In the 990 poem Hákonarmál, the Norse gods Hermod and Bragi ask Odin to welcome Haakon into Valhalla. Viking sagas about Haakon the Good, king of Norway from 934 to 961, describe preparations for his entry to Valhalla. I asked the valkyries to bring wine, as if a leader should come.’’ The poem’s verses declare, ‘’What kind of dream is this, that I had thought before daybreak I was preparing Valhalla for a slain army? I awakened the einherjar, asking them to get up to strew the benches and to rinse the drinking cups. The poem describes the king’s warlike existence, assaulting the coastlines of Europe-and Odin’s preparation for his arrival in the afterlife. Eiríksmál, a poem written around 954, honors the 10 th-century Norwegian ruler, Eric Bloodaxe. Not all Viking warriors were granted entrance to the mythical Valhalla, but ancient Norse poems describe heroes who were believed to be bestowed with the honor. READ MORE: Six Things We Owe to the Vikings Eric Bloodaxe, Haakon the Good “If you can only get to the good afterlife by dying in battle, and you're going to die on a particular day no matter what you do on that day, you're going to take any good opportunity to fight.’’ ‘’Ragnarok is the gods' equivalent of the ‘scheduled’ death-day that each mortal has,” Crawford says. To the Vikings, fate was unchangeable and an integral facet of the Norse worldview. Jackson Crawford, an Old Norse specialist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, describes Ragnarok as being the predetermined death of the gods. For a Viking warrior, the battles at Valhalla allowed him to continue his earthly career into the afterlife, preparing for the fateful day when he would fight alongside the war-god Odin. As detailed in the Edda, those slain in these battles were soon resurrected. In Valhalla, his einherjar train for the event by engaging daily battles. Odin knows that Ragnarok is going to happen. Eight hundred einherjar would exit out of each, prepared to defend Asgard against the encroaching forces of chaos. “In it the gods and their human allies will march out to fight against the frost giants and the fire giants, the trolls and the monsters.’’Īt Ragnarok, Odin would fight beside his einherjar who advance through Valhalla’s 540 doors. “Ragnarok is like Armageddon, the battle at the end of the world,” Shippey writes. This impending fight was the cataclysmic battle at Ragnarok, a mythological event the Vikings’ believed would one day occur.
0 kommentar(er)
