Representations of the Pagan Afterlife in Medieval Scandinavian Literature

the valley

The valleys through which Hermóðr rides for nine nights are hardly distinctive: they are deep, and they are dark – so dark, in fact, that Hermóðr rides blind for the duration of this part of his journey. Lindow points out that there are many examples in medieval Christian vision literature of travellers traversing dark spaces at the beginnings of their journeys. He also draws attention to the existence of a large dark valley in Dryhthelm’s vision and the Visio Tnugdali, both of which popular Latin visions were translated into Old Norse.¹⁰ In fact, the deep or dark valley is a standard part of the Christian visionary landscape, found in many of the most popular medieval descriptions of hell.¹¹ Sometimes the valley is understood to be hell, or to contain it, as in Bede’s account of Dryhthelm’s vision.

Incedebamus autem tacentes, ut uidebatur mihi, contra ortum solis solstitialem; cumque ambularemus, deuenimus ad uallem multae latitudinis ac profunditatis, infinitae autem longitudinis, quae ad leuam nobis sita unum latus flammis feruentibus nimium terribile, alterum furenti grandine ac frigore niuium omnia perflante atque uerrente non minus intolerabile praeferebat.¹²
The valley Dryhthelm sees has more than its impressive dimensions in common with that through which Hermóðr rides; later on in the description of his vision, it is the complete darkness that confronts him that causes Dryhthelm to panic:
At cum me hoc spectaculo tam horrendo perterritum paulatim in ulteriora produceret, uidi subito ante nos obscurari incipere loca, et tenebris omnia repleri. Quas cum intraremus, in tantum paulisper condensatae sunt, ut nihil praeter ipsas aspicerem, excepta dumtaxat specie et ueste eius, qui me ducebat. Et cum progrederemur “sola sub nocte per umbras”, ecce subito apparent ante nos crebri flammarum tetrarum globi ascendentes quasi de puteo magno rursumque decidentes in eundem.¹³
Sola sub nocte per umbras is a quotation from Vergil’s Aeneid VI, line 268. Aeneas’s journey into the world of the shades became one of the most important archetypes for medieval underworld-descent narratives. Whether because of textual influence from Vergil or a simple shared conception of the infernal realm as a dark place (which is a perfectly straightforward extrapolation of the belief that hell was somewhere under the earth), many journeys of this nature begin with the visionary in a state of total darkness. Elsewhere in the Historia (III. 19) Bede records the vision of an Irishman named Fursa, whose trip to the otherworld includes an aerial view of ‘some sort of dark valley’: uidit quasi uallem tenebrosam subtus.¹⁴ Bede’s works did circulate in medieval Iceland in some form, although it has been shown that the Old Norse version of Dryhthelm’s vision, translated in the fourteenth century, was known in Iceland through its inclusion in Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum historiale.¹⁵ A few scholars have regarded this sort of anecdotal material drawn from standard Latin authors – Gregory the Great is another whose works contain accounts of otherworld-visions that probably circulated in medieval Iceland – as potentially an important model for Snorri’s narratives in Gylfaginning.¹⁶ As Margaret Clunies Ross has put it, ‘only, perhaps, in the Latin and translated vernacular exempla or illustrative anecdotes from hagiography, sermon literature, compendia of universal history and other learned genres, do we find a potential model for the kind of illustratory mythic narrative that Snorri uses so skilfully throughout the Edda’.¹⁷ In this case, however, the shared topographical feature of a valley is not nearly sufficient to prove direct borrowing from Bede.

The phrase that narrates the initial phase of Hermóðr’s journey – hann reið níu nætr døkkva dala ok djúpa – has been regarded as supporting the thesis of a pre-existing poetic source on stylistic grounds: the alliteration of døkkva dala djúpa ‘suggest (sic) an underlying and presumably older eddic lay’.¹⁸ This alliteration, though suggestive, cannot be taken as proof of this poem’s existence: it may be a recollection, conscious or subconscious, of similar phrases in other extant eddic poems. Although none of the Codex Regius texts reproduces precisely this line, the semantic consonance of djúpa ‘deep’ and dala ‘valleys’ make the alliterating pair an intuitive choice within the eddic verse aesthetic: it is found in Hárbarðsljóð 18/4 (ok ór dali djúpum grund of grófu) and in Helgakviða Hjrvarðssonar 28/4 (dgg í diúpa dali), as well as in Heiðreks gátur 7 (Hverr byggir há fjll, hverr fellr í djúpa dali), which was probably composed after Snorra Edda.¹⁹ Perhaps Snorri’s occasional use of alliteration in his prose narrative indicates not quotation of a particular verse, but rather his immersion in the language of eddic poetry in general. Hardly anyone can ever have been so familiar with Old Norse poetic traditions as he, and if he had no single source from which to work his tale of Hermóðr’s Hel-ride, he might well have been concerned to create an air of verisimilitude, situating himself within the mythological world he was concerned with mapping, a world which included the poems of the Poetic Edda, but which extended beyond them. Such an interpretation is of course conjectural, but it is no more conjectural than the hypothesised existence of an otherwise completely unattested poem (or two).

Another possibility must be mentioned, however: it was not only poetry that featured alliteration. In the Hiberno-Latin Visio Tnugdali, the analogous passage in which the narrative’s subject begins his journey into hell by entering a vale of darkness makes use of alliteration to heighten the affective impact of this important passage, the first in the text where the otherworld is described.

Cumque longius simul pergerent et nullum preter splendorem angeli lumen haberent, tandem venerunt ad vallem valde terribilem ac tenebrosam et mortis caligine coopertam. Erit enim valde profunda et carbonibus ardentibus plena …²⁰

When this passage was rendered into Old Norse prose, it appears that the translator attempted to ape some of the alliteration of his exemplar, although the imitation is in the spirit rather than the very letter of the Latin prose:
En suo sem þau hofdu leingi geingit og hofdu ecki lios nema þat er stod af einglinum og um sider komu þau i dal einn mikinn og miog ogurligan myrkan og allan huldan daudans blinnleik. Sa dalr uar miog diupur og fullr gloandi gloda²¹
Both the Latin and Norse versions of the Visio Tnugdali, then, embellish their prose descriptions of the deep dark dales with modest alliteration. In a description of a second valley, the place of punishment for the proud, the soul – which, like Hermóðr, is descending into the underworld – is also said to be unable to see the depths of the valley because of the intense darkness in the putrid, shady, vale:
Sem salin hafdi geingit sem næst einglinum fyrir hræzlu saker komu þau j dal diupan og fullan myrka og sarleika og illra dauna þessi dalr uar suo diupur at aungum kosti gat set grunin sa dalr uar skipadur af salum þar matti sia og heyra mikinn huellan þytt af straumi brenusteins er rann or fiallinu.²²
Duggals Leiðsla may postdate Snorra Edda, if the usual attribution of the translation to the circle of Norway’s King Hákon Hákonarson ‘the old’ (1217-63) is accepted; ²³ the date of composition of Gylfaginning is also uncertain, but is almost certainly after 1220.²⁴ The Latin original has a terminus post quem of 1149, the year in which tradition placed the occurrence of Tundal’s vision.²⁵ Although Lindow avers that it is unlikely that Snorri knew the Latin, it is not impossible that he did. ²⁶ Nor is it impossible that he had been exposed to narrative in the vernacular, even if it had not found its way to Iceland by that point. Snorri, after all, made his first trip to the Norwegian court in the years 1218-20, a visit which lies within the period in which the Norwegian translation is thought to have been undertaken. This coincidence is tempting, but it provides only circumstantial evidence of how Snorri might have come into contact with a version of the Visio Tnugdali; the correspondences between the two texts are not so close that a positive link can be made between them. However, the parallels between Hermóðr’s ride through the shadows and the beginning of Tundal’s infernal vision reveal the fallacy underlying Schomerus, Dieterle and Lindow’s postulated lost poetic exemplar for Snorri’s narrative: alliteration is not the same as poetry, and the impetus for its use could have come from an entirely different source, if not merely from Snorri’s own authorial choice.

There would be no pressing reason to place the pitch-dark valley of Hermóðr’s nine night’s travel within a Christian context,²⁷ were it not for the fact that – in the absence of Helreið Hermóðs, or whatever it is called – there is no pre-Christian source which connects Hel to such a topographical feature. Baldrs draumar, the eddic poem that most closely resembles the Baldr-sequence from Gylfaginning, does not describe the landscape through which Óðinn rides on his quest for knowledge in the underworld:

Baldrs draumar 2

Upp reis Óðinn, alda gautr,

oc hann á Sleipni sðul um lagði;

reið hann niðr þaðan Niflheliar til,

mœtti hann hvelpi, þeim er ór helio kom.²⁸
Beyond the repetition of the direction of Hel as ‘down’, this stanza has little to say about the imagined topography of the underworld, save that the name it uses, Niflhel, which means ‘mist/dark-Hel’, might imply that visibility is restricted in the realm itself: but this is not the same as the benighted landscape through which Hermóðr rides. And since, as we have seen, skaldic poets had little or no conception of Hel as a place before the arrival of Christianity, we are left bereft of ‘native’ sources for Snorri’s deep and dark valleys, alliterate though they may. This landscape can more easily be paralleled in the Christian tradition, in which there was, by the twelfth century, a highly developed topography and iconography of the underworld, one part of which was frequently a dark valley, through which the visionary passed into the realm of the dead.