Fire in the Sky

Question: What myths are there about the Aurora Borealis?

Lots! While you naturally won't see any myths about the Northern Lights from cultures that aren't sufficiently northern, there are are plenty from the cultures of the great white wastes.

Ironically, the name Aurora Borealis is from the Mediterranean (Aurora being the Roman goddess of the dawn and Boreas the Greek god of the frozen north wind), but the Romans were too far south to see the effect very often. Even so, Pliny still recorded a Roman legend that the lights represented famous heroes from the ancient sagas, battling above the earth.

Myths of Finland and the nearby tribes give several explanations for the Aurora Borealis. In one story, the lights are the colored interplay of the souls of the dead, rising into the sky on their way to the afterlife, and they can be called down by humans to speak to them before they depart, though such a thing is dangerous since the dead might take the living along with them when they do leave. In another story, the Northern Lights are the result of a great celestial fox that runs across the sky, and the colors come from him striking sparks against the mountains that fly up into the heavens, sweeping snow into the sky with his tail or causing dazzling lights to reflect from snowflakes caught in his fur.

The Norse have surprisingly few myths about the aurora, which some scholars think may mean that they didn't see it much since it wasn't in the same position all those centuries ago that it is now. Nevertheless, Tacitus tells us that the lights are the bright flashing reflections of the weapons and armor of the valkyries as they ride to war, and therefore they were considered portents of battle to come soon. Some post-Christian Norse writers also thought that the lights might be the result of flames that ringed the far edge of the ocean, possibly an echo of old beliefs about Ragnarok.

Similar to the European myth, the Inuit believed that there was a hole between the earth and the heavens, and that the Northern Lights were the result of souls passing from this world to the next through it, carrying colored torches and often visible in the lights, dancing and feasting, their shadows visible to mortal eyes. Inuit rituals for the Aurora Borealis involved dancing along with the spirits above to honor them. And the Algonquin Native Americans believed that the Northern Lights were the reflections of the fires built by the great creator-god Nanabozho, intended to remind humanity that he is still there and paying attention to them.

Other than Nanabozho, most stories about the Aurora Borealis are closer to folkloric than mythological; they're really about general religious and story beliefs, not about the gods and their myths. But they're still super-neat, and a great place to look for things to add to the Scion landscape!