Saiwalo, Dwimor and Hel #2
Winifred Hodge Rose
“As souls (psyches) are born through the death of water, water is born through the death of earth. And as water comes into being from earth, so from water does the soul.”
Heraklitos (Heraclitus, ancient Greek philosopher) fragment DKB 36 (my translation).
Here I will explore the fascinating connections between the Saiwalo soul and water: water in the form of the sea, lakes, marshes, ponds and wells. I will also look at the connections between various Deities associated with water, and discuss their links with our Saiwalo soul.
Where does ‘Saiwalo’ come from?
Primitive Germanic *saiwalo; Gothic saiwala; Old Saxon seola, siola; Angelseax sawol, sawl; Old High German seula, sele; Old Frisian sele; Old Frankish sela; Old Norse sal (a later word borrowed from Old English).
The etymology of the word ‘soul’, from Proto-Germanic *Saiwalo, is not firmly established, but its most likely source is from the old Germanic word root for ‘sea’, *saiws, saiwi-z, saiwa-z, and this is what we’ll be exploring here. It adds to the challenge, that the etymology of ‘sea’ is even more obscure! I’ve read a number of different derivations of this word. Many philologists, but not all, conclude its root was borrowed from a non-Indo-European language. But the etymologist A. Liberman writes that: “According to some indications, the protoform from which saiws and its cognates were derived sounded approximately like saikwi-. Probably saikwi- and its Indo-European ancestor soigwi– designated a body of stagnant water…” (He is using ‘stagnant’ in the sense of ‘still’ here, a lake rather than the moving ocean.) (https://blog.oup.com/2009/10/watered-down-etymologies/). I find in Watkins’ Indo-European Roots dictionary that seikw meant “to flow out,” which would make sense. So this is a possible Indo-European root, but as I said, many scholars think ‘sea’ may stem from a loan-word, which for us here, further confuses the source of the word ‘soul’ deriving from ‘sea.’
Another layer of confusion arises, due to the changes in meaning of the word ‘sea’ and its Germanic relatives. There is another word-root for the meaning of ‘sea’, namely mar-. In Gothic it was mari, in modern German Meer, in English an old-fashioned word mere, in the Celtic languages mor, in Latin mare. In English, ‘sea’ means ‘ocean’ and ‘mere’ is a lake. In German, ‘Meer’ means ‘ocean’, while ‘See’ is a lake or inland sea; Gothic is the same with ‘mari’ as the ocean, ‘saiws’ probably as a lake or inland sea. Old Norse has saer and sjor meaning the sea, especially with respect to sea-related personal names and names of sea-related things, even though they also have haf meaning the ocean. So, assuming that we accept the general idea that *saiwalo the soul comes from *saiws, a body of water, there is still the question of ‘what kind of water body’, and what does this mean for our understanding of ‘soul’?
This is very often what happens as we search for roots of words, in my case, Germanic soul-words: academic study takes us up to a point, and then leaves us hanging there! Academics are supposed to stop when the evidence runs out, but modern Heathen soul-practitioners are not limited thereby! I have found a very fine scholarly analysis by Josef Weisweiler, an older article but very linguistically detailed, that I find offers the most meaningful and satisfactory insight into ‘soul and sea’ that I’ve come across. I have enough basic linguistic knowledge to understand Weisweiler’s arguments, but not enough to know whether there are better ones that would refute him, though he details a number of counter-arguments himself. In any case, I find that Weisweiler’s insights offer a very enriching perspective for understanding Germanic Saiwalo-soul, and I choose to follow his path into this knowledge. In the following section I summarize his findings, with additions from myself and other authors, as noted.
Weisweiler’s Exploration of *Saiwalo
Weisweiler bases much of his argument on a Saami word for one of the souls: saiva, saivo (I’ve seen this spelled Sajva online, and other spellings as well). (Note: Weisweiler, writing in 1940, used the word ‘Lappish’ to refer to this language, but the people who speak it prefer the term Saami, so I will use that here except in direct quotations.) Saami is a non-Indo-European language spoken by nomadic peoples whose range covers northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. According to many studies conducted over several centuries, the Saami adopted and modified a number of words, Deities, and other beliefs from their Germanic-speaking neighbors during the centuries of contact they have shared. Among them is likely the word saivo, saiva. According to Weisweiler, this word has somewhat different meanings, which he understands to be related, among different branches of the Saami. In the northern Sami area, it means a freshwater lake, and is combined to form names of certain freshwater fish and birds.
Among the western and southern Saami, the regions where they would have interacted the most with people of Norse culture, saiva or saivo means a ‘holy or sacred lake’. These lakes are understood to be full of fat fish, but strangely, these holy lakes are divided into an upper layer of the lake, and a lower, separated by a lake-floor in between, which has a ‘smoke-hole’ or access hole in it. These ‘two-bottomed lakes’ are also known in Swedish folklore. At times the fish appear in the upper lake, at times they disappear to the lower. Many practices from Saami lore and folk-religion focus on satisfying the Deities or spirits who control the access and behavior of the fish between the upper and lower layers, so as to have access to rich fishing. Offerings were made at significant locations near these lakes, generally large boulders or hills, and these were called ‘saiva-stones, saiva-mountains, etc.’
There was a belief, especially in southern Sami territory, that many kinds of spirits lived in these sacred saiva-areas: Huldren / elves, souls and spirits, underworld beings in the form of humans. Underworld was the territory of the Ancestors, who had the power to grant luck, prosperity, and fertile sources of food. These ancestral spirits were also called ‘saivo’, and Saami customs were heavily focused on interaction with their saivo-ancestors. Some saivo-spirits, both humans and sacred animals, become tutelary or warding spirits, much treasured by Saami shamans or noaidi. Saivo or Sajvo are considered to be holy and well-meaning humans and certain animals, while the general world of the dead, jabmi-aimo, also includes ill-intentioned and dangerous spirits.
Weisweiler follows this with about eight pages of linguistic discussion, drawing on many other scholars, showing that saivo is a loan-word from Proto-Germanic. In agreement with a number of other linguistic and folklore scholars, he points to the influence of Proto-Germanic language on Saami, going back to the Bronze Age before the separation of Proto-Germanic into different language branches. Significantly, they conclude that the Germanic root of saivo came from this very early period of influence, based on the morphology of both the Germanic *saiwalo and related words, as well as Sami saivo / saiva. In particular, it is clear that saivo was borrowed from the Proto-Germanic word *saiwalo, not from the later Norse soul-word sal, which was itself borrowed from Anglo-Saxon during the conversion to Christianity.
(It is baffling why the word saiwalo and its expected descendants dropped out of Proto-Norse at some point, while being retained in all the other Germanic languages from Proto-Germanic times up to the present day. If saiwalo was indeed a loan-word, that could be explained by saying that some branches of the Germanic tribes encountered the culture from whom they borrowed the word, but not other branches. Except that the word was borrowed into Proto-Germanic, before the Germanic languages split off from each other, so that explanation doesn’t work. Weisweiler discusses these issues, without coming to any firm conclusions.)
Weisweiler looks at the construction of saiwalo as a diminutive form meaning ‘belonging to the sea (lake),’ saiws, paralleling the construction of other words such as eichila, ‘little oak, or belonging to the oak’, meaning an acorn, and armilo meaning ‘sleeve’, something that belongs to the arm, and many other such words. Thus, saiwalo would mean ‘belonging to the sea’, or more poetically in German, ‘sea-daughter’, since saiwalo is a feminine noun. A good Germanic-type word I made up for the same idea is ‘sea-ling’, the little one from the sea.
Weisweiler links this back to the saivo-spirits, men, women, and children: the ancestral dead, the dwellers inside the holy mountain, the huldre-folk or elves, and spirit / power-animals. As he remarks, “These (beings), and everything else that belongs to the Lapp. saiva-concept of the ‘holy lake’, stand in the closest relationship to beliefs about the dead and the soul” (p. 43). He notes the commonality of these beliefs with those of their Scandinavian neighbors: two-bottomed lakes, huldre-folk, the dead (and other spirits) dwelling within mountains, rocks, and water-bodies, the ability of these spirits to provide luck and protection, and Scandinavian beliefs about lakes as the dwelling of souls.
Though Weisweiler does not discuss this, I would add the many Heathen connections with bogs and marshes here, as sites of offerings, sacrifices, and God-posts. The connection also shows in the name of Frigg’s holy hall, Fensalir or ‘fen-halls,’ ‘fen’ meaning a marshy area, and Saga’s hall Sokkvabek, meaning ‘sunken benches.’ The connection with Ran’s hall where she takes the souls of the drowned is also obvious. Weisweiler does bring up the Norns in a footnote, briefly noting that they live near a lake or water body called ‘sae’ in Voluspa v. 20, though in the previous verse it is called a wellspring, ‘brunn’, and linking them with later beliefs about where children come from (p. 44n).
Weisweiler quotes Olrik and Ellekilde, explaining that the Scandinavian belief in an ancestral dwelling-place of the dead within a nearby mountain shows up only occasionally during the Viking period, and has no connection with Elf-beliefs. They conclude that the Saami beliefs, and their adopted word saivo that goes with it, dates back to Bronze Age practices and beliefs that they held in common with their Scandian neighbors, about an ‘elf-world’ or ancestor-world within mountains and other landscape features, where the newly dead return to their ancestors, and then become protecting spirits of the living. All of these scholars conclude that the concepts relating to saivo were borrowed in very early times, before the Germanic languages split off from each other. This goes along with the linguistic evidence of saivo being borrowed from *saiwalo rather than from a later form of the word. In other words, both linguistic analysis and analysis of beliefs about the dead lead to the same conclusions. (p. 45-6.)
Weisweiler goes on to say that other Germanic lands outside of Scandinavia have beliefs about lakes or pools as the dwellings of the dead, in the form of ‘bottomless lakes’ that lead down to hell. Even more widespread are the beliefs that unborn children are found in bodies of water, from which they are ‘fished out.’ This is where the folk-belief that storks bring babies comes from (I would suggest, babies’ souls rather than the physical baby): these long-legged wading birds fish the babies out of ponds or marshes, and deliver them to their parents. Weisweiler mentions the Hollen-Teich, Frau Holle’s Pond, in this context, along with many other locations in Germany having their own ‘Kinderwasser’ or ‘children-water’ which holds (the souls of) unborn children. These ‘waters’ can be lakes, ponds, or well-springs. He quotes Kummer, who makes this very interesting observation: “Beliefs about where children come from do not stand under the sign of a heathen God-figure, but rather under the sign of a heathen conception about the origins of soul-life” (p. 49).
Weisweiler sums up his conclusions in this way:
“Comparing these German folk-belief remnants with the northern images of lakes as homes of souls, and with the Lappish saiva-beliefs, results in this: the (proto) Germans who had not split up into individual peoples saw certain ‘holy’ water bodies as dwellings of souls. Within or underneath such lakes, the unborn awaited the moment of their birth, and thence returned the souls of the dead to the others (the other dead). In this way the proto-German…*saiwa-lo, ‘the one from the sea / lake, the one belonging to the sea / lake’, is constructed from *saiwa-z (holy) sea / lake” (p. 49-50).
The Online Etymology Dictionary quotes the Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology, that the root of ‘soul’ means ‘coming from or belonging to the sea’ because that was supposed to be the stopping place of the soul before birth or after death, assuming that the word derives from *saiwalo. It also draws from Klein’s A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language: *saiwaz meaning ‘from the lake’ as a dwelling place for souls in ancient Europe. I suspect both these sources drew from Weisweiler. Wikipedia on soul-etymology offers the same information, along with English ideas about holy wells.
Other Folklore about Souls and Water
Here are some more images relating to souls, soul-powers, and water.
“(Holda / Holle) loves to haunt the lake and fountain; at the hour of noon she may be seen, a fair white lady, bathing in the flood and disappearing; a trait in which she resembles Nerthus. Mortals, to reach her dwelling, pass through the well” (Grimm p. 268).
Grimm’s mention of Nerthus is apt here, too: all those who lay eyes on her, save her priests, must be drowned, that is, they are sent to her domain by means of drowning.
“Children falling into wells pass through green meadows to the house of friendly Holle” (Grimm p. 822). “Newborn babes are fetched by the nurse out of Dame Holle’s pond” (Grimm, note p. 268).
According to folklore from the German lands, newborn children (or their souls) are brought from trees, cabbage-fields, wellsprings, ponds, water, also cliffs and boulders. (Compare this list with the Sami beliefs about saivo-locations.) They are brought from these places by various entities; the stork is the most widespread, but also the Water-man or Wasserman can bring the babes. (Erich & Beitl p. 409.) In German language-speaking areas, Wasserman is one of the most widespread images, and also appears in children’s games and songs (Erich & Beitl p. 858). “The water man (Wasserman), like Hel and Ran, keeps with him the souls of them that have perished in the water, in pots turned upside down…but a peasant visiting him tilts them up, and in a moment the souls all mount up through the water” (Grimm p. 496). “In some German lakes (‘See’ in German) the dead wait”, and the Bretons, too, regard lakes and ponds as dwelling-places of the dead (Weisweiler p. 47).
I have a thought here: the Christian practice of baptism may perhaps have been relatively acceptable to Heathens because of their own beliefs about the soul and water. Heathen belief would have tied in to the image of dipping the baby in the baptismal font: drawing the baby out of the water would have perfectly imitated their ideas about drawing babies / souls out of the water, with the priest in place of the stork! As an aside here, the image of a stork drawing our soul from the water, perhaps from Holle’s Pond or from Fensalir, and flying over the airs of Midgard can be fruitfully used for Heathen meditations on soul-cleansing and renewal.
In Norse lore, of course there is the sea-Goddess Ran, who keeps the souls of those who have drowned. Ship-symbols, and ships themselves, are common burial motifs in northern Germanic lands, and there are many tales throughout the Germanic lands about ships of the dead, and ships carrying souls, elves, and wights off into otherworlds. There is a very large body of material relating to ships, the dead, the Otherworlds, and Deities associated with them, especially the northern German Goddess Nehalennia. There is also the beautiful imagery toward the end of Voluspa (Poetic Edda), where the Earth sinks into the sea during Ragnarök, and after it is over, Earth rises again from the waves, eternally green and renewed. This is indeed an image of death and rebirth through water, as well.
All of these matters I’ve written about so far should be enough to establish a firm connection between water and the Saiwalo-soul! Now, let’s add a dash of salt to the mix. I’m going to leave the research and lore domains now, and turn to my own thoughts about Saiwalo, linking it with Njordh’s domain, and with my article Hel-Dweller, available on this website. The image of the soul in that article seemingly bears no resemblance to the imagery in this article, so it’s time to pursue that riddle, too.
A Dash of Salt
I am no more than an armchair alchemist, but I’ll put on an alchemist’s hat for a few minutes here. Salt is a primary substance in alchemy, both literally and symbolically. Salt represents condensation and crystallization that results in the body and physical matter. Mineral salts are what remain after alchemical processes of combustion and purification, after all else has been dissolved away. These salts hold within themselves the seeds and crystalline patterns of new earthly life, new physical shapes and functions. Hagalaz, a rune associated with Hel, represents this salty, crystalline seed-shape. Combined with Ingwaz rune, another crystalline shape, they hold all potential within themselves.
All of the material I discussed above refers to the connection between the Saiwalo soul and sweet or fresh water-bodies, and there’s lots of evidence for that. But anyone who has seen the sea has, I think, felt how that endless, restless, salty, mysterious expanse of water echoes something deep within all of us: the unknown, dimly-seen, protean, shape-shifting water-being that lies within our own depths, or within whose depths we ourselves lie. Have you ever listened to recordings of whale-songs? Sonorous, eerie, long drawn-out undersea echoes….these are the songs of the soul, of Saiwalo.
I believe that Saiwalo partakes of the nature of salt water and of the sea. Salt water is heavier and denser than fresh water, and layers itself underneath lighter lenses of freshwater. This reflects the double-bottomed lake of Scandinavian folklore; I envision the bottom layer of these holy lakes as denser salt water, the top layer as lighter fresh water, as often occurs in nature where aquifers are near the sea, and deeper salt water intrudes underneath the lens of freshwater.
I think that Saiwalo is a deep-dwelling being, rooted in its ecosystem, which is Hel. I think that the flitting shades or phantoms of the dead, which are referred to in the Germanic languages using words derived from Saiwalo, are actually image-projections sent out from these Hel-dwelling Saiwalo beings. I call these images Dwimors, from Anglo-Saxon gedwimor, meaning a phantom or apparition, to distinguish them from Saiwalo itself for purposes of discussion, though I see Saiwalo and Dwimor as one being in essence.
Here is my vision: when Saiwalo is ready to send forth a new Dwimor-phantom into Midgard to form the spindle around which the other souls will gather, it begins an alchemical process. It separates out the salt from itself, which condenses and crystallizes into the Dwimor, the phantom that Saiwalo projects into Midgard as our earthly soul, who bears our unique physical image. The beings whom I discuss in my previous Saiwalo article “Hel-Dweller” are Dwimor-phantoms, either after-death phantoms, or phantom forms of still-living beings who are experiencing a temporary, altered state of awareness rooted in their own Saiwalo / Dwimor.
Returning to Saiwalo’s alchemical creation of its Dwimor: Saiwalo sends up a fountain, which is salt at its lower level, then at the upper level separates into a salt-being, a crystallized soul-image, floating on an upwelling tide of sweet water. Though I didn’t include details in my Weisweiler summary, there are a number of species of fish and water-birds whose names include the saivo-root. This mirrors the action of the Dwimor, condensed and sent forth from Saiwalo, rising through a fountain of sweet water as a saivo-fish rises through the sacred saivo-lake.
That sweet water of Saiwalo’s upper extension wells up into Holle’s Well or Pond, carrying with it the crystallized Dwimor, Saiwalo’s projection into Midgard, for Holle to draw out of her Well. She takes this Dwimor-spindle and twirls it, and the threads of our other souls wrap themselves around it, conforming to the Dwimor, the phantom image which Saiwalo projects into Midgard as a pattern for a new, unique being.
Here I’ll bring in the fascinating Heraklitos fragment I quoted at the beginning: “As souls (psyches) are born through the death of water, water is born through the death of earth. And as water comes into being from earth, so from water does the soul.” Though he was a Greek philosopher, not a Germanic one, I think this enigmatic thinker has a lot to say to us here. Heraklitos is described as the first Greek to develop the idea of Psyche as the complete, living human soul (Snell p. 17). Psyche is the Greek word that Wulfila, the translator of the Christian Bible into the Gothic language, rendered as Saiwala in Gothic.
I see this enigmatic saying of Heraklitos as a way of describing the process of the Saiwalo soul rising through Holle’s Well. First there is elemental earth, and this serves as a metaphor for Hel, the Hidden Land that lies below the surface of the Earth. In its center, earth ‘dies’ and transforms into elemental water, thus becoming a water-well surrounded and contained by earth. This serves as a metaphor for Saiwalo, a watery being dwelling in earthy Hel, which reaches up toward Holle’s Well. Then the water in the center of the well ‘dies’ and is transformed into a soul surrounded by water, a metaphor for our Dwimor: our earthly soul-image condensed from, and projected by, our watery Saiwalo in the form of a phantom.
The Greek philosopher leaves it at that: from earth, to water, to soul. The Germanic visionary brings in the lovely figure of Frau Holle as the tender midwife of the soul, drawing it from the water into her sheltering arms. Holle places this soul-image, the Dwimor, which was born through the ‘death’ or transformation of elemental Saiwalo-water, into a mother’s womb. There it gestates and condenses further, while surrounded again by the waters of the womb. Thus Saiwalo’s Dwimor becomes fully rooted in a solid body and is born into the earthly plane, together with its complement of the other souls. As I see it, Saiwalo itself remains in Hel, but is tied to, and in communication with, its earthly body through its projection, the Dwimor-phantom, which is also called by ‘soul’ words in the various Germanic languages.
Salt / Sweet, Grasping / Giving
Here’s an interesting thing to think about. Hella and Ran are both said to hold tightly to the souls in their domains and never let them go, though it’s also said that if drowned men (their Dwimors) appear at their own funeral, it is a sign that Ran has received them well (see Eyrbyggja Saga ch. LIV). Contrast this with Frau Holle, whose name stems from the same root as Hel’s name. But unlike hard-grasping Hel and Ran, Holle gives back. It is through her own pond or well-spring, and her own blessed hands, that the souls of newborn children arise into Midgard. There is the implication here of an endless cycle of life and death and life again: souls flowing back and forth through Holle’s hands and her Well of life and death. (For more of this imagery, see my meditation on The Hallow-Streaming.)
Let’s look at this process of grasping versus giving from an alchemical perspective, as is appropriate for Saiwalo, an alchemical being in my understanding. Salt is a strong attractor of water: it absorbs water and holds onto it, as happens in our salt-shaker during humid weather. Only by the application of fire (heat and dryness) will salt release the water it has absorbed. Salt water is heavy, dense, and deep, and only beings who are fully adapted to it can live in a salt-water environment. Likewise Saiwalo, unlike our other souls, is adapted to function in Hel.
Sweet water, by contrast, is an essential requirement for all earthly life, except for the lives beneath the sea. Sweet water gives life to all of us on the surface of the Earth, hence the imagery of souls being drawn from sweet water as new babies. But even on Earth, traces of salt are needed for earthly bodies, while sea-creatures are adapted to excrete excess salt from seawater so as to use sweet water within their bodies. Sweet water and salt mingle in various proportions within living beings, both of them necessary for life.
Saiwalo is an alchemically active being who can rise up from its foundation of saltwater, and condense and precipitate salt out of itself, separating itself into a salt-being, a Dwimor, arising out of sweet water. What triggers this process? Fire is the medium by which salt and water are separated, and fire is what happens when egg and sperm of earthly life meet in the womb and together ignite the Fire of Life, our Ferah soul. (See my article “The Awakening of the Souls.”)
As our Saiwalo soul is elemental water and earth, so our Ferah soul is elemental fire and earth. When the spark of Ferah ignites in the womb, Saiwalo senses the new Ferah and rises up to meet it. Working together, fiery Ferah and watery Saiwalo pull Saiwalo’s salty crystals out of solution and condense them into a Dwimor, Saiwalo’s gift and its foothold within the newly-conceived infant in Midgard. Thus are their powers earthed in Midgard life.
Salt grasps life; when salty Dwimor is united with Lich and the other souls, it grasps and holds life within our Lichama and soular-system; hence the life-soul nature of Saiwalo with its Dwimor-projection. Other life-souls: Ferah, Aldr, Ahma, Ghost, Hama, constantly draw ambient life-force in various different forms into our body-soul complex. But it is Saiwalo, through its Dwimor, who provides the salty medium that absorbs and holds those life-forces within our soul-body matrix, ensuring that we remain alive in Midgard.
Within Saiwalo in Hel, however, its natural and ever-renewing saltiness causes it to grip hard onto its hidden potential for life, holding onto its treasure down in Hel and not letting go, giving Hel a reputation for grasping and holding….until Ferah-fire once again sets the alchemy in motion. Then Saiwalo condenses its salt, changes its upper reaches to sweet water, and releases its life-power into Midgard. Thus: salt and sweet, grasping and giving, in an endless cycle flowing between Midgard and Hel. Saiwalo and Ferah form a powerful Heathen life-death-afterlife polarity, one which caused a great deal of confusion and difficulty for Christian missionaries attempting to translate their spiritual concepts into Heathen words and concepts, as I explore in What Happened to Heathen Saiwalo?
Summary
The Proto-Germanic word ‘saiwalo’ most likely comes from the word ‘saiws’, meaning a body of water, and may be a diminutive term for ‘the little one from the lake / sea.’ Many tales and beliefs from Germanic and Saami lands tell of how souls come from bodies of water, and head for the afterlife through bodies of water. The German Goddess Frau Holle is especially associated with babies, souls, and with wells, ponds, streams and other freshwater bodies. She is the midwife of Saiwalo-Dwimor as it enters Midgard. Saiwalo souls have the nature of salt water. When it is time to send a Dwimor up to Midgard to ensoul a newly-conceived infant, Saiwalo condenses the salt out of itself and forms the Dwimor, a salty, grasping soul-matrix who holds all our souls and body together during life in Midgard. After Saiwalo has condensed its salty Dwimor, its waters are sweet, and it reaches up through Frau Holle’s well or pond to deliver Dwimor into her hands. There, she places it in a mother’s womb, where, again surrounded by water, Dwimor begins its work of collecting the baby’s souls and linking them with its body.
Hail the Holy Ones
So, here we have many connections between Saiwalo and waters of various kinds, and beings who live in these waters, ships which sail across these waters, life-giving treasures hidden deep below water and earth, and Deities and spirits who mediate passages between these realms. I’ve written here of Frau Holle, and mentioned Nehalennia as a matron of sea-faring. Though I don’t yet know her well, I believe Nehalennia is a soul-mother as Frau Holle is, but her domain is the salt-water aspect of Saiwalo, rather than Holle’s sweet-water aspect. The Norns, too, are associated with water, with birth and with our Aldr soul, as I’ve written of elsewhere (“Aldr and Orlay: Weaving a World”), and I believe that Mother Frigg, with her marshy dwelling of Fensalir, ties into these watery Saiwalo matters as well. I also find Mimir’s head, placed deep within his Well of memory and inspiration, to be a very potent, multi-layered symbol of Saiwalo’s nature.
Then there is the God of seafaring, Njord. Though there is no clear basis in the lore for doing so, I hail Njordh along with these other Deities as a patron of Saiwalo. Njordh adds his godly power to the activities of Saiwalo. His Seas represent the deep, mysterious, surging substance of Saiwalo. His ships represent the way we gather and transport and share out the treasures of Saiwalo, drawn from the depths of the Sea and from distant, unknown lands, borne across the Sea to the place where humans live. His gifts of wealth and harvest represent what we can gain by living a deeply Heathen spiritual life. Njordh is famed for his beautiful feet, and his footprints can point us toward a rich path of soulful life, leading us toward misty shores where seabirds cry, calling us to explore the vast unknown. Njordh teaches us to respect the waves and winds, the currents and shoals of the sea and of life itself: to meet them with courage, strength and clear sight ahead. While Holle presides over the entry and exit of our Saiwalo’s Dwimor into Midgard, Njordh joins her in overseeing all the activity that happens in the middle, our active life in Midgard that enriches and fulfills our Dwimor and at last sends it back to its Saiwalo-origin, fully laden with treasures from the Sea.
Bookhoard
Erich, Oswald A., and Richard Beitl. Wörterbuch der deutschen Volkskunde, 2nd ed. Alfred Kröner Verlag, Stuttgart, 1955.
Eyrbyggja Saga, transl. Hermann Palsson and Paul Edwards. Penguin Books, London, England. 1989.
Grimm, Jacob. Teutonic Mythology. Transl. James Steven Stalleybrass. George Bell and Sons, London. 1882.
Heraclitus fragment: www.heraclitusfragments.com
Larrington, Carolyne, transl. The Poetic Edda, revised ed. Oxford University Press, Oxford. 2014.
Liberman, Anatoly. Oxford Etymologist. https://blog.oup.com/2009/10/watered-down-etymologies
Watkins, Calvert. The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, 3rd ed. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston. 2011.
Weisweiler, Josef. “Seele und See: Ein etymologischer Versuch”, in Indogermanische Forschungen: Zeitschrift fur Indogermanistik und allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft. Vol. 57. Verlag von Walter De Gruyter & Co. Berlin 1940.
This article was first published in Idunna: A Journal of Northern Tradition, #123, Summer 2020. It was posted on this site in November 2020. Updated May 2021.