The Gods Were the Good Guys All Along

On the cliché of modern subversive narratives

“Heimdallr brings forth the gift of the gods to humanity” (1907) by Nils Asplund

Norse mythology is not an open-source fantasy system designed for entertainment studios to generate franchise material. It’s a collection of ancient stories that reflect an ancient belief system. While the stories themselves can be entertaining, the belief system did not exist solely for entertainment purposes. It existed for the same reason all religions do: to provide a framework for understanding and interacting with the world.

On that note, ancient Norse paganism was not just about re-telling myths around a campfire. Recurring rituals were performed, prayers were offered, and major sacrifices were made in the name of heartfelt belief. Ancient people felt gratitude and sometimes even anger toward their gods.¹ They both rejoiced in their beliefs and cried over them. In some cases they died for them. Religion is a lived experience, and characters in myth are connected to lived experience in that they fulfill roles that reflect their meaning in the lives of believers.

Thor, for instance, kills jotuns/thurses not because he is a genocidal maniac, but because he dutifully answers the supplications of humans who seek his protection from supernatural aggressors². In lived experience, humans carve amulets beseeching Thor to smite evil thurses who are out to get them, thus in myth, Thor is typically found smiting thurses. It’s his role in the life of the human so it’s what he does in the stories. The myths, therefore, are inseparable from the religion itself. Fundamentally, they are expressions of how ancient pagans conceptualized these beings’ purposes in the structure of life. Consider Thor’s own words as provided in Hárbarðsljóð 23: Were it not for his killing of jotuns, “there would be no humans in Midgard” (vætr myndi manna undir Miðgarði).

We are all foreigners to ancient culture and, unfortunately, some measure of cultural understanding is necessary to properly inform our interpretation of any given myth. Without that, we are left to apply our own modern (i.e. foreign) sensibilities and thereby risk overlooking the myth’s intended significance. It is exactly this lack of cultural understanding that leads to the prevalence of subversive narratives in modern mythological retellings.

Subversion

Subversive narratives are oriented toward challenging established norms and power structures, often focusing on marginalized experiences and highlighting problems with the status quo. Quite frequently they mean to surprise us with the no-longer-surprising question, “what if the good guys were actually the bad guys all along?"

Whereas subversive narratives certainly play an important social role and can be successful in entertainment, they can also become absurd in the context of religious storytelling. This is because religious stories have religious meaning and a subversive retelling risks subverting that meaning.

To illustrate, let us imagine a hypothetical movie plot wherein Jesus Christ brutally murders an innocent family, thus causing a protagonist to turn to Judas Iscariot for help in a revenge plot to kill Jesus. Such a story may play well at the box office, but it is not a story that would be told among real Christians in religious contexts because it subverts the role played by Jesus in Christianity and the meaning behind his death in the lived experience of Christians. It misunderstands the entire point of the religion, either willfully or accidentally.

To a Christian, this hypothetical movie is at least absurd, if not extremely offensive (what other horrible things does Jesus do in this movie?), and fans of the movie should not use it to inform their understanding of actual Christianity. The same concept would hold true for any similarly subversive media involving Judaism, Islam, any Native/Indigenous People’s religion, or any other long-established system of belief. Thus the same level of absurdity exists in stories based on Norse mythology wherein “the gods” are made out to be the villains.

In fact, the hypothetical movie plot I described above is the actual plot of the 2024 Netflix series “Twilight of the Gods”. I have simply swapped Thor and Loki out for Jesus and Judas. It misunderstands the entire point of Norse mythology, either willfully or accidentally.

In the same way that the makers of our hypothetical Jesus film have not evolved Christianity or told a valid Christian story, Zack Snyder and Netflix have not participated in the organic evolution of ancient Norse paganism, nor have they told a valid Norse myth. This is because neither story is an expression of how actual believers (much less ancient ones) conceptualize their beliefs. In both cases, the creators can only claim to have been inspired by the religions from which their characters are derived. What they have made is something entirely separate, albeit with some borrowed character names and themes.³

In any case, there is no law against creative storytelling, and there are no ancient Norse pagans alive to be offended by the countless authors and studios currently monetizing subversive Norse narratives. But anyone seriously interested in understanding Norse mythology now has the additional hurdle of unlearning what has been repeated ad nauseam in popular media: that the jotuns are victims of the gods’ unwarranted oppression, that cosmos-destroying monsters should be empathetically viewed as complicated-but-relatable individuals, that fate is meant to be overcome, that behaviors historically abhorred by ancient Germanic society were commonplace and accepted among them, and every other trope glorifying the cosmological or social antagonists of the ancient, cultural-religious mindset.

A Historical Point of View

In the ancient understanding, most of the Norse gods are viewed as generally just and good, especially with regard to their dealings with humanity. For instance, stanza 17 of Vǫluspá refers to the trio of Odin, Lodur, and Hønir as ǫflgir ok ástgir “strong and dear/kind/loving”. This kind of description may come as a surprise to the modern reader. How can a god like Odin, who kills his favored followers, be viewed as kind and loving? Does he not break Sigmund’s sword on the battlefield and beat Harald Wartooth to death with this own hands? Is he not “dangerous to worship?”

The answer, of course, is a matter of cultural nuance. For a man of high status inducted into the cult of Odin, a battlefield death is the optimal death, and having been personally killed by Odin, his legacy is permanently secured. There can be no question that he has arrived in Valhalla. Remember that the phrase “to choose the slain” means specifically “to choose who dies”, often with the added layer of personally bringing about those deaths⁴. To be killed by Odin is to be chosen by him. The Abrahamic god also chooses when lives should end, but this does not make him dangerous to worship, nor does it make him a morally ambiguous character in Abrahamic religious contexts. One may be inclined to argue that it does, but this is simply not how those religions work.

The poem Hymiskviða also contains several pertinent epithets in reference to Thor. Stanza 11 refers to him as both vinr verliða and as Véurr, respectively “friend of men” and “guardian of holy places”. Stanza 22 calls him sá er ǫldum bergr, orms einbani “he who rescues mankind, the serpent’s lone slayer”. The literary evidence is quite consistent with archaeological evidence indicating that Thor is indeed not a crazed killer of innocent jotuns, but a savior of humanity.

Freyr, regardless of the way our modern minds may recoil at the way he “obtained” his wife Gerd⁵, is also described quite positively in pagan verse. As per Lokasenna 37, mey hann né grœtir, né manns konu, ok leysir ór hǫptum hvern “he doesn’t make a girl cry, nor a man’s wife, and looses everyone from fetters.”

A beneficent nature is, of course, not true of every god nor of all of their offspring. The poem Þórsdrápa refers to Loki as drjúgr […] at ljúga “assiduous at lying” in stanza 1, while Vǫluspá prefers the term lægjarn “treachery-eager” in stanza 34. His son Fenrir also gets a special mention as tungls tjúgari í trolls hami “the moon’s pitchforker in troll’s skin” in stanza 39. Trolls, of course, are never cast in a positive light. In fact if there is any word in Old Norse that guarantees an “evil-disposed being”⁶ by way of its usage, that word is troll. Fenrir is a character who, according to Vafþrúðnismál 46, will devour the sun. Any agricultural society would very quickly understand this as an action meant to snuff out all life on earth. It should not be surprising to anyone familiar with common, Western fairytales that the big, bad wolf is indeed a big, bad wolf. We will return to this below.

Because most of the gods are considered friends and supporters of humanity, evidence of their worship in ancient times is plentiful. Consider, for example, the abundance of place-names derived from the gods’ names scattered all across Scandinavia⁷ and the plentiful artifacts, especially in graves, depicting references to the gods⁸. By contrast, compelling evidence for the worship of cosmological antagonists is practically nonexistent. Even venerated characters such as Skadi and Gerd who begin life among the jotuns must marry into the clan of the Æsir, thus making them into goddesses and justifying their veneration. Margaret Clunies Ross notes that:

The majority opinion [among scholars] is that cults of the giants (jǫtnar) of Old Norse myth are unlikely to have existed, because, on the whole, giants were conceptualized as hostile to both gods and humans. Sacrifices and other acts directed at the propitiation of giants would therefore have been unlikely to have achieved a positive outcome for humans.⁹

Regarding alleged Old Norse textual attestations of jotun worship (such as the infamous horse phallus story¹⁰ from Flateyjarbók), Ross makes essentially three points:

Firstly, these are texts “of relatively late date that recreate the period of conversion to Christianity in the North and represent the activities of those, living in remote locations, who continued to practise pagan cults in the face of a growing pressure to convert”¹¹.

Secondly, although “some of these texts are relatively reliable and may contain elements of truth, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that some of them apply a somewhat stereotyped template involving a later, Christian view of the nature of pagan worship.”¹²

Thirdly, “[t]here is some evidence that certain kinds of giant beings were associated with particular places as their guardian spirits, and it is conceivable that such figures could have been the recipients of cult in the pre-Christian period in Scandinavia. […] Such figures have some of the same qualities as the landvættir, guardian spirits of a region or a specific place, rather than of the jǫtnar of the major mythological narratives.”¹³

Thus the nuance in the general consensus among modern scholars is that, even if there is evidence that some pre-Christian Scandinavians worshipped specific beings not named among the Æsir or Vanir in the Eddas, all legitimate evidence of worship indicates that it was generally directed toward beings viewed as interacting at least neutrally with the gods and positively toward humanity, not towards the gods’ mythological antagonists.

Of course, we can not have this discussion without making a digression into Surtshellir, a lava cave located in western Iceland which is quite obviously named after the jotun Surt and contains evidence of ritual activity spanning roughly the last 100 years of Iceland’s pagan period. At first glance, Surtshellir may appear to stand out as a powerful testament to the worship of a named, antagonistic jotun. However, it is an outlier, and the purpose of ritual activity at Surtshellir seems to become clearer when analyzing a fuller timeline. According to Smith et al. 2021:

Bayesian modeling of radiocarbon dates from the cave […] indicates that the Hallmundarhraun eruption […] most likely began between AD 880 and 910 […]. Its lava ran more than 50 kilometers down from ice-shrouded highlands into newly settled valleys, burying 240 km^2 of valuable upland grazing land and fertile lowland valleys beneath black, smoking basalt. Landnámabók suggests that farms were being established throughout these valleys in the early 10th century and archaeological investigations at Halldórstóftir, Gilsbakki, Háls, and Reykholt confirm this (Guðrún Sveinbjarnardóttir et al. 2012; Ólafsson 2020; Smith 1995, 2005, 2009). Hjartarson (2015:22-24) suggests that five farms mentioned in Landnámabók, whose locations are unknown today, may have been buried under the lava.¹⁴

In other words, the very first experience Norse settlers had with Surtshellir was the Hallmundarhraun eruption, which possibly destroyed several farms and certainly destroyed quite a bit of valuable grazing land. Depending on the rate of lava production as modeled for similar shield volcanoes, this process of destruction could have lasted anywhere from 5 to 50 years.¹⁵ The paper continues:

…the impacts of this eruption must have been unsettling, posing existential challenges for Iceland’s newly arrived settlers. It may have been possible to adapt day-to-day activities in response to an eruption flowing slowly for decades, yet the fear and dread of living with something so destructive for much of a lifetime, not knowing whether it would ever end, must have been extremely challenging. On the other hand, experiencing an eruption capable of covering 240 km^2 of land in just a few years would have revealed almost unfathomable levels of destructive power to anyone living in its vicinity. The advance of the lava would not have been the only challenge these early settlers faced since shield eruptions release massive amounts of toxic gases (SO2, CO2, H2S, HF, HCl) that can flow into low-lying valleys, accumulating in low-lying depressions, hollows, and caves, poisoning the air, killing vegetation, livestock and people, and damaging land far beyond the eruption’s immediate vicinity (Guðmundsson and Larsen 2016; Thordarson and Larsen 2007; Weinstein et al. 2013).¹⁶

In essence, the story of Surtshellir is one that begins with natural disaster. It is only after the cave has sufficiently cooled that the first Norse settlers, witnesses to the catastrophe, are able to enter and begin ritual practice. It is not surprising, then, that Smith et al. conclude with a relatively Occam’s-Razor-style interpretation of the archaeological evidence found there (emphasis added):

It is hard not to conclude that the actions undertaken inside Surtshellir were initially done in response to the existential challenges that the Hallmundarhraun eruption presented to Iceland’s newly arrived Norse settlers. Bertha Philpotts’s and Finnur Magnússon’s suggestions that Surtshellir was the site of a cult devoted to Surtr, rather than efforts done to constrain him, may have missed the mark;¹⁷

The apparently outlying data point that is Surtshellir seems to be relatively well explained by the idea that early settlers witnessed the destructive power unleashed by the caves of the Hallmundarhraun lava field and responded with ritual efforts designed to “constrain” the jotun responsible for the destruction. Thus, even in the case that ritual observance may have been conducted with a jotun in mind, it was likely still within the understanding that Surt had already proven himself an enemy of humanity and required some ritual practice in order to be warded away (an effort which must have appeared to be successful for the following century).

The Purpose of Antagonists in Norse Myth

Returning to the matter at hand, there is a reason why surviving Norse myths do not contain scenes of Loki protesting the imprisonments of his children, or their mother Angrboda trying to free them, or Fenrir making pitiful whines in response to his entrapment, or any jotun mourning the loss of a loved one killed by Thor: In the ancient interpretation, we are not meant to feel sympathy for these characters. Their presence in a story is not meant to be relatable because they fill roles that fall in deadly opposition to human interests.

As a human being, I worry that my family will starve this winter because a jotun caused me to have a bad harvest or burned my farm with lava, or that my mother may die because a jotun caused her to develop an infection. I pray and sacrifice to the gods in hopes of fixing exactly these kinds of problems. This is why the worldview contains jotuns and why it contains gods.

This is not to say the gods don’t have faults, especially by modern standards. But in the Norse mindset, jotun and trollish antagonists do not exist to highlight the gods’ faults. They exist to provide an origin for the daily problems humans face in life, thus allowing the gods to protect us from them. Jotuns, trolls, and gigantic monsters are to be understood as our enemies just as much as they are enemies of the gods.

Let us continue dwelling on the character of Fenrir in order to make an example, since he has so frequently been interpreted as an innocent victim of betrayal who did nothing wrong. Fenrir’s role in the belief system is to be a destroyer of cosmological order, participating in the eradication of nearly the entire human race including you, me, and all of our friends and families. It is highly unlikely that ancient Norse people would have looked very kindly upon him or had any interest in sympathizing with his plight.

Fenrir’s binding is infinitely more likely to be a case of “thank goodness the gods figured out a way to hold that monster at bay for the time being,” rather than a case of “that poor little guy did nothing wrong and was betrayed by a gang of jerks.” Apart from the prophecies of Ragnarok, evidence can be found in the fact that Fenrir appears to be something of a fearsome creature even from the beginning. As we are told, hafði Týr einn djarfleik at ganga til at ok gefa honum mat “only Tyr had the courage to approach him and give him food”. This detail exists in the otherwise detail-sparse story for a purpose, and it disabuses us of the notion that a young Fenrir was ever innocent and friendly.

In fact the problem with Fenrir, as we might expect, lies in his very nature as inherited from his parents. Gylfaginning 34 explains that mikils ills af væni, fyrst af móðerni ok enn verra af faðerni "great evil was to be expected [from Loki’s children], firstly because of their mother‘s nature, and yet worse because of their father’s”. In Norse mythology, inherited nature quite often gives us foresight into a character’s actions, especially when it comes to sons. We see this idea repeated, for example, in Vǫlsunga saga when Signy finds that she can only produce cowardly children with her husband Siggeir and must therefore sleep with her brother in order to obtain a sufficiently courageous child. Norse audiences might have seen this coming, having already heard that Siggeir is a greedy, conniving traitor. His sons are therefore doomed to inadequacy on the scale of celebrated virtues.

What happens to Fenrir is a temporary victory for humanity and the world in this light. Having stated that Fenrir’s nature is evil, the narrator is no longer obligated to explain something evil Fenrir actually does before the gods bind him. A Norse audience will already be onboard with the idea, even if the information already given is scant. Fenrir’s inevitable problematic behavior is sufficiently established, especially when we include the prophecies foretelling his future actions.

This kind of thinking can be surprising to the modern, free-will-loving, individualistic mind, yet it is common in our ancient, deterministic, Norse storytelling. Fate, after all, is universally unavoidable and unalterable in the Norse conception.¹⁸ Had the gods chosen any other course of action with Fenrir, Ragnarok would still occur exactly as it has been prophesied, and we would simply be tracing a different chain of cause-and-effect leading him to the same calamitous actions in the end.

In a similar vein, we are not given a reason why Odin and his brothers killed the primordial being Ymir. However, Gylfaginning 5 explains that hann er illr “he [was] evil”. What specifically evil thing Ymir ever did is not important because it is not the narrator’s intent that the audience should judge whether or not this claim is true. Rather, if Ymir is evil, then his death at the hands of the gods can be understood as a righteous kill. This is fortunate for us, because from this righteous kill comes the Earth upon which we now live. It establishes the ongoing dynamic found throughout the source material. Order in the cosmos is impossible when the jotuns have their way, and the gods must defeat them from time to time such that order (and indeed life on Earth) can thrive. Otherwise, “there would be no humans in Midgard.”

1. See, for example, the poem Sonatorrek as found within Egils Saga. The poem is composed by a man on the verge of suicide out of grief over the death of his sons, one of whom drowned. Within its several stanzas Egil expresses an expectation that he will be received by Hel, a desire to fight Ran (the wife of Ægir who pulls sailors down to a watery death) with a sword, anger at Odin with whom Egil feels out of communion, and also an admission that Odin has blessed him in many ways regardless. Composing the poem allows Egil to process his grief in a healthy way, after which he has no more desire to take his own life. A free (though rather old) translation of Egils Saga by W. C. Green can be found at https://www.sagadb.org/egils_saga.en.

2. See my post “The Thundergod is Humanity’s Hero” for more information and sources on this.

3. A side note: All of this raises an interesting philosophical question, which is, how far can a creative concept deviate from Norse mythology before it is no longer a story about Norse mythology? Most would agree that “The Lord of the Rings” is not a story about Norse mythology. Even if its influence is heavily apparent in Tolkien’s world-building, that world is uniquely his own. But what if Gandalf’s name had been Odin? Would this have been enough to turn it into a story about Norse mythology? What if Aragorn had been named Thor and was given a hammer instead of a sword? What if Tolkien had explicitly claimed that his stories were “based on” Norse mythology? The threshold may be murky but it certainly exists somewhere. It is my opinion that once fundamental premises of the underlying belief system are subverted, storytellers have crossed the line either into original fantasy content or into religious commentary.

4. See my post “The Norse Afterlife Part II” for more information and sources on this.

5. The story as recounted in Skírnismál (a.k.a. Fǫr Skírnis) is that a lovesick Freyr sends his friend/servant Skirnir on a journey to convince Gerd, the object of his affection whom he has only glanced from afar, to join him in a romantic rendezvous. Initially Gerd protests but ultimately she relents after Skirnir threatens her with all sorts of awful, magical curses.

6. Mitchell, Stephen A. "Magic and Religion" The Pre-Christian Religions of the North: History and Structures, vol. II, edited by Jens Peter Schjødt, John Lindow, and Anders Andrén, Brepols, 2020, pp. 657.

7. Brink, Stefan. “How uniform was the old norse religion?” Medieval Texts and Cultures of Northern Europe, Jan. 2007, pp. 105–136, https://doi.org/10.1484/m.tcne-eb.3.4070.

8. See, for example, http://eitridb.com for a catalogue of hundreds of archaeological Mjollnir finds.

9. Clunies Ross, M., “Giants”, The Pre-Christian Religions of the North: History and Structures, vol. II, edited by Jens Peter Schjødt, John Lindow, and Anders Andrén, Brepols, 2020, pp. 1551.

10. The story known as Vǫlsa Þáttr revolves around a pagan family that ritually passes around an embalmed vǫlsi “horse phallus”every evening in the autumn, with each person reciting a poem over it containing the phrase þiggi maurnir þetta blæti “may ‘mǫrnir’ accept this offering”. One evening, the Christian king Olaf II of Norway stops by for a visit in disguise because he has heard of this family’s odd practice and wants to convert them. After dinner, the ritual is performed as usual, but when the phallus is passed to the king, he reveals his true identity, preaches about Christianity, and eventually converts the whole family. A critical problem for properly interpreting this story rests on the meaning of the word mǫrnir which is otherwise unknown and could either be a masculine singular word or a feminine plural. One plausible interpretation is something like “jotun women,” though this interpretation has also been heavily criticized. Additionally, scholars have suggested that this could be a reference to a sword, to a goddess (Vanir or otherwise), to Freyr himself (apparently the most common interpretation among modern scholars), or, as Schjødt prefers, to a localized deity. See: Schjødt, Jens Peter, “Cyclical Rituals”, The Pre-Christian Religions of the North: History and Structures, vol. II, edited by Jens Peter Schjødt, John Lindow, and Anders Andrén, Brepols, 2020, pp. 801-802.

11. Clunies Ross, pp. 1551.

12. Clunies Ross, pp. 1554.

13. Clunies Ross, pp. 1552.

14. Smith, Kevin P., et al. “Ritual responses to catastrophic volcanism in Viking Age iceland: Reconsidering surtshellir cave through bayesian analyses of AMS dates, tephrochronology, and texts.” Journal of Archaeological Science, vol. 126, Feb. 2021, 105316, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2020.105316, pp. 27.

15. Smith et al. 2021, pp. 27.

16. Smith et al. 2021, pp. 27.

17. Smith et al. 2021, pp. 29.

18. Lindow, J., “Fate”, The Pre-Christian Religions of the North: History and Structures, vol. II, edited by Jens Peter Schjødt, John Lindow, and Anders Andrén, Brepols, 2020, pp. 927-950.