So macho? Why we’ve got the Norse myths wrong
In this age of gender fluidity, the tales of Scandinavian gods and goddesses feel surprisingly modern, says Alex Diggins
Mount Olympus has been stormed by #MeToo. From Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls to Madeline Miller’s Circe, feminist retellings of Greek myths are the publishing phenomenon that has launched a thousand bestsellers. The latest is Jennifer Saint’s Ariadne, which tells the story of Theseus and the Minotaur from the perspective of the abandoned Cretan princess.
But writers in search of femaledriven stories should look northwards. At first blush, Norse mythology seems an unpromising prospect for this approach. In many depictions, Asgard – the home of the Norse gods – resembles a Village People reunion: it’s a fantasia of in-your-face biceps, natty leather armour and vigorous moustaches. Yet this macho vision is not borne out by the historical record – or by the literature.
Unlike in Greek and Roman mythology, the Norse gods and goddesses are not narcissistic superbeings whose back-stabbing and catfights propel the action. Instead, Asgard is a fragile place, under continual threat. Norse deities are not immortal – in fact, most die in Ragnarök, a catastrophe at the end of time when battles, floods and other natural disasters engulf their world. And Asgard is far from patriarchal. The goddesses have their own sanctuary, Vingolf, and they are “no less sacred, nor are they less powerful”. The chief goddess, Freyja, has her own hall called Folkvangar, Warrior’s Fields, and she shares equally the souls of fallen heroes with Odin, the leader of the gods.
Norse mythology also pre-empts current debates about the role of men and women, and whether gender is determined by biological sex. A key figure in these stories is Loki, a flickering, trickster character whose intelligence, inexhaustible appetites and mischief-making spark many of the gods’ dilemmas – but also provide their solutions. In one episode, Loki shape-shifts into a mare to seduce a stallion that is helping a frost giant build a wall around Asgard. The result of their coupling is a colt which grows to become Odin’s eight-legged horse, Sleipnir. But Loki is not the only Asgardian who slips between genders: Odin’s son Thor, the gods’ butchest enforcer who commands thunder and lighting, dresses as a woman to retrieve his hammer, Mjölnir, from the frost giants who have stolen it. Loki rigs him out in bridal attire and, as part of a wedding ceremony, asks the giants to lay Thor’s hammer in his lap. Make of the symbolism what you will.
These myths grew out of the pagan beliefs of Viking-age Scandinavia. They were part of an oral storytelling tradition, performed by bards called skalds at feasts and other celebrations. Yet most were written down after Christianity arrived in Scandinavia, around 1000AD. The compilers of these stories, therefore, looked on them as already archaic. They viewed the gods and heroes who stalked through them with a combination of awe and spiritual schadenfreude: after all, no matter how glorious their achievements, these characters were still destined for hell. Norse myths come down to us, then, strained through centuries of medieval, Christian prejudices about the place of women.
That said, the literature tells us that it was a rigidly stratified world; complex mechanisms of fealty, honour and blood feuds overlapped like plate armour. And the place of women was well defined. Though there are occasional examples of female chieftains (which was an elected, not hereditary, rank), women had no legal standing in the Althing, the decisionmaking assembly.
But this simplified picture disguises the power that women had in Viking society. There were no towns or cities, just scattered homesteads with sometimes hundreds of inhabitants. And, while the men were away fishing or fighting, women ran these complex communities. In addition, the main export of Scandinavian society was homespun wool, and its creation was a female responsibility. This material had many uses, including in sails, tents and sacking – the northern world was built on the labour of women. “Although this society was not an equal one, women had power in ways we’re only just beginning to realise,” says Dr Elizabeth Ashman Rose, reader in Scandinavian history at the University of Cambridge.
So how does an apparently patriarchal society produce myths which have more cross-dressing and gender-bending than a Christmas panto? For centuries, Scandinavian societies lived alongside the indigenous Sámi peoples, who practised a form of shamanistic magic and, during the Viking period, dwelt much further south than they do now. The Sámi believed their shamans crossed to the spirit world in the form of animals; during these rituals, hierarchies between men, women and beasts blurred. And the sagas bear the marks of this culture exchange, argues Dr Rose. “The literature brings together two cultures with different ideas about gender roles and femininity.”
Popular culture is beginning to respond to the more progressive elements of Norse mythology. The next Marvel film to feature Thor, Thor: Love and Thunder, due out in 2022, will star Natalie Portman as the titular thunder god(dess). It will follow a comic book storyline which sees Thor – played by Australian actor Chris Hemsworth with rough-hewn hunkiness – deemed unworthy to wield his hammer. Mjölnir is then passed to his old flame, Jane Foster (Portman), who must save Asgard from a cosmic threat. A similarly empowering narrative plays out in murkier hues in the popular video game Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice which features a female warrior battling her way through the world of the dead to rescue the soul of her dead lover
– a neat inversion of the Orpheus myth.
And then there’s a new translation of Beowulf, published in 2020 by the fantasy novelist Maria Dahvana Headley. Unlike the other sources of Norse myth, the Beowulf poem was written down in Old English, not Icelandic. Yet it deals with recognisably the same world: a place of honour and violence whose borders are shadowed by monsters, haunted by existential collapse. Headley’s translation spotlights the female characters and recasts the poem as an uncertain attempt to shore up masculinity. Her verse has a swaggering, street-smart bite: Beowulf is a “bro/hardcore in his helmet” who, in the poem’s rap-battle atmosphere, spits boasts not bars.
In her version, Grendel’s mother is not monstrous. Instead, she’s a highly capable warrior who, in accordance with the poem’s honour-bound conception of justice, seeks vengeance for the murder of her child. “You get a critical mass of pain in the poem,” argues Headley. “You see lots of women grieving for their sons. Marginalised people of all stripes have been depicted as monsters across generations of storytelling. It’s time to look differently at these canonical texts.”
One translation, of course, is not indicative of a trend. But there is a wealth of female stories to be unearthed in Norse mythology, which is a stranger place than conventional takes on it allow for. And new interpretations help its treasures gleam all the brighter. Besides, the sight of Natalie Portman lunking wrong-uns with a lightningsummoning hammer has got to be worth the price of admission.
Thor, the gods’ butchest enforcer, dresses as a woman to retrieve his hammer