BETWEEN RAGNAROK AND YGGDRASIL
I recently re-read Neil Gaimanās Norse Mythology. The first time, I read it because Iām a huge Neil Gaiman fan. Heās probably my favorite contemporary fiction author, and American Gods is easily one of my favorite novels, with all of its magic crackling under Americaās inherent weirdness. The second time, though, I read it with a more particular frame, to think more specifically about a cultural heritage that I have, as the descendent of Swedish immigrants, but one that I had not been taught or deeply considered.
Part of the desire to learn more about this cultural heritage and mythology comes from a place of personal history. Two years ago this summer, I took my then two-year-old son to Swedeburg, Nebraska, to bury my namesake, my great uncle Carl [1]. There in the cemetery surrounded by the mossy headstones of five generations of my Swedish Lutheran forebears, a sense of being from a place and having a thread back to another place out of my time and memory began to unspool. Itās been a quiet following of the thread, which feels only fitting for these stoic Scandinavians who came to farm the Midwest and start little churches and teach.
This contemplative unspooling has also come in the contemporary context of the Black Lives Matter movement, and with a desire to deconstruct the oppressiveness of what āWhiteā means, as someone who definitely is lacking in melanin and comes genetically from northern Europe. Writing in the New York Times [2], professor and author Nell Irvin Painter says, āAn essential problem here is the inadequacy of white identity. Everyone loves to talk about blackness, a fascinating thing. But bring up whiteness and fewer people want to talk about it. Whiteness is on a toggle switch between ābland nothingnessā and āracist hatred.āā¦Eliminating the binary definition of whiteness ā the toggle between nothingness and awfulness ā is essential for a new racial vision that ethical people can share across the color line.ā
Whiteness has always privileged my Protestant, northern European self. Even as it historically excluded Catholics, southern Europeans, and others, they have been, over time and in this country, sponged up into that emptiness. Whiteness is an erasure, of others and of the beneficiaries, an all-consuming blankness of power.
Breaking that toggle switch, filling that void of sameness, then, needs specificity. This is not to say that having a cultural heritage you are aware of and a participant in is a panacea for systemic injustice and prejudice, and history is filled with conflict because āyouā are not like āme.ā But if you are more aware of who you are and are comfortable with it, there is less need for an impulse to define yourself in opposition to, through power over others ā if we white people are to dismantle whiteness, we need to know where to put ourselves.
Which brings us back to Norse mythology, something that I have claim to but have never learned. There is a grim inevitability in the Norse myths, in that we know how they end. All these tales are simply slouching towards Ragnarok, the final battle where the Aesir will be wiped out. In Gaimanās hands itās a dry, almost sardonic end, and one that is of the godās own making, rooted in their own hubris and self-confidence. Odin, the All-Father, may have wandered the world, given up his eye and crucified himself for all the knowledge in the world, but all his power still makes him powerless to stop the end from coming. The strength of Thor and his hammer Mjƶlnir cannot win the battle.
The agents of this destruction are the children of Loki, the trickster god who the Norse gods donāt trust but believe they can control. Lokiās children are Jormungundr the Midgard serpent who is wrapped around the world and spits poison; Hel, the ruler of the dead who did not die valiantly, with her bowl Hunger, her knife Famine, and her bed Sickbed; and Fenris Wolf, the eater of the world, and enormous wolf bound and held captive through the treachery of the Aesir. The god Frey had a sword that could have defeated the fire demon Surtr, but he gave it up in pursuit of his wife Gerd.
As Gaiman puts it in his introduction, āIt was the fact that the world and the story ends, and the way that it ends and is reborn, that made these gods and the frost giants and the rest of them tragic heroes, tragic villains. Ragnarok made the Norse world linger for me, seem strangely present and current, while other, better-documented systems of belief felt as if they were part of the past, old things.ā
There is rebirth ā man and woman survive Ragnarok and emerge from Yggdrasil, the immense tree of life that holds all the worlds together. Balder, Odinās second son who was the āwisest, the mildest, the most eloquentā of the gods comes back from the underworld. If myths like this are passed down with morals or warnings that we are trying to discern or give our lives shape and meaning, then the promise of the world beginning anew, after foolishness, violence and destruction, that is worth holding on to. It also demands that we question ourselves and who we are in this, how our own actions and history must be confronted.
The other, more unsettling reason to read the Norse myths with an eye to dismantling whiteness is that white supremacists love their conception of Vikings, love a made-up all-white Norse myth, and have, through the prison-industrial complex, spread a racist version of Norse heathenism. [3] What would the All-Father say about these morons? Maybe Gaimanās line about Ragnarok, āTwilight will come to the world, and the places where the humans live will fall into ruin, flaming briefly, then crumbling down and crashing into ash and devastation.ā
David Perry of the University of Minnesota did have this to say about the misguidedness of Viking-loving white supremacists in the Washington Post [4], that āthe Vikings of Europe did not exist in pure white racial isolation. The Vikingsā¦tapped into rich multicultural trading networks ā fighting when useful, but delighted to engage in economic and cultural exchange with great powers of Eurasia. That included the Jews of Khazaria, Christians dedicated to both Rome and Constantinople and Muslims of every sect and ethnicity. Islamic coins, in fact, have been found buried across the Viking world, a testimony to the richness of this exchange.ā
Thereās something profound about that exchange, pointing other ways forward than the pillaging, blood-soaked, domination stories and assumptions weāre living through. Whiteness does not have to exist in this way, we have been as flawed, as self-involved, as short-sighted and as vain as the Aesir, and there is an end coming. āBurn it to the ground,ā like Michelle Wolfās note before the White House Correspondentās Dinner put it. [5] Or this excerpt from Danez Smithās extraordinary new poem, āsay it with your whole black mouthā: [6]
so many white people are alive because
we know how to control ourselves.
how many times have we died on a whim
wielded like gallows in their sun-shy hands?
here, standing in my own body, i say: the next time
they murder us for the crime of their imaginations
i donāt know what iāll do.
i did not come to preach of peace
for that is not the huntedās duty.
i came here to say what i canāt say
without my name being added to a list
A coda, of sorts. I think a lot about these Scandinavians on the prairie, and what they did to survive, and who they displaced to turn the open fields into farmland, and I donāt have any resolution in that. But I did, last weekend, find an extraordinary collection of poems, Sacred Hearts, by Phebe Hanson, published by Milkweed Editions in 1985. [7] The daughter of a Lutheran pastor who grew up on the prairie and then moved to Minneapolis to become a teacher, she immediately fit into my constellation of great aunts. The collection is full of spare, precise, and unblinking examinations of mortality, gender expectations, sexual violence, and change. For poems a year younger than I am and about experiences far older, they are also poems for now. This, from āWhy I Have Simplified My Life,ā knocked me flat:
Iāve had to give up my father,
Who went to join my mother, sister, and brother,
in that cemetery outside Sacred Heart, Minnesota,
Now that Iāve lost my last buffer against death,
there probably isnāt anything
I canāt learn to get along without.
Ragnarok is coming. There is work to do.
[1] http://catiyas.tumblr.com/post/152140001171/the-grace-of-a-more-perfect-union
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/opinion/sunday/what-is-whiteness.html
[3] https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/1998/new-brand-racist-odinist-religion-march
[4] https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/05/31/white-supremacists-love-vikings-but-theyve-got-history-all-wrong/
[5] https://www.npr.org/about-npr/607099827/fresh-air-interview-with-michelle-wolf
[6] https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/say-it-your-whole-black-mouth-0
[7] https://www.amazon.com/Sacred-Hearts-Milkweed-Editions-Hanson/dp/0915943085
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