview in Lindow (1997, 28–38); see also Lindow (2020).

2 See also Vennemann (1997, 464–68; 1998, 43–46).

3 Recent scholarship has called into question the existence of a separate ‘family’ of gods known as the Vanir in pre-Christian Scandinavian religion (Simek 2010; Frog and Roper 2011; Frog 2021).

4 The failed rescue of Baldr from Hel does not appear in any other source, but his death, and the finality of the event, appears to be one of the central concerns of the Baldr myth. Schier (1976, 6) points out that many of the ‘dying and rising gods’ do not, in earlier versions of their respective myths, actually rise, which undercuts the validity of De Vries’s argument.

5 It is tempting to speculate that De Vries’s approval of National Socialism and his enthusiastic cooperation with the SS during the German occupation of the Netherlands, leading to his conviction for ‘intellectual collaboration’ after the war (Hofstee 2008), may have influenced his interpretation of the Baldr myth as a ritual initiation into a warband.

6 Karl Hauck (2011) has argued that the Drei-Götter ‘three gods’ bracteates depict the piercing of Baldr by mistletoe, along with two other figures who may be Óðinn and Loki (or Hel). If this assessment is accurate, then narratives about Baldr’s death must date back to at least the fifth/sixth centuries (see also Heizmann 2007, 2012). Hauk’s theories have been controversial, and some critics remain unpersuaded. For critiques of Hauck’s theories, see Starkey (1999), Mees (2014), and Hines (2013). For a defence of Hauck’s work on the bracteate corpus, see Oehrl (2019).

7 Lincoln has recently rejected his earlier classification of this myth as Indo-European, stating that he ‘would now be more inclined to see a more fluid Eurasian continuum’ (Lincoln 2014, 245–46).

8 This theory has been widely accepted, but still has detractors (see McKinnell 2005, 11–12).

9 In Old Norse sources, jǫtnar (sg. jǫtunn) are the rivals/enemies of the Æsir; the term is usually translated as ‘giant’ in English, although not all sources attribute remarkable physical size to them.

10 Haukur Þorgeirsson (2017, 56) discusses the evidence of possible alliteration between the names Rindr and Váli, the latter of which is not actually present in the text but is supplied by editorial emendation, in Baldrs Draumar and concludes that it is weak as a dating criterion, given that Váli does not actually appear in the text.

11 Kaplan (2012) provides an illuminating analysis of the legal background for why the mistletoe cannot swear an oath on account of its youth.

12 It has often been assumed that that a lost eddic poem describing Hermóðr’s journey to Hel and the failure to weep Baldr out of Hel underlies Snorri’s narrative (De Vries 1955, 42–44), although this argument has been challenged by Abram, who sees Christian traditions of vision literature as furnishing much of Snorri’s material (Abram 2006). Abram’s evidence is persuasive and I am sympathetic to his argument; after all, a single stanza and some alliterative prose do not a lost eddic poem make. That said, it would seem odd indeed if the god whose death formed, as Magnus Olsen and Joseph Harris have argued, the etiological background for the composition of erfikvæði had lacked an elegy of his own (Harris 2006). The myth of Baldr’s death includes a number of tropes that appear in laments from other cultures, including laments for other dead gods, such as refusal to accept the death and imploring the dead to return/or bargaining with death. An argument could be made that these parallels derive from the psychological effects of grief independently reflected across different cultures (see Motz 1999).

13 The text is difficult, and I refer the reader to Harris’s extensive and illuminating body of work on this section of the Rök Stone inscription.

14 I follow the standard convention, which Harris uses in his article, of using boldface type to indicate transliterated runes.

15 Tívorr may also be cognate with Gothic *tibr, a suggested emendation for âibr, a hapax legomenon (Lehmann 1986, s.v. T.25 *tibr).

16 For recent discussions of the Hávamál episode, see Liberman (2016, 51–64).

17 Turville-Petre points out the similarities between Baldr’s and Víkarr’s deaths (Turville-Petre 1975, 118).

18 One version of Den Danske Rimkrønike has Balder declare in a rhyming monologue that he was slain by Høther, one by Otthen (ON Óðinn), and one version is missing the lines that name Balder’s killer. However, in both texts that name Balder’s killer, in the monologue preceding it Høther declares that he slew Balder, so presumably the reference to Otthen (whose monologue directly follows Balder’s in all three versions) as Balder’s killer is a scribal error (Toldberg 1958–61, 1: 16–17, ll. 393 and 405–407; 2: 7, ll. 407–408; 3: 15, ll. 393 and 405–407).

19 Compare Caesar’s comments on the continental Celtic tribes tracing descent from ‘Dis Pater’, whom Lincoln has argued is the Celtic version of the lord of the dead and ‘primordial father’ (Lincoln 1981, 227). Kuno Meyer observed similarities between Dis Pater, the Irish death deity Donn, and the Indic Yama, whose name is cognate with Ymir (Meyer 1919).

20 Clunies Ross refers to ‘the other, darker, side to this myth, which not only involves murder but killing within the family. Indeed, one might say that this deed, which is a social act though one of negative reciprocity, seals the character of the relationship between Æsir and giants thereafter. This relationship is to be exploitative of the resources of giantland for the good of divine society’ (Clunies Ross 1994, 197).

21 On folkloric evidence for Donn, see Müller-Lisowski (1948).

22 According to Turville-Petre: ‘It may not be extravagant to suppose there was yet another version of the story, in which the blind or half-blind Óðinn contrived the death of his own son. If so, Óðinn was inspired by the same motive which guided him on many other occasions. He needed his son Baldr to join him in his Kingdom, just as he needed his favourites Sigmund, Harald Wartooth, Eirík Bloodaxe and many others’ (Turville-Petre 1975, 115; see also Detter 1894, 502–504; De Vries 1955, 48–49; Harris 1994b, 2007).

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Kristen Mills

Kristen Mills is Associate Professor of Irish and Old Norse Philology at the University of Oslo, Norway. She received her BA from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA in 2005, and her MA and PhD from the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, Canada, in 2006 and 2012, respectively. She has published papers in the fields of Old Norse-Icelandic, Old and Middle Irish, Middle Welsh, and Old English literature.