2023-11-21 09:38:15
You can see how the thing with the gods apparently ended in the church of the charming fjord bank town of Akureyri: A colorful window shows the Icelandic leader Thorgeir throwing a wooden relief of the Nordic father of the gods Odin into the Godafoss waterfall. Iceland had chosen Christianity as its state religion in the year 1000; the old gods Odin, Thor and Loki had become obsolete and were disposed of by Thorgeir.
What Thorgeir hadn’t counted on was his countrymen’s hunger for stories. And in the eyes of the Icelanders, the Nordic gods probably delivered this much better than the gentle protagonists of the New Testament. In any case, a good two hundred years after Thorgeir, the West Icelandic scholar Snorri Sturluson set out to compile the best stories of the gods that were still in circulation: how the thunder god Thor disguises himself as a girl to get back his stolen hammer, and how Odin trades one of his eyes for wisdom , Loki gets himself pregnant in mare form and gives birth to an eight-legged horse or the god Freyr falls in love with the giant girl Gertrud and sends his servant Skirnir to court behind the ring of flames that surrounds Gertrud’s home. And of course about the construction of the magnificent castle of the gods Asgard, in which the builder, a giant, was cheated out of his wages by Loki. The German researcher Walter Hansen was not left in peace by these stories, and that on that day we were in the central area, surrounded by dense swarms of insects East Iceland’s journey to the gods over impassable roads also has something to do with Hansen’s book “Asgard”, which was published in 1985. In it he describes his search for clues with the Old Norse “Edda” poems in his hand in order to find the home of the gods as well as the dwellings of the dwarves and giants and even the entrance to the realm of the dead of the dark goddess Hel. This is entertaining and highly speculative, Icelandic geology with its volcanoes and fields of solidified lava plays the main role in this puzzle. And if you want to solve it, the best place to start is at Myvatn, the mosquito lake.
#Norse #gods #Iceland