Jens Ulstrup of the Time Patrol says that:
the Wanes or Vanir were an aboriginal chthonic pantheon;
the Indo-Europeans imported their warlike sky-gods, the Ansa or Aesir;
conflict between locals and incomers is reflected in myths of a war between their pantheons (see Anderson's War Of The Gods);
the divine war was settled by negotiations and intermarriage.
Negotiations and alliances end or prevent conflicts. As Alan Moore's Miraclewoman explains: two sides can make love or war. Anderson's "Star of the Sea" shows how a god and a goddess must choose between marriage and destruction. If Frae's arrows kill the horses that pull the Sun's chariot, then the Sun will fall and boil Niaerdh's sea which will then freeze forever but that will not happen because first Niaerdh would drown Frae's land. These primeval gods seem to share Anderson's knowledge of possible ecological catastrophes.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
What I thought was that these peoples did not realize what the Sun really is, a giant blazing ball of gases like helium destined to survive for billions of years. If they had, they certainly would not have come up with these myths.
Sean
Sean,
Of course. Nevertheless, the sea boiling, then freezing, or, alternatively, inundating the land sound like more modern understandings of what would happen if the Sun heated up, then was extinguished, or if the sea levels rose.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
OR when Earth went thru phases of partial or even complete glaciations. I'm reminded of the last part of Anderson's GENESIS, a billion years or more in the future, where a hotter, expanding Sun was making Earth less and less habitable.
Sean
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