Winifred Hodge Rose
This is my consolidated response to a number of related questions about Valhalla and Folkvang, Ragnarök, the God-Homes generally, and the afterlife. I’m addressing the querents as ‘you’ in this text. Here are the topics covered in this article:
On the ‘Criteria of Acceptance’ into Valhalla
There are other God-Halls
What is Ragnarök?
Past and Future Ragnarök Events
Naströnd and ‘Punishment’ in the Afterlife
On the ‘Criteria of Acceptance’ into Valhalla
You’ve about my thoughts on what one might call the ‘criteria of acceptance’ for warriors to enter into Valhalla and Folkvang. You’ve noted that the standards of ‘warrior morality’ in Viking times are quite different than the Geneva Convention standards regarding the conduct of war today, and that in conflicts around the world these modern standards of warfare morality are being disregarded by combatants, to the extent that such warfare seems more like the ‘no holds barred’ behavior of Vikings and other raiders of those times. Yet, as you note, we are told in the old poetry that many of those unrestrained Viking warriors were lauded as heroes and awarded places in Valhalla and Folkvang.
You write: “I have long pondered on the fates of fallen warriors in the modern day. It is said that only the honorable fallen may enter these realms, but what does that mean specifically? ” This is likely a question that many of us wonder about. What was honorable then, many of us may not consider honorable now. Are combatants who engage in acts that are considered dishonorable today still welcomed into the Gods’ halls as they apparently were in the past? What are the ‘criteria of acceptance’ into Valhalla and Folkvang today?
You also wonder whether Christian warriors are accepted into Valhalla along with Heathens. I don’t see this as the case at all, for the sake of the Christians as well as the Heathens. I think Christians would be horrified to end up in a Heathen afterlife, and would very likely simply regard that as being in their Christian Hell, not see it as a reward of any kind. Some Christians have a warrior ethos of their own which apparently doesn’t exclude them from their own God and their own Heaven, even though warrior behavior seems to contradict the teachings of Jesus. I leave them to sort out those contradictions themselves!
And on the Heathen side: what would be the point of accepting Christians? As I’ll get into more when I respond to your main question, I think one of the main criteria for acceptance into the Heathen warrior God-homes is loyalty and devotion to Odin or Freya: loyalty to the point of death, loyalty in spite of the risk of losing the battle, being a ‘failure’, as long as one dies in the process and dedicates one’s efforts and one’s death to one of these Deities. Christians certainly wouldn’t be loyal to our God/desses, and wouldn’t have that motivation to fight for them at Ragnarök, which is the primary motivation for collecting the warrior-ghosts into Valhalla, anyway.
Whenever we see individuals celebrated in the old poetry who are said to be taken into Valhalla, these people are of high status, kings or chieftains or famous warriors. They are not the raff and scaff of the Viking crews raiding and pillaging, but people who in the view of their society held and earned the highest honors, based their deeds, their status, their heritage and descent, and their luck. These people were driven by their sense of honor, which was sometimes quite different than ours today, as you mentioned, but their concept of honor was very much present and motivated much of what they did.
Viking raids abroad were not motivated by honor, but by gain and by the headiness of having power over those they regarded as prey – foreigners outside the frith of their own society. Their own societies didn’t regard this behavior as dishonorable, as we would, but neither was it specifically considered honorable, as vengeance against a personal enemy would be considered honorable. It was just a practical thing that brought them profit. (Though some raids were indeed motivated by vengeance, and those were considered honorable.)
I haven’t come across any mention (though there could be some) of Valkyries ‘harvesting’ the souls of Vikings killed during foreign raids. The Valkyries hover over fields of battle that are being fought for the sake of honor, for vengeance, for trying to raise the status, success and luck of the combatants, and they may well be there to harvest souls from both sides of the battle as acknowledgement that both sides are fighting for their own honor.
There are some passages in the old lore that say that Odin takes all those slain in battle every day, or the one that says he takes half and Freya takes half, whereas in other accounts it sounds like he and the Valkyries are being much more particular, choosing just a few out of the mass of combatants in each conflict. I believe that the latter is more accurate, and the title of “einherjar,” the single or unique warriors, supports that view. The Einherjar are not, really, a massed army, but rather ‘special forces’ that are individually chosen according to the criteria of Odin and the Valkyries (who are not always in agreement). However, I am not a warrior myself, and I may not be understanding the process correctly, but these are my thoughts.
As I see it, the process is one of ‘choice’, not just a godly vacuum-cleaner sucking up the souls of everyone who’s fighting every day and spitting them out into Valhalla and Folkvang. That’s why the Valkyries (or Waelcyrige in Anglo-Saxon) are called what they are: choosers of the slain. They’re picky! And the ones they don’t choose go off to Hel with everyone else, where things might be pleasant and comfortable for them, or might not.
It’s those criteria you’re interested in: why does Odin choose, or direct the Valkyries to choose, one warrior and not the next one, assuming that indeed the Einherjar are chosen individually? I get the impression from your original question that you view the entry into Valhalla or Folkvang as a reward for the chosen warrior, and the old poetry often treats it that way, too. I think the poets did that to flatter their wealthy patrons with visions of the treats awaiting them after their heroic death, and to encourage the warrior-spirit so chieftains would have people eager to join their warbands. If you look at the powerful Sonatorrek poem by that crusty old Heathen, Egil Skallagrimson—who was not a court-poet—that laments the deaths of his sons, you won’t see any praise of Valhalla there. He considers that Odin has stolen his “all-worthy” son from him: “Odin, not Egil, enjoys him forever.”
I think that Valhalla as a ‘reward’ for brave warriors isn’t the actual reason for the existence of Valhalla or for the choice of the Einherjar. For Odin, the reason is preparing for Ragnarök, as I argued before, and for the Einherjar, I believe the reasons for the Einherjar-Ghosts being in Valhalla are their honor and loyalty to Odin, the Æsir, and Odin’s purposes. If the main reason for Valhalla was ‘reward,’ then the Einherjar would simply be mercenaries seeking personal gain, not honor-bound warriors acting from loyalty and dedication. I have more respect than to call the Einherjar ‘mercenaries’! I, and I think many other modern Heathens as well, look at the situation more from Odin’s perspective – he’s recruiting the warriors he needs to prepare for Ragnarök. The fact that there are rewards for the warrior-minded in Valhalla is a nice ‘extra’ but not the main point of its existence.
Now getting into the morality aspect: first I’d suggest that Odin is not really the God to look to, for the details of moral behavior. He has his own morality, which I would characterize as “the ends justify the means,” something that many of us today don’t consider to be the high ground of moral behavior even though it’s often tempting to adopt that approach.
Odin doesn’t try to justify this, but he has his reasons. As I understand it, though he knows that Ragnarök will bring about the deaths of the elder Æsir Gods and destruction of Midgard and its societies, what he wants to do is bring down the enemies that will cause that destruction so that a new cycle of the Worlds can begin, one which does not have these dire enemies looming over it. He will do what it takes to bring that about, and his choice of the Einherjar is one of the tactics he uses. (As to his own role in the arising of those enemies of the Æsir, that’s another whole can of worms!)
There are other God-Halls
I’d like to bring up another point about God-Halls and afterlife locations. In the old lore, as we all know, there was much emphasis on warrior culture and the afterlife of warriors in Valhalla. But in the prose Edda, several other abodes are mentioned in connection with Odin, including Gladsheim, Vingolf, and Valaskjalf, where his high seat Hliðskjalf was said to be located. It’s not very clear; in one reference Vingolf is the hall of the Goddesses together, in another it’s one of Odin’s halls. Gladsheim, too, is in one context said to be a central location for all the Gods, in another it’s one of Odin’s places.
Actually, it all makes sense to me: the Gods and Goddesses often gather together for feasts and meetings, so why shouldn’t some of their places be considered as much gathering-places as any individual Deity’s abodes? But where I’m going with this is that I believe Odin has one or more other Halls, other than Valhalla, where people who’ve worked closely with Odin in ways other than fighting may choose to gather in the afterlife.
I see Valaskjalf in particular as one of those, named for the Vala, the powers of the Seers. It’s the location of his high seat where he sees, ponders, and learns much of his wisdom – and which, it is said, he shares with Frigg. I think that people who follow Odin’s path of wisdom rather than the path of the warrior may find a good afterlife home in Valaskjalf, or in Gladsheim, or Vingolf – the Hall of Friends (vin = friend).
The selection of the Einherjar and the Folkvang warriors needs to change, to prepare in a suitable way for whatever form of Ragnarök is coming next. And not only those warriors. Odin boasts in Grimnismal 24 (Poetic Edda) that Thor’s hall is the greatest of all, even larger than Valhalla, which contains fighters as well. I write some thoughts about the dwellers in that Hall in my article about Sif and the Hall she shares with Thor: Goddess Sif: Kinship and Hospitality.
In another article, To Honor Vidar, I quote a powerful poem written by modern Heathen John Mainer about Vidar, which gives a picture of a different ‘hall of waiting’ for warriors chosen by Vidar.
Frigg and her ladies have great roles to play in situations of disruption and chaos, as diplomats, frithweavers, and ones who pick up and mend broken pieces; so do the Ghosts of Heathens who head to their Halls to join their work. Tyr, through the Tyr-star that guides us over the paths of night, as the rune-poem says, points out a trustworthy path for those who would work with the Gods. All of our Deities have their teams of partners and human afterlife souls who support their work and aims in Midgard through spiritual means. They don’t remain fixed in the past, focused on things that might or might not have much relevance for today.
What is Ragnarök?
So let’s move on to the modern day, and the question as to whether the criteria of acceptance into Valhalla have changed. I’ll offer a scenario and a response to this question that might or might not make sense to anyone else. Odin and the Valkyries choose the Einherjar for a reason: their potential effectiveness at Ragnarök. So…what is Ragnarök – the Ragnarök that is coming next? Has the understanding of the nature of Ragnarök changed over time, along with so much else? And if it has, then the role of the Einherjar changes too, and hence the criteria for selecting them also have to change.
I propose this way of looking at it: Ragnarök is the symbol of a dire threat to the world, a massive change in the circumstances of living and in the things one believes and trusts. It’s as much an ‘inner’ thing as an ‘outer’ one. Various cultures and societies and locations of humans have experienced Ragnarök-equivalents many times over the centuries and millennia: effectively their own cultural world comes to a terrible end, the world they always knew before, even though the physical world continues in its existence. Though indeed there are often physical disasters too: floods, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, wildfire, famine, and the like. Climate change, too, and all that results from it. Such disasters happen all the time around the world. Sadly and awfully, it’s happening right now to various groups of people. It’s sometimes heralded by the death of a culture hero, like Baldr for the Heathens.
Different people respond differently to these events, and their religions play a role in shaping these responses. I suggest that the role of Odin and Valhalla, and Freya and Folkvang too — and in fact all the other Deities as well, who are much involved with all this — is to prepare for such changes as these ‘cultural Ragnaröks’ bring. Changes for them, for the Deities, and changes for us humans, for Heathens specifically, and for the natural world as well.
So, I think that the selection today of warriors for Valhalla, for Folkvang, and as teams and partners for the other Deities too, needs to take into account whatever form of ‘Ragnarök’ may be coming next. The thing is, we don’t know what shape that will take, nor what kinds of responses the Holy Ones may be preparing to deal with it. Here, I’d say, is where some trust comes in: trust that we Heathens and all our Deities can align our values and ethics to fit both the Gods’ visions and our own about what is right, as these matters play out in today’s world with all of today’s challenges and confusions.
We need to follow and live by our own values, and interact with our Holy Ones to understand their views, their actions, and their choices. And thereby we find and trust in the common ground, the frith, that unites us all. Ethics and values grow out of a ground of frith, and support that frith. While we live in Midgard, the Gods expect us to accomplish this creation and maintenance of frith and the values that support it ourselves; they don’t impose it on us with commandments and direct punishments as other Deities do with their followers. We need to have the intelligence and goodwill to take this pursuit of frith seriously, knowing that it’s our responsibility but that the Gods respect us for our efforts, and will meet us on that path of mutual understanding.
Past and Future Ragnarök Events
A number of modern Heathens I know, and I as well, consider “Ragnarök” to be a cyclical event. Some great devastation occurs that may include both human cultural devastation as well as various forms of natural disasters. The fall of the Roman Empire and of Byzantium. The Bubonic Plague in Europe and the East. Invasions and colonization of one conquering culture over another culture that happen around the globe time and again, involving many different peoples. These kinds of disasters often involve radical changes of religion as well, for example the Native American Ghost Dance movement in response to the destruction of their religions and cultures by invading Europeans. The word Ragnarök refers to the doom of the Gods, the Regin, the Rulers, but humans and Midgard are connected with their fates as well.
I think, and I know some Heathens who agree with this, that the Ragnarök that is described so powerfully at the end of the Völuspa is an event that already happened: it describes in symbolic terms the tumultuous events of the conversion of Heathen lands and peoples to Christianity, and the years of Christian hegemony and the imposition of its imperial power. This is certainly something that affected our God/desses and religion as well as mundane life, political power, and everything else. (I write about some aspects of that time and the role of wyrd / orlog and the Norns, in my article Webs of Luck and Wyrd: Interplays and Impacts on Events.)
Holy Baldr was killed and went to dwell in Hel; Nanna joined him there. Njorð heads off to Vanaheim, apparently deciding to sit this one out, though his son Frey joins the Æsir forces (maybe Freya does, too). The other elder male Æsir die during Ragnarök, taking their foes with them. I assume that they, like Baldr and Nanna, go to some otherworld realm of waiting. Much fighting of forces occurs, then a conflagration. Earth sinks under the sea, out of the light of sun and moon. There is an age, now, where silence reigns about the old things, the old ways and beliefs – they are forcibly or willingly shoved underground, into the subconscious.
But then the Earth rises again, out from the sea. Tokens of the old times are found by the younger Gods who survived Ragnarök, and presumably the Goddesses too. Baldr and presumably Nanna return. Hoenir casts the rune-tines anew. Vidar, Vali, and Hoðr, Magni and Modi, Thruðr too, are younger Gods who inherit the ‘windy world.’ A new world arises, a new time where God/desses and Heathens renew their knowledge of each other, their ties, their customs, their beliefs. We all crawl out of the underworld, so to speak, into the light of day. The other Gods return, as Baldr does, from whatever other World they went to after their deaths. The old cycle of Ragnarök spirals around on itself and another spiral begins.
But unlike in the poem, symbolic and poetic, the old / existing world is still here — before, during, and after Ragnarök — still with some issues the old Heathens dealt with plus many, many more we’ve generated in modern times. The Ragnarök that comes next may not involve hand-to-hand combat with giants and monstrous beings, wolves and phantoms from Hel. Though of course it could involve them: the issues and problems of our world could take those shapes again.
Where I’m going with this is that I think we who live in this world today can see many dangerous issues, situations, precedents developing across the board – everything from how children are influenced as they grow up today, to changing world orders, to climate change, to the fact that when life becomes intolerable and impossible for them, people and animals and plants do what they have always done: try to migrate to a new and better place to live. But those places are taken now; the world is crowded, resources are scarce, and many conflicts arise.
I don’t have to go on; we’re all familiar with these lists. The point is: our next Ragnarök may require other skills in addition to those of the physical warrior. I’m sure that Odin and the other Deities are well aware of this and are taking steps accordingly, in terms of human souls they recruit or welcome to their Halls, and train to help them in the afterlife. (Though I am not saying that preparing for the next Ragnarök is all that God/desses and Ghosts in the afterlife are doing; there are many more purposes and activities as well.)
In this broader picture of the roles of human Ghosts in the afterlife, I see every God/dess and God-Hall as having something to contribute. Like Thor’s huge Hall that holds the farmers, the crafts-folk, the everyday workers who keep life running, the fathers and mothers who give everything to support their families, the practical-minded and stout-hearted backbone of human society. Tyr and his focus on law and lawful assemblies, and the power to keep them lawful and frithful. Frigg’s Hall where she and her Ladies offer so much support with the skills and graces and healing of everyday social and family life, and powerful love in all its forms. And on and on, each of the Deities and their followers playing their own roles. Where would we be without all these? We often feel that all these great powers of human life are crumbling and we need help to restore them here in Midgard.
The point is, many new skills, and older skills that have dropped out of sight, may be needed – really, they already are needed – as the next challenges of human life and the rumblings of the next Ragnarök develop. Honorable folk of all kinds, not only warriors, will be needed – are needed, each one loyally offering the gifts they have to offer and working with the Holy Ones whose focus and skills they share. I hope that my own skills of wordcraft and idea-craft will also be useful in their own way, however they transform as I arrive in the God-realms!
That’s my picture of what cyclical Ragnarök is, and the roles of the God/desses, and our Ghosts or Spirits who can support and work with them, each of us in our own best ways, for the good of all.
Naströnd and ‘Punishment’ in the Afterlife
As part of this discussion that includes ethics and the afterlife, I’m glad to respond to a question with thoughts about Naströnd, but have to emphasize that these are my ideas and may or may not be entirely in agreement either with ancient or modern Heathens!
In my understanding of Heathen values and ethics, and of how our pursuit of these relates to metaphysical realms and the afterlife, I see much less emphasis on “punishment” than others might see. There was great emphasis in ancient Heathen times on “vengeance,” and to the modern mind there may be little difference between the two. I think there are subtle differences, however, that have metaphysical consequences. I write more about this in my article Threads of Wyrd and Scyld, in the section “Step 2: Paying your Shild.”
To put it very briefly, vengeance is meant to rebalance a situation where one’s honor and hamingja have been damaged by someone else’s deeds, along with whatever other harm occurred. Wergild can serve as such a rebalancing mechanism, where the wergild reinstates the lost hamingja and honor by its intrinsic value. Blood vengeance, though obviously problematic, was valued more for the reinstatement of their concept of honor—“honor has been satisfied” by a duel or by winning a fight—than it was considered actual punishment.
We can see this is true by understanding that to the old Norse, secretive killing of someone was defined as murder and was considered dishonorable no matter the circumstances. If ‘punishment’ was sufficient to reinstate honor and hamingja, it wouldn’t matter if the perpetrator was punished by being secretly murdered, but it did matter, very much. No honor was gained thereby, but only dishonor. Honor could only be regained by honorable vengeance, not punishment by any means.
(I am emphatically NOT suggesting that these particular notions of honor should rule us today–there are huge and obvious problems here; I’m just trying to hone in on conceptual distinctions between vengeance and punishment in elder times.)
Punishment such as imprisonment could not serve the metaphysical purposes of vengeance: imprisonment reinstates nothing, gives nothing back to those who have lost hamingja and honor and have been harmed by the crime. Vengeance, especially in the form of imposing wergild, is an act or a deed that has results within a Heathen metaphysical view of things. Punishment, especially as implemented by imprisonment in Midgard or in an afterlife world of punishment, is not a deed in a metaphysical sense; it is a negative state of being that has no positive results for any of the people involved. Obviously, it does prevent the perpetrator from committing more crimes, but I’m speaking of metaphysical acts and consequences here. Again, please note that I am not at all advocating vengeance, I’m simply clarifying some elder-times metaphysical principles!
For me, this idea carries over into concepts of the afterlife. Honestly: what is the point of punishing people in perpetuity in the afterlife? It achieves nothing. I realize that this concept is used in many religions to scare people into behaving themselves according to the religion’s ethics. But let’s look at this as Heathens: is behaving a certain way, just because you’re scared of what will happen to you in the afterlife if you don’t, really consistent with a Heathen worldview, values, way of life?
To me, it is not: we should not be motivated by fear, but by aspirations. Namely, we want positive reinforcement (aspirations, honor, reputation) rather than negative reinforcement (fear of punishment) to power the virtuous Heathen life. I do think that if we look at all the old poetry we’ll see that this perspective is, indeed, a truly Heathen one. Ancient Heathen heroes were not motivated by fear, but by aspirations, by the pursuit of what was, to them, honor and glory, a shining reputation, status in their community, and all the rewards that come with them. And, importantly, hamingja and luck, as well. The rewards meant much more than the threat of punishment.
If Beowulf did everything that he did out of fear of punishment if he failed to do so, would the old Heathens have revered him as a hero? Or would we? The mere idea is laughable!
I think that the imposition of punishment is very much more a Christian thing than a Heathen thing. Christian life in medieval times was full of rules governing every tiny aspect of life, and punishments for disobeying them (even unwittingly). Which doesn’t mean there was no punishment in Heathen life – of course there was. But for smaller transgressions the punishment was a lessening or loss of the respect and status, the honor and glory, of the perpetrator. For the worst transgressions, it was being cast out as an outlaw, or being killed. It wasn’t being locked up forever in some awful place, in Midgard or in the afterlife. What they were really doing was very practical: reducing the person’s influence on the community, in cases of lesser misdeeds, and removing the person from the community entirely, for greater misdeeds. They were not simply inflicting punishment for the sake of punishment.
Do I think there are consequences for wrongdoing, in this life and the afterlife? Yes, I do, but I think it is the Norns and orlog that impose those consequences, not an afterlife place of punishment. Evil deeds bring evil consequences, sometime, some way. Unworthy deeds lack significance; they don’t matter, they are nothing, and if our life consists of unworthy deeds or no deeds of worth at all, then it counts for nothing, it is meaningless, we lay no layers in the Well of Wyrd. This is what the old Heathens were most afraid of. I think the ultimate consequence for the worst of misdeeds and failures-to-act in Heathenism is erasure: it is Wyrd and the Deities and posterity ignoring that person and that life out of existence, not endless, pointless punishment.
So what about Naströnd? Well, Naströnd is the ‘strand or beach of corpses.’ They’re dead. People in Hel aren’t dead; they’re not ‘alive’ in Midgard terms, but they have existence, and they interact with the living in Midgard. I don’t believe in the gloomy portrayal of everyone in Hel that Snorri and other old poets and writers gave us; I think that it was overly influenced by Christianity and by the literary style of moral allegories used at that time. And for that matter, simply influenced by what physical graves and burials look like: wet, cold, muddy, miserable, decaying, horrible. Hel isn’t a physical place, and it isn’t the analog of the grave, either. And it’s not a place of punishment; it’s the place of the ancestors, the natural residence of souls / Saiwalos.
Naströnd is somewhere else, something else; it’s not the same as Hel. It’s the place of corpses, where even souls are dead and decaying. I don’t, honestly, put much credence in Naströnd myself. But if it does exist, those soul-corpses are what happens when we live life after life in total worthlessness, not achieving or trying to achieve or even dreaming of achieving anything worthwhile by any measure of worthiness. Where we care for nothing and want to care for nothing, not even ourselves. Where we empty ourselves of all good and choose paths of ill and harm and ugliness and poison and debasement solely for their own sakes, not even with the mistaken notion that they will lead to some kind of good.
If Naströnd does exist, I think that only the ultimate levels of evil or abysmal and irreparable unworthiness would send souls there to decay, not human weaknesses like adultery or oath-breaking. Those have their consequences, laying dire orlog for us, to be sure, and those consequences must be endured and repaid, but not as a corpse in Naströnd.
There may be a number of people, at any given point of time, who are living in that kind of state in Midgard. But I have my doubts that they persist in these ways life after life – assuming that reincarnation does occur – and never, ever, learn anything from experiencing these lives in Midgard, any learning or experience that drags them out of that state into at least a slightly better one. There is a great deal of hard learning that occurs in Midgard lives, without needing to resort to entire afterworlds devoted to perpetual punishment.
Oath-breaking, adultery, and murder received plenty of punishment in Midgard, for that matter, among people whose lives and wellbeing really depended on their community and on their reputation in their community. The fear of Midgard-consequences for one’s misbehavior is a very valid one that can serve to prevent such misdeeds for many. If one is motivated by true honor and worthiness – in the eyes of one’s community, the Deities, and Heathens in general – then I don’t see the need for any additional motivation from fear of Nastrond and the like.
I think that the questions many of us ask about the values that guide one into the God-Homes arise from the root of a longing for frith among humans, and frith between humans and Deities. We want to have a sense of values and to know those values are shared with others, humans and Deities, both. By asking these deep questions and pursuing the answers as well as we can, we help to create that common ground of understanding among us all.