Heroes and Hero Worship

T >> Thomas Carlyle >> Heroes and Hero Worship

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How the man Odin came to be considered a _god_, the chief god?--that surely
is a question which nobody would wish to dogmatize upon. I have said, his
people knew no _limits_ to their admiration of him; they had as yet no
scale to measure admiration by. Fancy your own generous heart's-love of
some greatest man expanding till it _transcended_ all bounds, till it
filled and overflowed the whole field of your thought! Or what if this man
Odin,--since a great deep soul, with the afflatus and mysterious tide of
vision and impulse rushing on him he knows not whence, is ever an enigma, a
kind of terror and wonder to himself,--should have felt that perhaps _he_
was divine; that _he_ was some effluence of the "Wuotan," "_Movement_",
Supreme Power and Divinity, of whom to his rapt vision all Nature was the
awful Flame-image; that some effluence of Wuotan dwelt here in him! He was
not necessarily false; he was but mistaken, speaking the truest he knew. A
great soul, any sincere soul, knows not what he is,--alternates between the
highest height and the lowest depth; can, of all things, the least
measure--Himself! What others take him for, and what he guesses that he
may be; these two items strangely act on one another, help to determine one
another. With all men reverently admiring him; with his own wild soul full
of noble ardors and affections, of whirlwind chaotic darkness and glorious
new light; a divine Universe bursting all into godlike beauty round him,
and no man to whom the like ever had befallen, what could he think himself
to be? "Wuotan?" All men answered, "Wuotan!"--

And then consider what mere Time will do in such cases; how if a man was
great while living, he becomes tenfold greater when dead. What an enormous
_camera-obscura_ magnifier is Tradition! How a thing grows in the human
Memory, in the human Imagination, when love, worship and all that lies in
the human Heart, is there to encourage it. And in the darkness, in the
entire ignorance; without date or document, no book, no Arundel-marble;
only here and there some dumb monumental cairn. Why, in thirty or forty
years, were there no books, any great man would grow _mythic_, the
contemporaries who had seen him, being once all dead. And in three hundred
years, and in three thousand years--! To attempt _theorizing_ on such
matters would profit little: they are matters which refuse to be
_theoremed_ and diagramed; which Logic ought to know that she _cannot_
speak of. Enough for us to discern, far in the uttermost distance, some
gleam as of a small real light shining in the centre of that enormous
camera-obscure image; to discern that the centre of it all was not a
madness and nothing, but a sanity and something.

This light, kindled in the great dark vortex of the Norse Mind, dark but
living, waiting only for light; this is to me the centre of the whole. How
such light will then shine out, and with wondrous thousand-fold expansion
spread itself, in forms and colors, depends not on _it_, so much as on the
National Mind recipient of it. The colors and forms of your light will be
those of the _cut-glass_ it has to shine through.--Curious to think how,
for every man, any the truest fact is modelled by the nature of the man! I
said, The earnest man, speaking to his brother men, must always have stated
what seemed to him a _fact_, a real Appearance of Nature. But the way in
which such Appearance or fact shaped itself,--what sort of _fact_ it became
for him,--was and is modified by his own laws of thinking; deep, subtle,
but universal, ever-operating laws. The world of Nature, for every man, is
the Fantasy of Himself. this world is the multiplex "Image of his own
Dream." Who knows to what unnamable subtleties of spiritual law all these
Pagan Fables owe their shape! The number Twelve, divisiblest of all, which
could be halved, quartered, parted into three, into six, the most
remarkable number,--this was enough to determine the _Signs of the Zodiac_,
the number of Odin's _Sons_, and innumerable other Twelves. Any vague
rumor of number had a tendency to settle itself into Twelve. So with
regard to every other matter. And quite unconsciously too,--with no notion
of building up " Allegories "! But the fresh clear glance of those First
Ages would be prompt in discerning the secret relations of things, and
wholly open to obey these. Schiller finds in the _Cestus of Venus_ an
everlasting aesthetic truth as to the nature of all Beauty; curious:--but
he is careful not to insinuate that the old Greek Mythists had any notion
of lecturing about the "Philosophy of Criticism"!--On the whole, we must
leave those boundless regions. Cannot we conceive that Odin was a reality?
Error indeed, error enough: but sheer falsehood, idle fables, allegory
aforethought,--we will not believe that our Fathers believed in these.

Odin's _Runes_ are a significant feature of him. Runes, and the miracles
of "magic" he worked by them, make a great feature in tradition. Runes are
the Scandinavian Alphabet; suppose Odin to have been the inventor of
Letters, as well as "magic," among that people! It is the greatest
invention man has ever made! this of marking down the unseen thought that
is in him by written characters. It is a kind of second speech, almost as
miraculous as the first. You remember the astonishment and incredulity of
Atahualpa the Peruvian King; how he made the Spanish Soldier who was
guarding him scratch _Dios_ on his thumb-nail, that he might try the next
soldier with it, to ascertain whether such a miracle was possible. If Odin
brought Letters among his people, he might work magic enough!

Writing by Runes has some air of being original among the Norsemen: not a
Phoenician Alphabet, but a native Scandinavian one. Snorro tells us
farther that Odin invented Poetry; the music of human speech, as well as
that miraculous runic marking of it. Transport yourselves into the early
childhood of nations; the first beautiful morning-light of our Europe, when
all yet lay in fresh young radiance as of a great sunrise, and our Europe
was first beginning to think, to be! Wonder, hope; infinite radiance of
hope and wonder, as of a young child's thoughts, in the hearts of these
strong men! Strong sons of Nature; and here was not only a wild Captain
and Fighter; discerning with his wild flashing eyes what to do, with his
wild lion-heart daring and doing it; but a Poet too, all that we mean by a
Poet, Prophet, great devout Thinker and Inventor,--as the truly Great Man
ever is. A Hero is a Hero at all points; in the soul and thought of him
first of all. This Odin, in his rude semi-articulate way, had a word to
speak. A great heart laid open to take in this great Universe, and man's
Life here, and utter a great word about it. A Hero, as I say, in his own
rude manner; a wise, gifted, noble-hearted man. And now, if we still
admire such a man beyond all others, what must these wild Norse souls,
first awakened into thinking, have made of him! To them, as yet without
names for it, he was noble and noblest; Hero, Prophet, God; _Wuotan_, the
greatest of all. Thought is Thought, however it speak or spell itself.
Intrinsically, I conjecture, this Odin must have been of the same sort of
stuff as the greatest kind of men. A great thought in the wild deep heart
of him! The rough words he articulated, are they not the rudimental roots
of those English words we still use? He worked so, in that obscure
element. But he was as a _light_ kindled in it; a light of Intellect, rude
Nobleness of heart, the only kind of lights we have yet; a Hero, as I say:
and he had to shine there, and make his obscure element a little
lighter,--as is still the task of us all.

We will fancy him to be the Type Norseman; the finest Teuton whom that race
had yet produced. The rude Norse heart burst up into _boundless_
admiration round him; into adoration. He is as a root of so many great
things; the fruit of him is found growing from deep thousands of years,
over the whole field of Teutonic Life. Our own Wednesday, as I said, is it
not still Odin's Day? Wednesbury, Wansborough, Wanstead, Wandsworth: Odin
grew into England too, these are still leaves from that root! He was the
Chief God to all the Teutonic Peoples; their Pattern Norseman;--in such way
did _they_ admire their Pattern Norseman; that was the fortune he had in
the world.

Thus if the man Odin himself have vanished utterly, there is this huge
Shadow of him which still projects itself over the whole History of his
People. For this Odin once admitted to be God, we can understand well that
the whole Scandinavian Scheme of Nature, or dim No-scheme, whatever it
might before have been, would now begin to develop itself altogether
differently, and grow thenceforth in a new manner. What this Odin saw
into, and taught with his runes and his rhymes, the whole Teutonic People
laid to heart and carried forward. His way of thought became their way of
thought:--such, under new conditions, is the history of every great thinker
still. In gigantic confused lineaments, like some enormous camera-obscure
shadow thrown upwards from the dead deeps of the Past, and covering the
whole Northern Heaven, is not that Scandinavian Mythology in some sort the
Portraiture of this man Odin? The gigantic image of _his_ natural face,
legible or not legible there, expanded and confused in that manner! Ah,
Thought, I say, is always Thought. No great man lives in vain. The
History of the world is but the Biography of great men.

To me there is something very touching in this primeval figure of Heroism;
in such artless, helpless, but hearty entire reception of a Hero by his
fellow-men. Never so helpless in shape, it is the noblest of feelings, and
a feeling in some shape or other perennial as man himself. If I could show
in any measure, what I feel deeply for a long time now, That it is the
vital element of manhood, the soul of man's history here in our world,--it
would be the chief use of this discoursing at present. We do not now call
our great men Gods, nor admire _without_ limit; ah no, _with_ limit enough!
But if we have no great men, or do not admire at all,--that were a still
worse case.

This poor Scandinavian Hero-worship, that whole Norse way of looking at the
Universe, and adjusting oneself there, has an indestructible merit for us.
A rude childlike way of recognizing the divineness of Nature, the
divineness of Man; most rude, yet heartfelt, robust, giantlike; betokening
what a giant of a man this child would yet grow to!--It was a truth, and is
none. Is it not as the half-dumb stifled voice of the long-buried
generations of our own Fathers, calling out of the depths of ages to us, in
whose veins their blood still runs: "This then, this is what we made of
the world: this is all the image and notion we could form to ourselves of
this great mystery of a Life and Universe. Despise it not. You are raised
high above it, to large free scope of vision; but you too are not yet at
the top. No, your notion too, so much enlarged, is but a partial,
imperfect one; that matter is a thing no man will ever, in time or out of
time, comprehend; after thousands of years of ever-new expansion, man will
find himself but struggling to comprehend again a part of it: the thing is
larger shall man, not to be comprehended by him; an Infinite thing!"

The essence of the Scandinavian, as indeed of all Pagan Mythologies, we
found to be recognition of the divineness of Nature; sincere communion of
man with the mysterious invisible Powers visibly seen at work in the world
round him. This, I should say, is more sincerely done in the Scandinavian
than in any Mythology I know. Sincerity is the great characteristic of it.
Superior sincerity (far superior) consoles us for the total want of old
Grecian grace. Sincerity, I think, is better than grace. I feel that
these old Northmen wore looking into Nature with open eye and soul: most
earnest, honest; childlike, and yet manlike; with a great-hearted
simplicity and depth and freshness, in a true, loving, admiring, unfearing
way. A right valiant, true old race of men. Such recognition of Nature
one finds to be the chief element of Paganism; recognition of Man, and his
Moral Duty, though this too is not wanting, comes to be the chief element
only in purer forms of religion. Here, indeed, is a great distinction and
epoch in Human Beliefs; a great landmark in the religious development of
Mankind. Man first puts himself in relation with Nature and her Powers,
wonders and worships over those; not till a later epoch does he discern
that all Power is Moral, that the grand point is the distinction for him of
Good and Evil, of _Thou shalt_ and _Thou shalt not_.

With regard to all these fabulous delineations in the _Edda_, I will
remark, moreover, as indeed was already hinted, that most probably they
must have been of much newer date; most probably, even from the first, were
comparatively idle for the old Norsemen, and as it were a kind of Poetic
sport. Allegory and Poetic Delineation, as I said above, cannot be
religious Faith; the Faith itself must first be there, then Allegory enough
will gather round it, as the fit body round its soul. The Norse Faith, I
can well suppose, like other Faiths, was most active while it lay mainly in
the silent state, and had not yet much to say about itself, still less to
sing.

Among those shadowy _Edda_ matters, amid all that fantastic congeries of
assertions, and traditions, in their musical Mythologies, the main
practical belief a man could have was probably not much more than this: of
the _Valkyrs_ and the _Hall of Odin_; of an inflexible _Destiny_; and that
the one thing needful for a man was _to be brave_. The _Valkyrs_ are
Choosers of the Slain: a Destiny inexorable, which it is useless trying to
bend or soften, has appointed who is to be slain; this was a fundamental
point for the Norse believer;--as indeed it is for all earnest men
everywhere, for a Mahomet, a Luther, for a Napoleon too. It lies at the
basis this for every such man; it is the woof out of which his whole system
of thought is woven. The _Valkyrs_; and then that these _Choosers_ lead
the brave to a heavenly _Hall of Odin_; only the base and slavish being
thrust elsewhither, into the realms of Hela the Death-goddess: I take this
to have been the soul of the whole Norse Belief. They understood in their
heart that it was indispensable to be brave; that Odin would have no favor
for them, but despise and thrust them out, if they were not brave.
Consider too whether there is not something in this! It is an everlasting
duty, valid in our day as in that, the duty of being brave. _Valor_ is
still _value_. The first duty for a man is still that of subduing _Fear_.
We must get rid of Fear; we cannot act at all till then. A man's acts are
slavish, not true but specious; his very thoughts are false, he thinks too
as a slave and coward, till he have got Fear under his feet. Odin's creed,
if we disentangle the real kernel of it, is true to this hour. A man shall
and must be valiant; he must march forward, and quit himself like a
man,--trusting imperturbably in the appointment and _choice_ of the upper
Powers; and, on the whole, not fear at all. Now and always, the
completeness of his victory over Fear will determine how much of a man he
is.

It is doubtless very savage that kind of valor of the old Northmen. Snorro
tells us they thought it a shame and misery not to die in battle; and if
natural death seemed to be coming on, they would cut wounds in their flesh,
that Odin might receive them as warriors slain. Old kings, about to die,
had their body laid into a ship; the ship sent forth, with sails set and
slow fire burning it; that, once out at sea, it might blaze up in flame,
and in such manner bury worthily the old hero, at once in the sky and in
the ocean! Wild bloody valor; yet valor of its kind; better, I say, than
none. In the old Sea-kings too, what an indomitable rugged energy!
Silent, with closed lips, as I fancy them, unconscious that they were
specially brave; defying the wild ocean with its monsters, and all men and
things;--progenitors of our own Blakes and Nelsons! No Homer sang these
Norse Sea-kings; but Agamemnon's was a small audacity, and of small fruit
in the world, to some of them;--to Hrolf's of Normandy, for instance!
Hrolf, or Rollo Duke of Normandy, the wild Sea-king, has a share in
governing England at this hour.

Nor was it altogether nothing, even that wild sea-roving and battling,
through so many generations. It needed to be ascertained which was the
_strongest_ kind of men; who were to be ruler over whom. Among the
Northland Sovereigns, too, I find some who got the title _Wood-cutter_;
Forest-felling Kings. Much lies in that. I suppose at bottom many of them
were forest-fellers as well as fighters, though the Skalds talk mainly of
the latter,--misleading certain critics not a little; for no nation of men
could ever live by fighting alone; there could not produce enough come out
of that! I suppose the right good fighter was oftenest also the right good
forest-feller,--the right good improver, discerner, doer and worker in
every kind; for true valor, different enough from ferocity, is the basis of
all. A more legitimate kind of valor that; showing itself against the
untamed Forests and dark brute Powers of Nature, to conquer Nature for us.
In the same direction have not we their descendants since carried it far?
May such valor last forever with us!

That the man Odin, speaking with a Hero's voice and heart, as with an
impressiveness out of Heaven, told his People the infinite importance of
Valor, how man thereby became a god; and that his People, feeling a
response to it in their own hearts, believed this message of his, and
thought it a message out of Heaven, and him a Divinity for telling it them:
this seems to me the primary seed-grain of the Norse Religion, from which
all manner of mythologies, symbolic practices, speculations, allegories,
songs and sagas would naturally grow. Grow,--how strangely! I called it a
small light shining and shaping in the huge vortex of Norse darkness. Yet
the darkness itself was _alive_; consider that. It was the eager
inarticulate uninstructed Mind of the whole Norse People, longing only to
become articulate, to go on articulating ever farther! The living doctrine
grows, grows;--like a Banyan-tree; the first _seed_ is the essential thing:
any branch strikes itself down into the earth, becomes a new root; and so,
in endless complexity, we have a whole wood, a whole jungle, one seed the
parent of it all. Was not the whole Norse Religion, accordingly, in some
sense, what we called "the enormous shadow of this man's likeness"?
Critics trace some affinity in some Norse mythuses, of the Creation and
such like, with those of the Hindoos. The Cow Adumbla, "licking the rime
from the rocks," has a kind of Hindoo look. A Hindoo Cow, transported into
frosty countries. Probably enough; indeed we may say undoubtedly, these
things will have a kindred with the remotest lands, with the earliest
times. Thought does not die, but only is changed. The first man that
began to think in this Planet of ours, he was the beginner of all. And
then the second man, and the third man;--nay, every true Thinker to this
hour is a kind of Odin, teaches men _his_ way of thought, spreads a shadow
of his own likeness over sections of the History of the World.

Of the distinctive poetic character or merit of this Norse Mythology I have
not room to speak; nor does it concern us much. Some wild Prophecies we
have, as the _Voluspa_ in the _Elder Edda_; of a rapt, earnest, sibylline
sort. But they were comparatively an idle adjunct of the matter, men who
as it were but toyed with the matter, these later Skalds; and it is _their_
songs chiefly that survive. In later centuries, I suppose, they would go
on singing, poetically symbolizing, as our modern Painters paint, when it
was no longer from the innermost heart, or not from the heart at all. This
is everywhere to be well kept in mind.

Gray's fragments of Norse Lore, at any rate, will give one no notion of
it;--any more than Pope will of Homer. It is no square-built gloomy palace
of black ashlar marble, shrouded in awe and horror, as Gray gives it us:
no; rough as the North rocks, as the Iceland deserts, it is; with a
heartiness, homeliness, even a tint of good humor and robust mirth in the
middle of these fearful things. The strong old Norse heart did not go upon
theatrical sublimities; they had not time to tremble. I like much their
robust simplicity; their veracity, directness of conception. Thor "draws
down his brows" in a veritable Norse rage; "grasps his hammer till the
_knuckles grow white_." Beautiful traits of pity too, an honest pity.
Balder "the white God" dies; the beautiful, benignant; he is the Sungod.
They try all Nature for a remedy; but he is dead. Frigga, his mother,
sends Hermoder to seek or see him: nine days and nine nights he rides
through gloomy deep valleys, a labyrinth of gloom; arrives at the Bridge
with its gold roof: the Keeper says, "Yes, Balder did pass here; but the
Kingdom of the Dead is down yonder, far towards the North." Hermoder rides
on; leaps Hell-gate, Hela's gate; does see Balder, and speak with him:
Balder cannot be delivered. Inexorable! Hela will not, for Odin or any
God, give him up. The beautiful and gentle has to remain there. His Wife
had volunteered to go with him, to die with him. They shall forever remain
there. He sends his ring to Odin; Nanna his wife sends her _thimble_ to
Frigga, as a remembrance.--Ah me!--

For indeed Valor is the fountain of Pity too;--of Truth, and all that is
great and good in man. The robust homely vigor of the Norse heart attaches
one much, in these delineations. Is it not a trait of right honest
strength, says Uhland, who has written a fine _Essay_ on Thor, that the old
Norse heart finds its friend in the Thunder-god? That it is not frightened
away by his thunder; but finds that Summer-heat, the beautiful noble
summer, must and will have thunder withal! The Norse heart _loves_ this
Thor and his hammer-bolt; sports with him. Thor is Summer-heat: the god
of Peaceable Industry as well as Thunder. He is the Peasant's friend; his
true henchman and attendant is Thialfi, _Manual Labor_. Thor himself
engages in all manner of rough manual work, scorns no business for its
plebeianism; is ever and anon travelling to the country of the Jotuns,
harrying those chaotic Frost-monsters, subduing them, at least straitening
and damaging them. There is a great broad humor in some of these things.

Thor, as we saw above, goes to Jotun-land, to seek Hymir's Caldron, that
the Gods may brew beer. Hymir the huge Giant enters, his gray beard all
full of hoar-frost; splits pillars with the very glance of his eye; Thor,
after much rough tumult, snatches the Pot, claps it on his head; the
"handles of it reach down to his heels." The Norse Skald has a kind of
loving sport with Thor. This is the Hymir whose cattle, the critics have
discovered, are Icebergs. Huge untutored Brobdignag genius,--needing only
to be tamed down; into Shakspeares, Dantes, Goethes! It is all gone now,
that old Norse work,--Thor the Thunder-god changed into Jack the
Giant-killer: but the mind that made it is here yet. How strangely things
grow, and die, and do not die! There are twigs of that great world-tree of
Norse Belief still curiously traceable. This poor Jack of the Nursery,
with his miraculous shoes of swiftness, coat of darkness, sword of
sharpness, he is one. _Hynde Etin_, and still more decisively _Red Etin of
Ireland_, _in_ the Scottish Ballads, these are both derived from Norseland;
_Etin_ is evidently a _Jotun_. Nay, Shakspeare's _Hamlet_ is a twig too of
this same world-tree; there seems no doubt of that. Hamlet, _Amleth_ I
find, is really a mythic personage; and his Tragedy, of the poisoned
Father, poisoned asleep by drops in his ear, and the rest, is a Norse
mythus! Old Saxo, as his wont was, made it a Danish history; Shakspeare,
out of Saxo, made it what we see. That is a twig of the world-tree that
has _grown_, I think;--by nature or accident that one has grown!

In fact, these old Norse songs have a _truth_ in them, an inward perennial
truth and greatness,--as, indeed, all must have that can very long preserve
itself by tradition alone. It is a greatness not of mere body and gigantic
bulk, but a rude greatness of soul. There is a sublime uncomplaining
melancholy traceable in these old hearts. A great free glance into the
very deeps of thought. They seem to have seen, these brave old Northmen,
what Meditation has taught all men in all ages, That this world is after
all but a show,--a phenomenon or appearance, no real thing. All deep souls
see into that,--the Hindoo Mythologist, the German Philosopher,--the
Shakspeare, the earnest Thinker, wherever he may be:

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