In this final installment of our series on mythology, I would like to apply the Jungian framework that Joe O’Reilly explained in his essay to a tradition of mythology that is likely unfamiliar, at least in its details, to most readers. Norse mythology’s origins are murky, and the most important primary source we have, The Poetic Edda, was not composed until after the Icelandic renaissance. By that time (circa 900’s AD), the Norse traditions were concentrated in Iceland, and the Christianization of Iceland had substantially been complete for generations. This historical peculiarity will resurface to supply an additional layer of meaning to be explored, but first, let us turn to a particularly profound story from The Poetic Edda, called “The Rune Poem.”
By way of background, the Norse cosmos is structured on the world-tree, Yggdrasil, which has its roots in the Well of Urd, a chaotic underworld-like realm. The Well of Urd is the home of powerful beings called the Norns, who determine the fates of those who live above in the nine realms of Yggdrasil by carving runes (letters) into its roots. In “The Rune Poem,” Odin, the god of wisdom, recounts how he hung himself from the branches of Yggdrasil. After nine days of suffering, this sacrifice was at last rewarded with knowledge of the runes, which Odin then shared with the world. There is a lot of archetypal imagery to explore in this poem: the very structure of the Norse cosmos with its intrinsic and continual interplay between order (Yggdrasil) and the chaos out of which it grows; the fact that there is in that chaos a language unintelligible at first to those above, but which shapes their lives in a powerful way; and the use of a tree as the model of the ordered world. All of these aspects are worth reflecting on, and I think the Norse perceived the natural order in an insightful and understandable way.
Now the two realms of chaos and order, to return to Jung’s framework, are equivalent to the unconscious and the conscious. The unconscious seems disordered, but powerful; like the Well of Urd, it is home to powerful forces which shape our world in a way we do not fully understand. The collective unconscious is not consciously knowable, by definition, and it is difficult to understand even what Jung has in mind with this term. But it seems clear that a society’s myths are the narrative expression of that society’s collective unconscious. The act of mythical storytelling is the key mechanism by which the unconscious intimates its understanding and perceptions to the conscious mind, and when this act of storytelling is generationally continuous and communal, it becomes the mechanism for the collective unconscious to do the same. While not a definition of the collective unconscious, understanding this one function of it is sufficient for this purpose. But what is the collective unconscious actually communicating through myths? It is that people’s perceptions of archetypes: chaos and order, sacrifice, wisdom, etc. The structure of the mythical cosmos and the characters which inhabit it are the foundational perceptions of that society. So, what perceptions are apparent in The Rune Poem specifically?
Beyond the surface level truth that man’s linguistic ability is in a real sense a supernatural gift, not something that one achieves by oneself, the more profound insight that it contains is two-fold. First, it illustrates that the greatest mind (i.e. Odin’s) is one which endures with willingness and purpose the pain of staring into the abyss of the unconscious, so as to glean knowledge from it. And second, when Odin resurrects at the end of his trial, a part of him remains dead, meaning that that bit of chaos/unconscious that one allows into oneself because of its power will kill a part of the order previously clung to, and hopefully form the foundation for a new and more perfect order.
This is somewhat different than other societies’ mythical presentations of the pursuit of knowledge or wisdom. For example, the Greek goddess of wisdom, Athena, emanates from the mind of Zeus, fully formed; the Greeks were a speculative people, striving for knowledge of the universal and theoretical, so this squares with their group perception of that archetype. But Odin is an old and disfigured male, who, in a different story, gouges out one of his eyes to gain knowledge, and as seen in the proverb-like second half of The Rune Poem, he is primarily concerned with practical knowledge, so his character conveys the radically different view that the Norsemen had of wisdom.1
Hopefully this exercise has been illustrative of what myths really are at their core, and why we should care about those of other societies. At this point, however, I would like to return to the topic of the historical peculiarities of the text. As stated earlier, The Poetic Edda was composed after the Christianization of Iceland. It is hard not to notice parallels between the Rune Poem and the Passion, which seems to undercut its authenticity as an expression of the pre-Christian Norse worldview. The poem tells a story of a god sacrificing himself on a tree to gain secret knowledge that he then shares with mankind, strongly hinting at the Christian heresy of Gnosticism. Combine this with details like him being impaled with a spear and mentioning that nobody brought him anything to quench his thirst, and it seems like a contaminated source, so one might feel the urge to disregard the myth’s importance. But while the details are Christian additives beyond a reasonable doubt, there is substantial evidence that the general story line predates the Christianization of the Norsemen. So why were these details added?
There were already storylines from Norse mythology that had been Christianized so as to be used as a bridge for conversion; the Heliand, written centuries prior is essentially Norse fantasy fiction about the gospels (and quite amusing I might add). It also seems odd that the educated Christian who compiled The Poetic Edda would put in these Christian details if it portrayed a heresy, so it must be that importing Christian imagery augmented or clarified the meaning of the original story, rather than fundamentally changing it.
To understand these additions, I began by looking for other edits that the compiler may have made. The most obvious one to me was the strange absence of the Norns. While the story is hardly given in full narrative form, one would still expect the Norns, as the source and sole users of the runes, to appear, but they don’t. Rather, the runes just come to Odin seemingly of their own accord:
None made me happy | with loaf or horn,
And there below I looked;
I took up the runes, | shrieking I took them,
And forthwith back I fell. (Havamal 140)
I think their absence clues toward why the Christian imagery was added. The runes are part of the intrinsic order of the Nordic cosmos, and quite literally are the words etched into the structure of the universe that shape the unfolding of events. As a Christian, the compiler would have had in mind an augmented sense of the Word (ref. John 1), but to allow for this meaning to come through, the runes had to be untethered from the dark and mysterious characters of the Norns. By removing the Norns, the compiler transformed the runes from a tool of the chaotic underworld to a symbol of order that permeates the universe and dispels the chaos of the underworld; the runes were transformed from the utterings of dark magic to symbols of the Word in the Christian sense, and this in turn recasts the entire Nordic cosmos. No longer are the two realms those of chaos and order; rather, the two realms are those of the natural and the supernatural. Order permeates all. Odin, who no longer acts as a Promethean figure, stealing the source and mechanism of the dark power of the underworld and sharing it with men, now acts as a figure of Christ, bridging the divide between the natural and supernatural. Finally, because the runes are also symbols of Christ under the aspect of the Word, the act of Odin giving the runes to mankind is now a eucharistic image, where the Word is given to man by the Word himself.
One astounding trait of Christianity is its ability to find a foothold in every culture it finds itself surrounded by, adopt what is good from it, solve its intractable problems, and then subsume it into itself. Alasdair MacIntyre brilliantly argues in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, that this trait is the key indicator that a tradition is superior to those around it. The telling of the Rune Poem in The Poetic Edda is an example of this trait magnificently executed.
These radically different perceptions of the same archetype would be my argument against the existence of a single and universal collective unconscious, but the Jungian framework still holds.