THE TERRIBLE ONE'S HORSE: CHAPTER 4

THE VALKNUT: A REAPPRAISAL OF ODIN'S KNOT OF THE SLAIN

A great many theories have been advanced in an attempt to explain the nature and significance of the Norse symbol known to modern scholarship as the ‘valknut’ or “knot of the slain”.  Some of these theories are ingenious, even plausible, while others apply modern sensibilities and ideas to an ancient icon in ways that can be described as either fanciful or absurd.  In the argument that follows, I hope to show that those who would relate the valknut to Snorri Sturluson’s Hrungnir’s Heart are, in all likelihood, correct.  In addition, I will explore exactly what it is the Hrungnir’s Heart symbol represents in the context of the Gotland Picture Stones.

We must begin by understanding what is being stated in the myth of Hrungnir and Thor’s duel in Sturluson’s Prose Edda.  The motif is an incredibly ancient one: as far back as Mesopotamian religion, we are told of a battle between thunder gods in the mountains.  As Thorkild Jacobsen and others have noted, there was a tendency early on for one of the dueling thunder gods to be vilified.  This was usually accomplished by converting a combatant into a monster that must be slain.  For the Mesopotamians, this opponent of the chief thunder god was called the Anzu or Imdugud bird and was visualized as a thundercloud-eagle.  It is possible that an enemy’s thunder god was portrayed thusly, and was made the victim of a native deity.

In the case of Hrungnir (‘brawler, rioter’; see Simek), we have a giant who is accompanied by an assistant, Mokkurkalfi (‘fog-leg or fog-shin’, according to Simek, although Old Norse mokkr means ‘dense cloud’).  We are told Mokkurcalfi is made of clay and he has the heart of a mare.  Hrungnir, on the other hand, has a three-cornered heart of stone.  The giant also has a shield which he at one point stands upon in an attempt to ward himself from Thor’s attack from below.  I should note that is was customary in saga accounts of duels for the champions to be ‘seconded’ by chosen companions.  These companions generally offered shield service to the duelers.

The first thing to realize in this account is that Mokkurkalfi  or ‘Cloud-leg’ is a very apt poetic description of a towering thunder cloud (he is said to be nine miles tall, etc.) whose “leg” is the dense rain that issues from the cloud. A thundercloud appears, after all, to “stand” upon its pillar or column or “leg” or rain.  The “clay” he is said to be made of is the same clay used by the Norns to bathe the world-tree Yggdrasill: it is symbolic language for the clouds of heaven.

Hrungnir is both the twin and antithesis of Thor.  We can know this because he possesses a whetstone, a shard of which becomes stuck in Thor’s forehead.  This whetstone can be compared with the reginnaglr or ‘[divine] power-nail’ said to extrude from the forehead of the high-seat Thor pillars found in some Viking halls.  Simek discusses parallels to this emblem of the lightning which emerges from the foreheads of various Indo-European gods or heroes, and it is interesting that the New World Maya have a thunder god who has a flint celt as symbol of the lightning emerging from his forehead.

The question now becomes: what is the heart of Hrungnir?  If he is the thunder god as adversary, and his whetstone is a thunder stone not unlike the Roman Iuppiter Lapis, what is the three-cornered stone heart?

In the first place, there is the distinct possibility that Snorri’s reference to the heart being made of stone is an error for an earlier iconographic observation.  What I mean by this is that a valknut depicted ON A STONE may have later mistakenly been described as BEING MADE OF STONE.  We could also be dealing with a confusion of very similar words.  In Old Norse, stein or steinn is ‘stone’.  In some contractions, we may find this word written steina-.  This is remarkably close to Old Norse steina, ‘to stain, color, paint’, steinn, ‘a stain, a color’.  Runes are known to have been painted, and the valknuts on the Gotland Picture Stones were “stained”.  It is certainly possible that when Snorri says the heart was made of stone, what was originally meant is that the heart was “stained” or “colored” on stones.

Does any of this help with determining what the valknut/Hrungnir’s Heart symbol represented?  I believe so.  Although there may be “variants” on the valknut symbol itself (some associate it with a triangle formed of three linked drinking horns, or even with the kind of knotwork present under Odin’s horse Sleipnir on the Tjängvide stone), the two most important stones for our purpose are Stora Hammars I and Stora Hammars III.

On the first stone, the valknut appears in the sky, pointed down, as if issuing from a sky bird.  This is probably Odin’s eagle, and not one of his ravens Huginn (‘Thought’) and Muginn (‘Memory’), although another bird is being held by a warrior to the right on the same register.  The valknut is precisely located over a barrow mound and what may be its associated altar stone or ‘horg’ or perhaps a bautasteinn or memorial stone.  To the left of the valknut is a tree bearing a hanged man (or Odin himself?).  We note a man being inserted into the barrow, the interior of which is divided into compartments, much as is the one described for us in “Volsunga Saga”.

Stora Hammars III has a horse and rider being greeted by a horn-bearing female figure, ostensibly a valkyrie.  There are three valknuts under the horses body and legs, two pointed upright flanking one that is inverted, i.e. pointing to the ground.  The same motif is found in the stone from Tjängvide already mentioned.  There Odin on Sleipnir rides to the Otherworld barrow and is greeted by the horn-bearing goddess.

At this point, it is enlightening to briefly cover the section ‘The Journey Through the Wall of Fire’ in H.R. Ellis Davidson’s book “The Road to Hel”.  Here the author describes “the barrier between the worlds of the living and the dead” that “is marked by the cold fire that flickers around the barrows.”  The saga heroine Hervor “waded through the fire like smoke” in order to reach the barrow of her father Angantyr.  In “Grettir’s Saga”, the barrow of Karr the Old is ablaze with fire.  The ‘Saga of Egil and Asmund” has a barrier of flame that must be leapt before the underworld can be entered.  The story of Sigurd’s passing through the wall of flame to reach Brynhild is well known; the hero’s horse Grani is of the stock of Sleipnir.  In the “Lay of Svipdag”, the hero rides of horse of supernatural power through the ‘threatening flames” that block the entrance to the underworld.  Skirnir in his Lay must have a divine steed to bear him through ‘the dark and flickering flames’ that separate the world of the living from the world of the dead.  In the “Saga of Eirik Vidforla”, the hero passes through the fires and smoke of a dragon’s mouth (a motif showing probable Christian influence) in order to reach the otherworld.  Other examples are cited by Davidson, but these should be sufficient to show that the barrier of flame was a component of Norse funeral ritual and was manifested in that ritual through the practice of cremation.  Cremation of the body alone is known, but also recorded is the cremation of the king or hero in a ship that itself represents the fiery dragon.

Sometimes the steed of a god or hero is said the leap over the flame, while at other times whoever is brave enough to venture into the barrow or underworld must physically pass through the flames.  The fire surrounds or covers the barrow, which itself symbolized the earth-mountain into which the dead entered both physically and, more importantly, spiritually.  I would propose that this ‘fire’ was the heavenly fire contained within the thundercloud.  As such, it could also represent the lightning – as is the case with the inverted valknut issuing from the eagle on Stora Hammars I.  The lightning started fires on the ground.  Such fire was thus holy by virture of its origin and was used to cremate the dead.

When a warrior or king was burned, he symbolically “became one” with a celestial divinity. The sun and the moon both MUST PASS THROUGH THE FIERY CLOUDS before they can enter the underworld, the original location of Valholl or the ‘Hall of the Slain’.  Hence, humans who leap over or wade through fire in order to gain entrance to the barrow mound are replicating the actions of the sun and moon as they set into the earth after first passing through the fiery cloud.

As the valknut is found UNDER THE HORSE, just as we would expect to find the barrier of fire under Sleipnir the sky-horse or his kin, and the valknut appears IN HEAVEN, issuing from the Jupiter-eagle, I would interpret this important Viking symbol as an emblem for divine fire, either in the form in which it was thought to exist within the stormcloud, or in its extruded form of lightning, i.e. ‘fire from heaven’, and again in its form as the fire which consumed the funeral pyre and the dead.  I would further add that when one looks upon the dancing tongues of fire, one can often see the interlaced triangles of the valknut.

To argue that the valknut could not possibly represent the lightning because the lightning as hammer was Thor’s chief attribute is not very convincing.  Odin’s spear Gungnir, ‘the swinging or swaying one’, is a typical lightning weapon.  As the sky-father whose eyes were sun and moon, some of his functions duplicated that of Thor-Jupiter.  The apparent Roman equation of Wotan/Wodan/Odin with Mercury is due merely to the former’s role as psychopomp and should not be taken seriously as an identification of the Germanic deity.