Question: Why does Odin not have Prophecy?
I was sure we had answered this before. In fact, I was so sure I spent about half an hour searching the blog archives trying to find it. But I failed, so I must be hallucinating from the pain medication, or maybe remembering talking about it on the old White Wolf forums or something.
Anyway, Odin doesn't have Prophecy because he does not perform, inspire or appear to be associated with prophecies in any myths. In fact, he clearly doesn't have prophecies, because while we see others around him have visions or be said to have prophetic foreknowledge, including Frigg and Baldur, Odin never does, and when he wants to know the future, he actually has to outsource that job to someone else who does it for him.
The most obvious example of this is the Voluspa, the major poem in which the prophecies of Ragnarok are related. The entire premise of the poem is that after being troubled by the idea that something bad is coming, Odin seeks out and disinters a dead voelva, a wise-woman and prophetess who can see the future. He demands that she perform divinations for him and tell him about events yet to come, which she does against her will because he compels her with his powers over magic and the dead; over and over throughout the poem, she relates some of the prophecies of Ragnarok and then begs him to let her go back to her rest, only to be told that she will not be released until she tells him everything. Only at the poem's end, when she has finally told him everything to come, is the voelva allowed to return to her grave.
This is a pretty major example of Odin clearly not having Prophecy; if he had the ability to see the future, why would he need to go hunt up an oracle elsewhere and bother her until she did it for him? Similarly, the prophecies of Baldur's doom are given to Baldur himself in a dream, but Odin never sees or expands on them, and it's Frigg - also said to have the gift of prophecy but to refuse to tell anyone about her visions - who must try to interpret it for him. Odin himself never experiences visions of the future, reads omens of things to come or manages to do more than get uncomfortable when these things are happening to others; he knows something is going on, but apparently lacks the ability to discover exactly what. Even the few times he does directly tell someone that they're doomed or something is about to happen to them, such as when he does so to King Geirrod, he's not really delivering a prophecy so much as declaring his intent to fuck that person up.
So, no Prophecy associated for Odin. Considering that he demonstrates an obvious inability to do prophecy by himself and that as a god his role is to be a manipulator of Fate and ultimately destroyed by it, we think he probably has few or even no boons in that purview. His hanging of himself from the World Tree in order to gain secret knowledge is better expressed as an association with Mystery, which represents his connection to hidden knowledge.
You mentioned it here (Good Gods, I spend way too much time on this blog): http://johnsscionresources.blogspot.in/2012/08/the-art-of-seeing.html
ReplyDeleteI knew it had to be somewhere!
Deleteso was the volva in valhalla, or Hel? She says she wants to rest, but Hel is not a very cheery place for the common dead. Also, I get the feeling from the dead seer the cross cultural idea that death grants greater insight and wisdom. Odin calling up the dead is similar to the Greek mystery rights of talking to the dead to gain their wisdom.
ReplyDeleteShe was definitely not in Valhalla, since Odin has to ride out to go find her; the poem implies (although it doesn't outright say it) that she's actually a jotun, and therefore not bound by the rules of Norse Underworlds. That would also contribute to how extremely unhappy she is to have Odin harassing her, and how callously he treats her when he does it. Jotun women often have connotations of sorcery or seer powers in Norse mythology.
DeleteIf you want to be a little more free with the interpretation, it's also possible she could have been a Vanir prophetess, and also therefore not party to Valhalla or Hel. The conflict between the Vanir and Aesir began with the Aesir harassing a Vanir witch, after all, so this would be continuing that theme.
I am pretty sure she's absolutely in Hel. Odin has to sneak around, avoid guardians, etc. to get to her grade. Who, exactly, she is/was is a very interesting question with enough hint for Storyteller's to take it in a lot of different and fascinating directions. (Like, she was Odin's first, giant wife or just another of his many many lovers; that she was the witch who taught him seidr, etc.)
DeleteIn any case, the Aesir who are prophets are usually noted directly as such. The epithet is "foresaw, like a Vanir". Which is very interesting in it's own right.
And guess who has that? Heimdallr. In fact, in one translation, it even says he foresaw like the other Vanir...
It's actually all the sneakin' about, and the manner in which he calls her (I seem to recall something about "calling her out of the grave"?) that doesn't seem like visiting Hel. Theoretically, he wouldn't need to call her up if he were in Hel - he could just go find her and talk to her, since she'd already be there normally. The whole holding-her-in-his-power thing seems more to me like he's found her body and forced it back up out of the grave, or otherwise summoned her away from where she ought to be.
DeleteOf course, she could normally be in Hel and that's where he's called her from, but my impression has always been that it's more likely he's sneaking around because he's snuck into Jotunheim central, rather than directly into Hel.
IIRC, Freya is generally assumed to be the witch who taught Odin seidr based on the passage in the Yngling Saga where it says she brought the practice from the Vanir to the Aesir, but he could always have come by it some other way. The gods are mysterious and sneaky creatures. :)
Yeah, the Vanir are definitely the star prophets of Norse mythology - that's also one of the leading reasons I love to assume Frigg is Vanir!
Me too!
DeleteBut I think there is some pretty compelling evidence there is no Frigg at all. She's just Freya. Besides their names being virtually indentical. Frigga is married to Odin, Freya to Od. Frigga is the premiere sorceress and so is Freya. Frigga has a cloak of feathers and so does Freya. Which means there is either a divine & royal cat fight (haha) on the horizon or there may be something going on here.
If Frigg is Freya, it looks like the Aesir may have been pulling their own Rape of the Sabine Women and gone to war against the Vanir for (non-jotun) wives.
I think it's likely that Freya and Frigg have the same original root, but that by the time of Christianization they'd developed into distinct entities of their own. There's certainly plenty of dusty old linguistic evidence linking them, but also plenty of more recent stories that cast them as distinctly different people. Which makes for more fun in a Scion game, in my opinion, but different strokes, of course.
DeleteI totally agree, though, I love the idea of most, if not all, of the Aesir's wives being Vanir. It would be very culturally in character for the Aesir to marry their conquered peoples' women, thus cementing their dominance and preventing too much retribution, and would tie nicely into the idea of it being primarily the women of the pantheon who have ties to ideas like the mysteries of Fate and control over the natural forces of fertility and life.