Viking Goddesses

By E. Kaman, Éva Pápes and Eva Lokay

Viking Goddesses, the second edition of the first volume of the "Forbidden Knowledge" series, offers a captivating exploration of Norse mythology, with a focus on powerful women. Part I introduces the enigmatic Völur, and through the tales of Freyja, Gullveig, and Menglöð, readers are transported to a world where goddesses wield immense influence.
Then the book delves into the age of the Nornir, weavers of fate, and introduces readers to Valkyries, mistresses of death, and swan maidens. Finally, we meet the revered Dísir. Part II examines the transition of divine women into earthly affairs, revealing intriguing changes within Norse society. Lastly, the book provides valuable appendices for those eager to discover more about Norse language and literature. With over 60 illustrations enriching the narrative, "Viking Goddesses" offers an engaging journey into the captivating realm of Norse mythology and the enduring legacy of its female figures.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lokay
• Release date: Apr 19, 2024
• ISBN: 9781999036638

Book preview

E. Kaman – Éva Pápes

Viking Goddesses

Forbidden Knowledge

Book One

Translated by Rachel Maltese

Publishers Logo

Lokay

2024

ISBN number: 978-1-9990366-3-8

2nd edition, revised and updated

© Kaman – Pápes 2024

All rights reserved. ©

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or manual, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system without written permission from the publisher.

Cover graphic design and illustrations: Eva Lokay

Book designer: Ibolya Kálmán

Publisher: Lokay

Distributor: Publishdrive

Authors’ website: vikingseeress.com

Table of Contents

Preface

Chronicles and Chroniclers

The Eddas

Lady Sun

Lady Moon

Part I: The First Women of the Icy North

The Age of the Völur

The Beginning and the End

Hyndla

The Wakened Völva

The Age of Goddesses

Menglöð – The Realm

Freyja – The Woman

Gullveig – The War

The Age of the Nornir

The Genesis of Humankind

Beneath the World Tree

The Cloth of Fate

The Age of the Valkyries

Mistresses of Death

Swan Maidens

The Dísir

Part II: The Age of Transition

The Transformation of the Völur

Goddesses sans Thrones

After Menglöð

Twins and Incest

Divine Nornir on Earth

Variations on the Valkyries

Óðin’s Women

The Serving Girls

The Pseudo-Valkyries

Part III: The Vision from the Past

Vestiges of the Realm of Women

Women’s World, Men’s World

Women’s Legacy

Appendices

Old Norse Language, Words and Texts

The Alphabet

Old Norse Words

Kennings

Galdralag

Translation

Family Names

Old Norse Words and Texts

Silence I bid

Tell me, Fjölsviðr

A small sword will be ready

"The Æsir were assembled"

Óðin hurled

There are three pure sisters

She remembers the war

Playing on the lawn

Thence came maidens

She saw Valkyries

Various Parts of the Darraðarljóð

She was called Heiði

Gunnlöð gave me drink

The Old Norse literature

Certain Songs of the Poetic Edda Related to the Gods

Völuspá

Hávamál

Vafþrúðnismál

Grímnismál

Skírnismál (För Skírnis)

Hárbarðsljóð

Hymiskviða

Lokasenna

Þrymskviða (Hamarsheimt)

Alvíssmál

Baldrs draumar (Vegtamskviða)

Rígsþula (Rígsmál)

Hyndluljóð & Völuspá hin skamma

Gróttasöngr

Svipdagsmál

Darraðarljóð

Hrafnagaldr Óðins (Forspjallsljóð)

Snorri Sturluson: Prose Edda (a Brief Overview)

Prologue

Gylfaginning

Skáldskaparmál

Nafnaþulur

Háttatal

Skáldatal

Snorri Sturluson: Heimskringla

Historical writings and Collections

Íslendingabók – Book of Icelanders

Landnámabók – Book of Settlements

Hauksbók – Haukr’s Book

Flateyjarbók – The Book of Flat Island

Miscellaneous additions

Baugr and the Viking Marriage

Spinning and Weaving

The Tree that Reached the Sky

The Mandorla

Venuses

Geography Primer

Our Cover Rune

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Bibliography

Book references

Manuscript references

Old Norse Text References

Web references

List of Illustrations

Preface

In Western culture, light—or illumination—is generally linked to good, and darkness to evil. This book is one of a series dealing with the dark side of knowledge. In this book, however, the word dark is used with different connotations. To us, dark knowledge is not dark because it is evil, but because it is not governed first and foremost by principles of transparency, order, rationality, or logic. Given the prodigious emotional energy it represents, its effects cannot be assessed or quantified, nor can it be described by scientific means. Still, it has a place among the forces that define our lives.

An alternate name for it might be knowledge of the night, as is appears in forms akin to those of dreams, visions, or premonitions, its origins residing in that elusive space that defies any attempt at definition.

Our ancestors conceived of their environment as an overarching whole, of which they themselves were part. To protect themselves from the thousands of hazards this environment harboured required acutely honed senses—in many cases beyond those afforded by their physical beings— as indeed, their very survival depended on them.

When approached by a person of evil intent, they needed to detect the danger this presented, as well as to perceive the wishes of powers exterior and superior to them. Living in perfect communion with nature, they were constantly aware of—and constantly subordinated themselves to—the laws that guided the universe, which they took pains never to violate, and on which they frequently sought instruction.

Those who supplied this information were women with the ability to hear, or even to summon this unseen world, who served as bridges to it, who formed the first mediators between humanity and the gods. Women capable of interpreting the dark side and harnessing its forces became the first wise seeresses, healers, venerated—even fearsome—priestesses, oracles who divined the future from a state of ecstasy.

And the reason it was to women, and not men that this fell was that the primary experience prompting humanity to reflect upon things beyond mere survival was the mystery of birth, a process in which men, at that time, had no clearly defined role.

Over time, as human beings began gradually to separate their own egos from those of others, this consciousness of instinct, of communal motion, began to break down. A time came when individual personalities began to emerge and individual courses took their beginnings, in which humans found themselves falling away from the former cohesive whole. The process occurred in different areas of the world at different times and in different ways, and is still underway today—indeed, many cultures on the planet still look to communal awareness as their principal guiding power.

Around the beginning of the 17th century, there commenced in Europe a set of sweeping changes centered around the principles of logic, rationality, and systematic thinking. The rise of the individual reached its summit in the wake of Renaissance humanist self-definition in a period known as the Enlightenment.

There, rationalism became the definitive principle around which humankind’s sense of the world was to be organized; science, repeatable experiments, documented exposition, and the distillation of natural laws into written symbols the manner in which our surroundings were to be described. The term Enlightenment itself is a pregnant one that encapsulates our association of light, illumination, and organization with all that is good and desirable, and relegation of all that belongs to the night and the dark to the kingdom of evil.

The communal culture of natural man and concomitant knowledge of the extranatural were replaced by a world in which humans conceived of themselves as individuals, operating under their own order with their own systems and laws. Not surprisingly, therefore, magic was expelled from Western culture as a mode for interpreting that world.

Since things belonging to the dark side of knowledge cannot be examined using laboratory methods, their workings being non-reproducible, they were pronounced non-existent, relegated to the status of superstition or falsehood, marked for extermination in the interest of humanity. While all of this was underway, those who continued to channel communal knowledge and to perceive the world in the manner of natural humankind were pushed to the fringes of society.

It is a mentality that can be traced back as far as the early Middle Ages, and one that would prompt what are now commonly known as the witch hunts. Knowledge derived from the dark and the night was irreconcilable with the systems of norms that dominated societies led by men, as Western society had clearly become. It is no coincidence, therefore, that it was chiefly women who fell victim to the purge which, led by the Christian Church, sought to expunge the old knowledge from human memory. Though by this time, ironically enough, the forces presumed to underpin the dark knowledge may long have faded, still, it is clear that a transition from old age to new did occur.

As a result, the preternatural consciousness passed into oblivion, the citizens of Western culture left nature behind with ringing finality, and the dark knowledge was thenceforward forbidden. Under the persecution that followed, the shamans, priestesses, soul seers, and sorceresses who possessed it grew so weak in both its theory and its practice that they ceased to have any true bearing on the thought processes that shaped the world about them.

At the same time, weakened though it was, their extranatural awareness did not disappear entirely. In the tales of simple rural folk, God and Saint Peter visited homes and worked wonders in much the same way the pagan gods had before them. The preternatural perception, too, has lived on in the forces—hidden or openly displayed—of the hagiographies, rituals, and ecstatic practices of various religions, in the visions of saints and prophets, and, of course, in art, where much inspiration has been drawn from the domain of the night.

On the scale of day-to-day life, extranatural awareness is most clearly palpable in the perceptions of women, who faithfully preserve their own part in all this—in the ecstasies of sexuality, in the images of dreams and visions, in ordinary hunches, and in the type of thinking commonly shrugged off as I just know.

The dark realm functions in terms less of what one sees than what one feels, such that its consequences and outcomes simply materialize, and each course of action arises without recourse to visible planning or preparation. The event of suddenly knowing something is neither instinct, nor intuition, as it is frequently named. Of course, we are by no means claiming that people with this ability can put their finger on any knowledge at any time. Rather, the ability to suddenly just know is no more a given than is knowledge of the rational sort: in other words, both skills require a certain degree of honing.

A good example of how the dark side functions can be found in story that precedes the publication of this book and, indeed, of the entire Forbidden Knowledge series:

My co-author and I have known each other and been friends for over forty years, yet in all that time, it never occurred to us that we might someday write a book together. No plans were ever made, no words exchanged on the subject, rather, fate carried us to opposite ends of the earth, to countries a full 10,000 km apart.

Fortunately, with the help of the Internet, we were able to sustain our relationship, and during one conversation, one of us expressed the thought that certain old folk tales, such as Sleeping Beauty, were originally quite different than is commonly remembered today. At this, the other requested the source of the information, later going so far as to look into the matter and discovering that the earlier tale of Briar Rose was indeed quite different.

And it was here that the underlying presence of the dark side first became apparent. In some nebulous way, the subconscious cooperation between our two minds gave direction to what had previously been no more than a topic of mutual interest, and we began consciously to seek out folk stories featuring women who had fallen asleep in the manner of Sleeping Beauty.

Again thanks to the Internet, it was not long before we had gathered together more than twenty such stories from every corner of the globe, including many early versions of known tales that differed substantially from the way they are typically told today. One of these was the story of Brynhild, the Old Norse Valkyrie, which caught our interest for its account of the protagonist’s having slept within a ring of fire. Our immediate feeling was that Brynhild’s sleep stood out from the others, in part because the story was rather a myth than a tale, but also for its distinctive quality in general.

And here again, the dark side made its presence felt: the two of us began writing a book together, not because we had discussed it or made prior plans, but because all at once we just knew that this is what we had to do. There was no question. One day one of us sat down and started writing, and the other did the same. No consultation ever took place as to division of labour: each of us knew what our part would be. Not once did we deliberate as to how to progress, nor set any deadlines: each of us covered her own individual area, and somehow we just knew which of us was capable of producing which sections of the text.

The book we were in the process of writing addressed the topic of sleeping women—Briar Rose and the rest. And as our work unfolded, so did something else: the exciting image of an entire panoply of phenomena looming behind the dream-laden slumber of fairy-tale women. Depth, sleep, prolonged submersion in the darkness of existence; this and much more beckoned to us to come find out why these women slept and what went on when they did. What was going on as they moved into this sunken state that then changed their lives?

As we made headway with our writing, we began to understand that Brynhild, simply, did not fit the same mould as the rest, so much so that in the end, we agreed to leave her out. The initial lines of our book Sleeping Women were put to paper in January of 2017, and by mid-May, we were already half-finished. At this point, for some reason we never could explain, we put the incomplete book aside and began looking exclusively into the myth of Brynhild, whereby it soon became clear that the translations available to us did not yield the story content we needed to conduct our analysis.

To obtain it, it became necessary to translate the Völsunga Saga, which includes the story of Brynhild, from the original; and to do this required that one of us learn Old Icelandic to the appropriate level. By September of 2017, the translation was ready, and the two of us found ourselves utterly absorbed in what it had to say.

Once more, the dark side reared its inscrutable head. Having first acted on the impulse to examine the Völsunga Saga, now we found our attention drawn to Old Icelandic traditions, the frozen vestiges of Viking culture, and indeed, the whole of Icelandic literature. We were curious to discover what the sagas would reveal of the workings of darkness, and in this way, the idea for this book was born. We commenced writing in October and by August of the following year, were more or less finished. Under the influence of the dark side, Brynhild was again omitted from consideration, as her story proved too recalcitrant, and too independent, to share space with others.

Still, from the stories we did encounter there began to emerge the contours of a past world, one in which dark knowledge, a factor of great importance to all, was represented by women. The women in question dreamt, performed magic, interpreted dreams, and delivered messages from the gods. And on this point, given that it is a people’s conception of the gods that typically reveals the most about them, we found our attention drawn in particular to the stories of the most ancient of seeresses – the völur – who, in the myths, told of the creation of gods and humans, of fate and war. Who were their gods? What did they know? How did they live? How were they shaped by the human imagination of the time?

We began to hunt for clues that might help us answer these and other similar questions. Examination of the sagas uncovered a forgotten lifestyle, headed by women of the night, bearers of the knowledge of the dark side. These were stories of goddesses, völur, and sky-bound Valkyries, stories of women who sat on golden thrones, awaiting the men fate had assigned them, who would sit at their sides.

Our mission was to give voice to an age that had been left out of the history books, one recounted in sagas written only hundreds of years after the fact, preserved for posterity in northern ice. As we worked, we felt a force compelling us; became part of an intimate process in which one thought birthed the next; experienced the energy about which we were writing.

The result: the first volume of Forbidden Knowledge, of which you now hold the second edition in your hands. In this book, we bring to life the women of the divine universe of the Old Norse myths, recount the events of the first war, and examine the process by which feminine power and knowledge began to lose their hold on humankind.

Our story as authors may alone be enough to demonstrate how the dark side operates. Though the changes in direction we experienced could, to some, seem random and purposeless, it is clear to us they were not. Those who routinely proceed only along well-plotted, visible courses may doubt the effectiveness of not seeming to know what one wants, grasping at straws, leaving jobs half done, etc. From the vantage point of today, however, one might say we could not have approached the subject matter as it presented itself in any shorter, more direct way.

And the reason it happened this way was that we simply let the dark side do its work, rather than resisting, let it lead us. It should be added that we did not set out with the intent of proof of hypothesis, but were motivated by what could best be likened to curiosity, though this description is not wholly apt, as the force that drove us was considerably more powerful than any simple thirst for knowledge.

The dark side, when it acts, is a palpable thing, and we let it take us where it willed, skipping parts others might have held important to chase after shadows and vague references. In the end, we found we had exhumed as many forgotten books as we had read articles written only yesterday. No plan; no set course; no stated objective. Every day a new turn of events; new knowledge; new experiences.

We do not believe that the value of a book appreciates or depreciates in line with the methods applied to its writing or the time or effort required to produce it; nor is it important how much we, the authors, agreed with each other in the course of our work or debated certain details or conclusions. From the standpoint of the final product, not even whether it represents the final shape of a concept born at the outset can be said to be of any particular significance.

In writing this book, we have made as much use of planning, research, deductive reasoning, and logic—the organized, step-by-step approach of the light side—as we have of the ways of the dark: obscure and inscrutable even to us, but clearly present, as we continuously felt. And as we researched the topics that commended themselves to our attention, we came to appreciate the value of this knowledge—this right-brain, visually perceptive, visionary approach—even to intellectual pursuits. Clearly, this very different mode of operation was not an enemy to rationality, but its equal.

It was for these reasons that we came to feel it so important that not only we ourselves learn about the extranatural side of human thought, but that we share it with others. It is a form of knowledge left to us by human tradition, one that can bring balance to a mind limited by its own rationality, make space for imagination, and permit those who tap into it to perceive a universe that lies beyond the capacity of their five bodily senses.

Skype, between Canada and Hungary, 22 February 2020

The Authors

Chronicles and Chroniclers

In this book we will be examining the faded contours of a story left to us by our pre-literate pagan¹ ancestors of the Viking age and earlier through the mediating activity of Christian chroniclers and scribes.

Viking ship and warriors

1. Viking ship and warriors

The term Viking applies not to a particular ethnicity, but to a group of explorers, conquerors, and traders whose knowledge of ship-building and sailing enabled them to fan outward from their Scandinavian homes and settle in locations far removed from Northern Europe. Though early Vikings returned home after each excursion, later groups were to construct settlements in places as distant as the British Isles, the French coast, and the territory of present-day Russia. The settlement of Iceland in the decades between 870 and 930 CE was also the result of Viking exploration.

Beyond their historical towns and villages, archaeologists have found traces of Viking activity in places as far-flung as North America, the Mediterranean, the Near East, and even Central Asia. The centuries in which this prodigious spread was accomplished are known collectively as the Viking Age, a period that extends roughly from 700 until 1100 CE.²

In modern terms, Viking activity might almost be described as piracy, though the Vikings were not by any means the first people to pursue a lifestyle characterized by raiding. After all, the Angles and Saxons had conquered the British Isles in precisely the same way.

The Vikings were rediscovered in the 18th century, when they were painted as romantic barbarian warriors and noble savages. Such appellations tended to obscure the fact that there were women among them, who also played significant roles in the conquest and administration of new lands.

In the 20th century, the meaning of Viking was expanded to encompass not only the conquering voyagers, but also those who remained behind. Of the peoples now referred to as Vikings, only about ten percent actually fell under the heading of adventurers, the rest having consisted of settled families of farmers, pastoralists, hunters, and traders.

Today, the word Viking is applied as an adjective to various elements of the cultures of Scandinavia: e.g. Viking ship, Viking art, and Viking religion.

For the purposes of this book, where not stated otherwise, the term Viking age will refer to the period lasting from roughly the second half of the first millennia to 1100 CE.

In this book we delve into the Eddas and Icelandic sagas, texts remaining to us from Old Norse mythology, in an attempt to divine just what it was that these magically endowed woman knew, how they lived and thought, and what powers they embodied.

The term saga means story, tale, legend or history. To begin with, the telling or performance of sagas, the primary source for our analysis, constituted an important part of the norse community life. Though taken down in the Christian era, these stories were by no means new, but had been told, honed, and perfected – ennobled, as it were – over the course of many generations.

Prior to their transcription, the sagas, like folk tales, were spread by word of mouth from person to person, their essential messages regarding the deeds of the ancestors growing ever clearer in the process. Traversing progressive generations through the vehicle of memory, their rich tradition of songs, poems, and legends preserved the worldview, mentality, legal practices, and customs of the earliest Old Norse communities. Originally, the term saga, was applied exclusively to the transcribed versions of the tales and was thus construed to mean written story. Later, both the written and oral traditions came to be referred to as sagas.

The classic sagas were first transcribed sometime during the 13th century, most of them in Iceland, where the adoption of Christianity had not brought with it a general prohibition against – and hence the obliteration of – pagan customs, at least for a while. Some sagas entered the written literature at the last moment, just as the tradition was on the verge of disappearing; still others were never recorded at all.

The Old Norse literature used for this book consists of poems and sagas encompassing stories of