Or Extra Legs and Many Meanings
Have recently been doing quite a lot of reading on the solemn subject of death.
Or rather not death itself, but the invention of it, so to speak, and especially the under/after/otherworlds of myth and legend. While this is also to a large extent a visual exploration (yes, it’s for a book), I have been reading a good deal and taking copious (and traditionally disorganized) notes. Most of what I’ve been reading falls into domains familiar, though other underworlds are entirely new to me.
There certainly are a lot of them. If a relatively small body of text has been written on heaven(s), a considerable amount has been penned about that other place. (Good news never makes front pages, it’s a well-known fact.) Much of it has been generated by those institutions whose prime mission is to keep us from going there, cautionary tales written with a certain vindictiveness (and this despite lack of first-hand experience on the parts of the writers, or at least one would so assume).
Most, however, spring from the realisation, some time between 2 million and 100,000 years ago, that humans have a material envelope and a (usually eternal) soul. A soul which, when it is not doing a stint in a fleshy envelope, must go somewhere. While little ink has been spent on souls before they inhabit bodies (with the exception of metempsychotic cycles, anamnēsis and the like), there is a good deal of concern about what becomes of them after. Are the grand Pyramids of Egypt vast monuments to the glory of the pharaohs, or Cherobyl-style sarcophagus, to keep a particularly powerful soul from changing its mind and having a second try, to keep him form interfering with the living and sending him firmly on his way to the Duat? Humble cists and marble-sheathed gold-capped mountains are of course all about onotology and zeitgeist, immortality of the soul (whatever it is) and like matters, whether one subscribes or not. (Even disbelievers disbelieve differently, depending on what they disbelieve.) Pantheisms, monisms, monotheisms (and the decidedly have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too henotheisms) are all rich, exotic and often quite confusing.
It’s also wonderfully complex, it’s not as if you can pick up Orphism for Dummies, and while you can do day trips to Eleusis or Delphi, all you may come away with is a sunburn. Why was Hephaestus hideous? (So much so that his Mom tossed him off Mount Olympus when he was a baby.) The answer is in the etiology; gods and deities are fashioned for a reason, and as we now live in a literary age, they are nevertheless the page-marker psychopomps that can guide us into the worlds of “Thou”, when elements were animate and resembled humans, in an attempt to understand, sensu lato, the code for which we no longer really possess the keys. (As literate creatures, we have seen most of our mnemonics replaced by phonics, and now inhabit the world of “It” where the elements are inanimate and their actions are explained on a molecular level, and can only grasp with difficulty earlier world-concepts.) It’s easy to be amused by the “primitive” who believes fire lives in the piece of flint, but it’s to forget that not understanding such approaches (perfectly logical in themselves) reduces myth and legend to a series of colourful episodes without much substance, and above all, with little meaning. A literal reading by default of allegory and metaphor is not only confusing and uninforming, but ultimately pointless.
The so-called Nine Worlds of Norse mythology are amongst the most exciting and complex, with their continual distortions of space and time, which makes illustrating them quite tricky, (When Thor lifts the cat, for example, but is really lifting Jormugandr, or drinking from Utgard-Loki’s horn, which has one end in the sea.) At any rate, that brought me to Sleipnir, Odin’s horse. Of course I knew he had eight legs, but while I recently grappled with drawing them convincingly, I had never wondered why he had so many. (“Sleipnir. Check. Legs, eight. Check. Four front, four back. Runes engraved on teeth.”) I did manage to squeeze all eight in the picture, and harmoniously enough, considering he’s not even galloping in the image. (An even more uncomfortable mythical steed to draw would be Bayard, a medieval version of the stretch limo ridden by the four Aymon brothers.)
In the course of reading, I had skimmed over the more common explanations, that the eight legs represent the eight directions (eight? why not four, or sixteen for that matter?) and the eight spokes of the solar wheel, reasoning which seems a little heliocentric to say the least. Another explanation put forward is the polydactyly – one or two extra toes on each leg – of a horse ridden several times by Jules Caesar, which might have “worked its way” into the myth. Reasoning even flimsier than the solar connection, but revealing of the urge to ground myth in reality at the expense of more complex explanations. (I just read one book where the myth of Prometheus is explained away by the sight of glowing lava at night, supposed to represent the god’s nocturnally rejuvenating liver. The same book also contained a pretty lame explanation of the dragon in Beowulf.) According to another view, the explanation lies with Icelandic horses, which apparently have two unusual gaits called “Tolt” and “Flying Pace”. This would explain the multiplying of flying hooves, moving so quickly four looked like eight. Not very convincing either. A similar suggestion involved Vikings drinking so much they saw two horses standing one behind the other and thought it was only one, but with double the legs. To propose that the mount of the All-Father owe his eight legs to some shaggy ponies, legless Vikings or a horse with extra toes is really to reduce myth to less than a postscript. (Another source confirms Sleipnir as the ancestor of Santa Claus’ team of reindeer, one leg for each, though which leg ended up as Rudolph is anyone’s guess.) Shamans riding to the Otherworld may do so astride creatures with eight legs; crossing extraordinary (and perilous) borders requires the sure step of extraordinary steeds.
Or perhaps Sleipnir is a descendant of the nightmare horse Echwaz (whoever the devil he is). And Sleipnir isn’t Odin’s only steed. The world-tree Yggdrasil means “horse of Odin”, or in other terms, a gallows. So Odin is a gallows-rider, as well as being a bit of a gallows-swinger – he hung for nine days by the neck with a spear through his side from Yggdrasil to gain knowledge – and his Valkyrie race to battles on fleet steeds to convey the fallen to the afterlife. Odin, in his many forms, with his many names, is a complex being. Little is really understood of Odinic rites, and besides, even if Ibn Fadlan faithfully wrote down what he thought, or at very least what he was told, the picture that emerges is a frightening one that has been bowdlerized by historians ever since his texts were rediscovered. Odin is also known tag along on some versions of the Wild Hunt (which has dozens of leaders, from King Arthur to Gwyn ap Nudd), but apparently leaves Sleipnir stabled in Asgard for those particular jaunts.
 |
A. Odin and Sleipnir, The Ardre VIII image stone.
B. The Tjängvide image stone
C. Detail.
D. Title page of a manuscript of the Prose Edda, showing Odin, Heimdallr, Sleipnir and other figures from Norse mythology. From the 18th century Icelandic manuscript ÍB 299 4to, now in the care of the Icelandic National Library.
E. Hermóðr upon Sleipnir, arriving in Nilfheim to rescue Baldr from Hel, from the 18th century Icelandic manuscript “SÁM 66”, Árni Magnússon Institute in Iceland.
F. Odin rides the eight-legged horse Sleipnir, from the 18th century Icelandic manuscript NKS 1867 4to Ólafur Brynjúlfsson: Sæmundar og Snorra Edda – 97 verso, Danish Royal Library
G. Odin rides the eight-legged horse Sleipnir, from the 18th century Icelandic manuscript “SÁM 66”, Árni Magnússon Institute in Iceland.
H. Odin and Sleipnir, illustrated by John Bauer in 1911 for Our Fathers’ Godsaga by Viktor Rydberg
I. Svipdag speaks with Thokk, illustrated by John Bauer in 1911 for Our Fathers’ Godsaga by Viktor Rydberg
J. Odin Rides to Hel (1908) by W. G. Collingwood.
K. Odin and Sleipnir, from Arthur Rackam’s illustrations for The Ring of the Nibelung, Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods, by Richard Wagner.
Thus, perhaps the best explanation for Sleipnir’s eight legs is this one. When a warrior’s body is carried on a bier to its resting place, four pallbearers mean eight legs. Hilda Ellis Davidson, in Gods And Myths Of Northern Europe, cites the following funeral dirge, recorded by anthropologist Verrier Elwin, from the Gondi people in central India.
“What horse is this?
It is the horse Bagri Maro.
What should we say of its legs?
This horse has eight legs.
What should we say of its heads?
This horse has four heads. . . .
Catch the bridle and mount the horse.”
Does that let him be drawn any “better”? I would venture a yes, because every extra cloak of meaning frees the illustrator from grasping at the flimsy straws of literalness and allowing those broader strokes to happen unimpeded. Itemizing iconographic elements is an error and is the predella on which esotericism’s predilections are anchored, as well as requiring a literal reading of the imagery itself, rather than treating it as narrative.
As each possible meaning overlays those underneath, each is a new invitation to musings and intuitions. Accretion is the keyword; myth is not simple, cut-and-dried, or packaged into suitable portions. Ambiguities, contradictions, dualities and inconsistencies (but never emptiness of meaning) are all excuses to let the pencil wander freely. Lack of inspiration is the default setting of the imagination.
But, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll stop here. I have drawings to do, and fitting eight legs on a horse, independently of solemn funereal connotations and considerations, still demands some serious sketching…
A FEW WORDS MORE…
For anyone who lives near the Castle of Malbrouck in northeastern France, there will be a weekend event beginning Thursday November 19, centering around the presence of influences from the Middle Ages in today’s culture. The program is vast, and there is likely something for everyone’s taste.
Friday the 20th, at 2 pm there will be a showing of the interview I recently did especially for the event. No revelations or scoops, however, just a lot of my usual meandering from one subject to another. The event program can be downloaded from the castle web site.
SIGNING BOOKS
I’ll be doing another booksigning at the Weta Cave on the first weekend on December. More on that – times, exact date, etc. – next newsletter.
