With Yuletide come and gone, I can hopefully finally settle back to a reasonable writing routine. Winter is a time of stillness and repose, or at least to my mind, it should be. True, there are always family obligations and a never-ending litany of things that must be done, but it invites the mind to turn inward. As I looked out upon the – as yet- – snowless landscape it struck me that winter, like Hel, the old Norse goddess of the underworld, strips away all illusions. Once the trees lay bare of their garment of leaves and the grass lies dormant, beaten down and dead, you can see the landscape for what it truly is. The trees stand against a winter sky like bones. There is no greenery to give them flesh as mother earth lies dormant for another season. Would that all could be so simple, with illusions stripped away and lies seen for what they are. Death is like that. Like winter it gives no illusions and like winter it gives dormancy and a much- needed rest to the earth. We are reminded of Hel’s lessons. Impermanence. Fate. Sacrifice. Happiness is nothing without pain. Summer is made more brilliant because of winter. Life more beautiful because of death.
Such is the developing theme in my novel the working title of which thus far is The Bone Goddess. The Bone Goddess has many themes in many cultures. In the Slavic culture which is the more prevalent one in my third book of the Varangian Chronicles, she is Mara, a deity much like the Norse Hel. She later became the folk character Baba Yaga, best known as a witch tho lives on a house with stilts of gigantic chicken legs and reminds us of the witch in the German folk tale, Hansel and Gretel. We are afraid of characters like Baba Yaga or Hel, because they remind us of our own mortality. We shy away from the lessons she teaches us, even the one that in spite of our own mortality, there is really no death. All things cycle into new life. The animal that dies in the forest decays and becomes part of the soil, feeding the insects and the crows in the process. If all life is energy and energy is a never ending recycling process and constant refeeding upon itself, then nothing every truly dies that does not become new energy.
This concept was well understood by our pre-Christian ancestors as the time of the solstice or Yule was a celebration of the death of the sun and the eventual return of longer days and rebirth. One of the few stories told of Hel embodies this. When jealous Loki sought the destruction of Odin’s son Baldur (a representation of the sun) he came upon a means of trickery to do so. Baldur began to have dreams of his impending death and so his mother, Frigg went throughout the earth to make all things living and inanimate swear not to hurt her son. Only the mistletoe had failed to swear an oath but Frigg thought it too small and of little consequence to swear an oath. Delighted that to find that he was impervious to all weapons and poisons, the gods began to throw darts and weapons at him and he was unharmed by all. But Loki, dark-souled and jealous, convinced Baldur’s blind brother Hod to throw a dart made of mistletoe at Baldur and so caused his death. The legend is that Friggs’ tears turned to the white berries of the mistletoe as a symbol of her love for him. She forgave the plant and decreed it should be a symbol of love and friendship, which is why we have the tradition of kissing under the mistletoe to this day at Christmastime. When Baldur was consigned to the realm of Hel, Helheim, Hermod, another son of Odin made the journey down to the roots of the world Tree to implore his release. It is a mark of the respect that Hel held for Odin that she was willing to concede on the condition that all things in the world must weep for him. All agreed, except for a giantess named Þökk , really Loki in disguise. And so Hel kept her prestigious guest. The story has a ring of similarity to it with the Greek story of Hades and his capture of Demeter’s daughter Persephone who was obliged to stay in the underworld a month for every pomegranate seed she had eaten. Both stories epitomize the dark days of winter and the release of the deity who brings back the sun. How much this story must have resonated with our early ancestors who longed for the return of the sun as we do today. Only then it also meant an ending to days of winter famine and freezing. We cannot truly appreciate in our time of modern heating and grocery stores the hard bitterness of winter for our Northern ancestors. And no time was more bitter and freezing for the Europeans than 536 CE, which will be the subject of my next blog post.
In the meantime, my friends, keep warm, wherever you are and be sure to ring in the new year with joy and friendship!