Myths that were prescientific explanations of natural phenomena persist as stories. Thor passes overhead in imagination.
"Star of the Sea," section I, is entirely a mythical narrative. Of course we are told that a goddess, Niaerdh, made seals, whales, fish, gulls and spindrift. Her song calls rain or sends light across water. The world has a rim where her daughters dance. She sleeps in the east. Darkness is her blanket. The morning star shines on her forehead when she rises even earlier than the sun. Her daily activity is to roam among her creatures in the sea.
So far, this story is only of the sea and the narrative might still be in the dawn period before the creation of mankind - although that will change in the second paragraph. Frae rides to the shore on the bull Earthshaker so he is a god of land and maybe of agriculture. The bull's bellow wakes dead kings in their barrows. Thus, there are indeed human societies with rulers and burial customs. Niaredh approaches on an iceberg holding her net that catches ships. Again, the narrative is definitely set in a human period.
Frae can cause the sun to fall, boiling Niaerdh's sea, then leaving it to freeze in an endless night. But Niaerdh can drown Frae's earth:
"'Best that we not wreck the world between us.'" (p. 468)
By marrying Frae, Niaerdh will become an earth as well as a sea goddess with sway over sowing, reaping, begetting, birth and age. She will bring rain in spring and together they will bless the land but she will return to the sea each autumn.
"This shall be the year and every year henceforward." (p. 469)
She asks for the bull. Frae can continue to use him except when Niaerdh needs him but he will be hers:
"'...and in the end I will call him to me forever.'" (ibid.)
There are the comforting ideas of completion, an end, but also, after that, reunion forever.
Finally, this narrative explains one more natural phenomenon:
"'I will come to you on the rainbow,' Niaerdh plighted. So it was. So it is." (p. 469)
"Star of the Sea," if published as a separate volume, should have a cover illustration showing the gods, their creatures and the rainbow.
We remember the rainbow in Genesis and in the Eddas but also that myths differ.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
Yes, the Scandinavians associated thunder and lightning with Thor. And I think Semitic pagams similarly associated Baal and Hadad with such phenomena.
And you beat me to mentioning the rainbow at the end of the Genesis flood story.
Ad astra! Sean
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