King Hadding swears an oath:
"He called on the lawmen to set out the oath-ring. Laying his hand on it, he swore to those words, so help him the Vanir and almighty Thor." (p. 111)
Almighty? (Sometimes individual gods are addressed as if they were supreme. Eventually, one god is regarded as supreme.)
By now, we know that such words cannot pass unnoticed by the elements. The passage continues:
"Wind strengthened, tossing his hair golden around his brows. It whistled. Cloud shadows hastened across the land and thunder began to growl from afar." (ibid.)
Wind strengthens, tosses hair, whistles and speeds clouds. But, also, thunder speaks - Thor.
This response of nature is not lost on Hadding's followers. The paragraph concludes:
"Men looked at each other, muttered, and left as soon as the king told them the meeting was over." (ibid.)
7 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I am a bit surprised. I would have thought Hadding would have sworn by Odin, the god of aristocrats and warriors. Then I remembered what Stirling said about Thor being favored by yeomen and farmers. Which explains why Hadding swore by Thor.
Ad astra! Sean
Thor was the guardian of Midgard and of mortal men -- he fought the Giants and various evil influences, and his hammer brought the rain that gave life to the land. Note that his chariot was pulled by goats, while Odhin rode a horse.
He was called "allmighty Thor" principally because his feature was strength -- strength to build, strength to smash, strength to guard.
Odin was -tricky-. Subtle, deep of mind, often in disguise. Thor was straightforward -- in some of the stories, a bit of an oaf.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree! And in one of Fletcher Pratt and L. Sprague DeCamp's Incompleat Enchanter stories, set in an Eddaic world, we see Thor as a big, basically good humored bruiser, and perhaps just a bit on the not so smart side.
Ad astra! Sean
Also note the pervasive assumption in WAR OF THE GODS -- authentically pagan Scandinavian -- that if anyone not of the right lineage (usually descended from a God) rules a given area, the Gods will withhold their favor, harvests will be poor, order will break down, etc.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Iow, dynastic legitimacy and loyalty was important to the Scandinavians. As it was to the Germanics who set up the Anglo/Saxon kingdoms in Britannia and to the Merovingians who conquered Roman Gaul.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: dynastic legitimacy was important, but it was directed at the -lineage-.
Anyone descended from X qualified, and it didn't have to be someone who was the product of a legitimate marriage, either -- that was a flexible concept in pre-Christian Scandinavia anyway. Upper-class pagan northerners were polygynous, with multiple wives and concubines.
A look at the way the sons of Harald Fairhair ripped up Norway after Harald had unified it is illuminating.
Primogeniture -- eldest legitimate son, then eldest daughter if no sons -- was a massive improvement.
Even a drooling idiot who was a puppet of some aristocratic cabal was superior to sixteen brothers and cousins and their bullboys setting it with axe and sword.
That was the main constraint on the potentially chaotic feudal system of the High Middle Ages.
You couldn't just seize the throne of, say, France because you had the strongest army, the way you could in Byzantium.
You had to have some sort of claim to be the legitimate heir; even a foreign invader had to; hence the dueling genealogical declarations between London and Paris in the Hundred Years War.
One of the reasons Napoleon's claim to power met such determined and prolonged resistance in Europe was that he was, quite nakedly, a usurper.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
You are right, I was being too broad and imprecise. The Germanic tradition of dynastic loyalty had a major flaw: all the sons of the king, youngest as well as the eldest, those born of a queen or bastards by a concubine, had an equal claim to the succession. This could and did lead to fratricidal strife. So, slowly and painfully, safeguards and limitations of the kind you cited were worked out.
I would add, however, that France eventually came to insist, after the death of Louis X in 1316, on agnatic male succession to the crown within the Capetian house. Which was why Edward III's claim was rejected. And continued to be rejected by the great majority of the French even after the catastrophe of Agincourt.
Correct, what you said about Napoleon. And not everybody even in France accepted his rule as rightful. The exiled Bourbons still had plenty of supporters!
Ad astra! Sean
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