Skafloc's wizard skis bear "...him like the wind." (p. 83) He meets Tyr who:
"Despite a chill wind...wore only a wolfskin kilt..." (ibid.)
It is not good to meet the god of war "...alone at dusk..." (ibid.) so, of course, the wind at the time of this meeting is appropriately chill.
"[Tyr's] voice was as of a slow storm through a brazen sky." (p. 84)
The earliest gods were personifications of natural forces. It would have been imagined that a storm was the voice of a god so, of course, this god's voice sounds like a storm. When society became more complicated so that social forces like wars overwhelmed individuals with the apparent inevitability of natural forces like hostile weather, then social forces also were personified. Thus: Thor, thunder; Tyr, war. Next, personified external forces were unified. Then they came to be understood and therefore no longer personified... However, because external forces remain uncontrollable, resort is still made to spells or prayers.
Poul Anderson's narrative returns us to those ages when a storm was a voice and when men told tales of gods and elves.
2 comments:
Tyr was "God of War" in an ancestral sense -- he was a descendant, so to speak, of the original Indo-european "Sky Father". Odin was a more recent God of War.
Kaor, Paul!
No, what Anderson did in stories like THE BROKEN SWORD and HROLF KRAKI'S SAGA was to set them in times when many still believed the Norse gods were actual beings. Albeit THE BROKEN SWORD shows them starting to fade away as knowledge of the true God proclaimed by Christianity spread.
Ad astra! Sean
Post a Comment